{"id":21165,"date":"2019-06-08T00:01:57","date_gmt":"2019-06-08T04:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/?p=21165"},"modified":"2019-06-07T12:14:20","modified_gmt":"2019-06-07T16:14:20","slug":"2019-excellence-in-early-learning-digital-media-award-honoree-spotlight-on-pop-pop-pops-lexis-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/2019\/06\/2019-excellence-in-early-learning-digital-media-award-honoree-spotlight-on-pop-pop-pops-lexis-world\/","title":{"rendered":"2019 Excellence in Early Learning Digital Media Award Honoree Spotlight on Pop Pop Pop\u2019s Lexi\u2019s World"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In February, the ALSC Children and Technology Committee blog post presented the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/2019\/02\/getting-to-know-the-newest-alsc-youth-media-award-excellence-in-early-learning-digital-media-award\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">criteria<\/a> for the newest Youth Media Award, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ala.org\/alsc\/awardsgrants\/bookmedia\/EELDM\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Excellence in Early Learning Digital Media Award<\/a> [EELDM]. It also featured the 2019 winner, <a href=\"https:\/\/pbskids.org\/apps\/play-and-learn-science-.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">PBS\u2019s Play &amp; Learn Science<\/a> and the first of two award honorees, <a href=\"https:\/\/tinybop.com\/apps\/coral-reef\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tinypbop\u2019s Coral Reef<\/a>. Today I want to take you through the second honoree, <a href=\"http:\/\/poppoppop.info\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pop Pop Pop\u2019s Lexi\u2019s World<\/a>, to highlight some of the features that stood out to the committee particularly related to the award selection criteria.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Lexi&#039;s World: introduction demo\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/EE4tmHCzVqw?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h2>The Skills Required to Navigate and Explore the Media Should Be Developmentally Appropriate and Suitably Challenging for the Intended Audience<\/h2>\n<p>In order for an application to receive the Excellence in Early Learning Digital Media Award, the media must make the navigation and exploration developmentally appropriate and suitably challenging for the intended audience. Lexi\u2019s World offers the child a simple provocation\u2014a keyboard, a girl named Lexi, and a world. The idea is that the user will fill Lexi\u2019s world. No matter the letter the child begins with, the app suggests the next letter in the word that, when fully spelled out, functions as a command. If the word is an animal or object, down it drops from the sky! If the word is a verb, such as \u201crain,\u201d it happens. If it is a human action that Lexi can do, such as \u201csneak,\u201d \u201crun,\u201d or \u201cstop,\u201d she\u2019ll do it.<\/p>\n<p>The animals move around the world upon which Lexi is perched and the user can spin it, as you would a globe, to follow the animals and objects as they wander Lexi\u2019s world. What\u2019s more, is that the animals provide hints about words the children can type to cull up something they interact with\u2014a horse thinks of an apple because then the horse will eat the apple; bunnies and rabbits think of carrots; leaf cutter ants think of leaves. Children can repeat their favorite words if they simply recall the first letters of the words they are looking to replicate. In this sense, the application offers children a good balance of support, structure, and challenge.<\/p>\n<h2>Respects the Audience\u2019s Intelligence and Imagination by Offering a Rich and Diverse Experience<\/h2>\n<p>The award selection committee was particularly pleased with the ways in which Lexi\u2019s World offered a rich and diverse experience to the audience. At first, we figured that there was one object, animal, or action for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, but then we discovered more! We enjoyed the range of real animals mixed with a few fantastical ones&#8211;our test users particularly fancied the \u201cunicorn\u201d that dropped from the sky after they pressed all the computer-prompted letters that need to be pressed to spell \u201cunicorn.\u201d The best part about this is that the unicorns (and most animals) come in different colors so the child is surprised to see what drops from the sky. We believe that there is no pattern here in the order in which the colors appear and that the code in the app programming utilizes a \u201cRANDOM\u201d command for each animal\u2019s color\/pattern, which keeps children coming back to try to figure the pattern and get their favorite. The rainbow unicorn is the favorite in my research context, as is the spotted dog.<\/p>\n<p>The coolest thing is that the animals and objects interact with one another, but the children have to understand a bit about conditional programming first. If there is an \u201celephant\u201d and you type \u201cwater\u201d the elephant will drink the water and spray it up into the air. No other animals will do this. If you try to add \u201cwater\u201d before the \u201celephant, \u201cyou only get the option for the other word beginning with \u201cw,\u201d \u201cworm.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Kids will learn to spell as they are trying to figure out how to get Lexi and the animals and objects to do specific things that give them joy. I have a five-year-old who is writing \u201cballoon\u201d on EVERY piece of paper she gets her hands onto. I watched her play balloons with Lexi for quite some time so I&#8217;m sure she learned to spell &#8220;balloon&#8221; from this game. After Lexi had too many balloons, she lifted up off the ground like Mary Poppins and we tried to type \u201cpop\u201d (to pop the balloons) and Lexi came back down. I was so pleased to see new word learning transfer from inside the game to outside in the real world as part of my child\u2019s emergent writing!<\/p>\n<p>Guest blogger, Katie Paciga, PhD Associate Professor of Education Columbia College Chicago<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In February, the ALSC Children and Technology Committee blog post presented the criteria for the newest Youth Media Award, the Excellence in Early Learning Digital Media Award [EELDM]. It also featured the 2019 winner, PBS\u2019s Play &amp; Learn Science and the first of two award honorees, Tinypbop\u2019s Coral Reef. Today I want to take you through the second honoree, Pop Pop Pop\u2019s Lexi\u2019s World, to highlight some of the features that stood out to the committee particularly related to the award selection criteria. The Skills Required to Navigate and Explore the Media Should Be Developmentally Appropriate and Suitably Challenging for the Intended Audience In order for an application to receive the Excellence in Early Learning Digital Media Award, the media must make the navigation and exploration developmentally appropriate and suitably challenging for the intended audience. Lexi\u2019s World offers the child a simple provocation\u2014a keyboard, a girl named Lexi, and a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[155,1604,1614],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogger-children-and-technology-committee","category-competencies-for-librarians-serving-children-in-public-libraries","category-knowledge-curation-and-management-of-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}