Redesign "Back to School with Elmo"

Fall 2022 Video-Based Design | Design Theories | Design Strategies

Part I: Analysis of Existing Design

The instructional design to analysis in this paper is a five-minute clip from The Sesame Street episode “Back to School with Elmo”. In this clip, Elmo, the main character in Sesame Street, is the host to teach children numbers from one to five.

Goals of The Video-Based Design

The target audience of this math episode is children aged two to six years old. There are three specific instructional goals from one to five, comparing numbers ranging from one to five, and building children’s mathematical consciousness of these numbers in daily life. First of all, the opening song is very cheerful and contagious, arousing the interest of children, and before each clip there will be the same opening song, which is a conditioned reflex to inform the children that “I am gonna know a new theme”. Following Gagane’s nine events of instruction, this clip gained the attention of children in the first place (Cronje, 2006). And afterwards, Elmo threw a self-answered question to inform the audience the main topic of this clip is counting, which is also the learning objective. Another strategy adopted is a repetition of the numbers from one to five. They are introduced for the first time as the number of clouds, but another character "Smarty" counts them out again in a different sequence to recall children’s prior knowledge. After this recall, to raise children’s awareness of these numbers in real life and engage them, clips with the target of contextualization showed up on screen (Schwartz & Hartman, 2007, p.10, 11 & 21). To stimulate children’s interest, the realistic videos casted by children were shot at home, sandbox and playground. These scenarios are every day and play related. By showing children scenes of playing with friends, these videos provide a case-based instruction and successfully contextualize it. This smart strategy takes the prior knowledge and psychology of the children into consideration.

Later, the knowledge is strengthened by gamification (a gamified exercise led by Elmo). Throughout the clip, Elmo’s finger serves as an interactive stimulus and guidance to lead the children’s eyes. Since children are inherently curious and prefer following active and moving images, Elmo’s finger movement will draw their attention. In the following exercise to help five penguins wear hats, Elmo first tried the wrong answer “three”, and quickly the feedback from a child’s voice tells the audience that two penguins had no hats. And the same interaction applies to the answer five. After testing the possible choices, Elmo and children voiceover provides feedback comments (Conje, 2006, p.409).

Shortcomings of The Current Design

At the end of the penguin hat math problem, learners should be able to compare the numerals ranging from one to five. But currently we cannot tell because of a lack of an assessing system of learners’ mastery of knowledge. This clip can help learners remember and understand the knowledge, yet whether it can help them apply remains in doubt. Considering the close relationship between numerals and daily life, it would be better to help learners apply this knowledge in reality and add more exercise with daily objects such as candies, apples or toys. Our redesign addressing these problems will be further illustrated in the second part of this paper.

In a LXD, designers should put the scaffolding function of the design into full play, since tell me and I will forget, show me I might remember, and let me do so I will understand. To confirm the skill acquisition of the learners, a performance assessment is important for us to test their behaviors (Schwartz & Hartman, 2007, p.14). That is why we suggest setting up an evaluation and making the exercise more interactive in Part II. After conducting a needs assessment using the innovation model, to equip students’ with mathematical skills, we find that it is vital to evoke critical thinking skills of children, in the five-penguin hat math problem, the answer “seven” hats should also be taken into consideration (Ragen & Smith, 2005, pp.45-46). Though the point is to teach learners how to compare from one to five, just skipping the number seven is not appropriate. Maybe it is better for Elmo to inform children that the extra two hats can be given to children themselves and one of their friends, thus providing another perspective and teaching the value of sharing.

Part II: The (re)Design

“The Sesame Street: Back to School with Elmo” is used in improving students’ ability to count. This enables students to understand and comprehend the order of the numbers from one to five. Counting enables kids to recognize the set of objects, as they can count with and without objects, in assistance with technology. Besides, it enables a student to carry backward and forward counting of numbers (Bakker, van den Heuvel‐Panhuizen & Robitzsch, 2016; Khoza & Biyela, 2020). The engagement in the activity also enables students to recognize the numbers that can be used for representing objects and be able to determine the set of objects and their sequence. Another critical objective is to enable students to understand the relative position and cardinal numbers and their position. In this regard, watching the video enables the students to connect number words and numerals to the quantities they represent, as evidenced by five hats, clouds, penguins, Schmoodle with 1,2, and 3 toys. In determining the number of penguins that have hats and those that do not, students will improve their ability to add and subtract numbers. Students can generate a set equal to a number and compose numbers from one to five. However, there are some limitations in current technology as we mentioned in part I. Our group addresses some new techniques that can be used in the video to improve students’ learning experience and make more effective outcomes.

Developing Thinking Abilities

To ensure that learners adequately use the designed components and technology, there is a need for engaging them in practicing exercises that will improve their psychomotor skills and ability to remember the concept. The process is essential for promoting the learning of new skills and the mastery of old ones. Technology can support learning and dissemination of information, which expands course offerings and improves the learning experience. It will be beneficial if Sesame Street will record kids’ learning process, review the past learning activities and get new insights on the learning process. From the video “Sesame Street: Back to School with Elmo”, it also encourages kids to think of a question that will help in improving the thinking ability of students. It is an essential step through which a teacher can fill the gaps and improve the understanding of other students. Asking great questions is a critical step for revealing students' understanding and it could stimulate students’ curiosity. It will be useful for teachers of Sesame Street to prepare some opening questions related to the content at the end of the learning part, it could not only enhance their memory, but also stimulate their interest and curiosity in learning. According to a survey, “a network of schools in NYC encourages their students to think through the points of view behind the material they read, asking, ‘What did the author stand to gain?’ This concern should become a central feature of high school curricula in many subjects.” (Engel, 2021) Thus, it is very important to ask some questions after teaching and encourage young kids to have critical thinking.

Assessment

Initially, it is obvious that the original model of Sesame Street is highly successful. There have been many studies investigating the effect of children watching Sesame Street.The most striking finding was that frequent viewers of Sesame Street and other child informative programs at the age of five had higher high school grades in English, math, and science than infrequent viewers, even with controls for early language ability and the educational level achieved by parents (Huston & Wright, 1998).

What we want to verify here is whether our redesign can help children learn numbers one to five better. Children will be observed in a controlled environment where the stakeholders will determine whether the objectives can be achieved.

We will find 90 students and divide them into three groups. The first group uses nothing; the second group uses the original design; and the third group uses the new design. Then, the success will be measured by the student’s ability to understand the relative position of the numbers, recognizing the number of penguins with hats and those that do not have hats. Consequently, a teacher could act as the tester to ask about the number of penguins without hats. The ability of the students to determine penguins with hats and those without hats will be an indication that success has been achieved in the dissemination of information. If the students are able to recognize the number of penguins with hats, then the results of the third group are favorable, thus indicating that our new design is effective and successful in the dissemination of information; however, if students fail in assessment, we will conduct a preliminary evaluation based on our observations of students taking the test, and then invite educational experts, scholars, teachers and parents to research and evaluate together.

Reflection

Adult Perspective VS. Child Psychology

When we analyzed Sesame Street, we saw many relevant videos to get a feel for it. Because the video had several tunes and overly dramatic speech, we were emotionally uncomfortable after watching them. As a result, we began to ponder: How can an adult viewpoint help us better understand children's psychology?

It is critical to think about the design from the perspective of the intended audience. We studied children's psychology to make better designs. An egocentric youngster is unable to perceive a situation from the perspective of another person. Notably, it is as though they have a different perspective on the world than grownups. It's "all about me" all the time in their universe. This aspect does not imply that they are self-centered; instead, it is the perspective of children in the preschool years (White, 2007). Since preschool children's comprehension of numbers is restricted, we incorporated more interactive tasks and learning props to the redesign to assist kids to better comprehend numbers one through five.

Our knowledge of children’s psychology is inadequate. Thus, certain features of our design may not correspond to preschool children’s standard developmental patterns. On top of all this, we are concerned that personalized learning designed by us would separate children from one another, reduce learning to a crudely sanitized mechanical process, and turn children into research subjects rather than participants in the educational process.

Technology Access VS. Digital Divide

Compared to the original simple form of viewing, we hope to provide children a smart e-learning environment that is inseparable from the technical support of big data, artificial intelligence in our redesign, but it also requires the usage of tablets, smartphones and other devices. We intend to endow youngsters with a more complicated form of seeing than the original basic one via our redesign.

The original purpose of Sesame Street was to narrow the knowledge gap between children of different races. Our teammates have argued that the design of an intelligent e-learning environment may deviate from what was initially intended for the program. In the light of our new design, we feared it might create a knowledge gap between children from various socioeconomic backgrounds, especially families of different income levels. The digital gap continues to widen with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Around 35% of lower-income families with school-age children lacked access to high-speed internet in 2015. Regrettably, 59% of low-income parents with children in remote schools due to the pandemic said in April 2020 that their children would likely face at least one of three digital obstacles to their schooling, such as not having reliable internet at home, not having a computer at home or having to use a smartphone to finish schoolwork (Vogels, 2020).

More Possibilities in China

Sesame Street is unquestionably a very popular American children's education brand. Our research turned up several additional instructional shows for kids besides Sesame Street.

An instructional program for youngsters produced by BBC called Operation Ouch is widely recognized as the finest in the UK. Twin medical professionals host the show. Notably, there are actual tests utilizing genuine medical instruments, such as endoscopes to see the nasal cavities or throat, medical equipment to identify stool bacteria, and so on, in each episode.

Blippi, a children's show, was the second most popular educational channel for kids on YouTube. The show’s scenes do not only depict typical childhood destinations like the zoo, playground, and so on. As well as that, it included several locations that children like and are naturally fascinated about, such as a chocolate factory or a strawberry jam factory, which are often inaccessible to them up close. Blippi brings the kids to exciting locations where they learn about various interesting things thanks to the film’s complex themes. Moms and fathers will get inspiration from the presentation and knowledge about how to help their children in their lifelong quest to find and learn new things.

After talking about our childhoods, we realized there were no other instructional programs for youngsters in China besides Wisdom Tree and Big Windmill. This element also served as motivation for our business plan. Despite China's enormous population, few well-known companies offer children's educational programs, particularly those geared at teaching lessons about medicine. As a result, the sector offers tremendous potential.