From Consumers to Creators: Ideas How to Engage Your Kids with the Technology Creatively  

Technology is evolving at an incomprehensible speed.

The breaks are shot and there’s no stopping it now, and many people feel they are blinded by the headlights. I get it, change is scary. It takes us out of the known and into the inevitably unsettling unknown, pulling out our safety net. No one has the time to stop and fully understand the capabilities of their phones, tablets and laptops, and the tech changes so fast anyway the only way to stay up to date would be to work in Apple’s R&D dungeon. When it’s just a personal choice we’re usually fine, the potential risks that we don’t really know about are completely outweighed by how cool, shiny and useful our technology is.

 

However, when it comes our children, even the tiniest bit of unknown is too much. Seeing the zombification of your kid, sprawled on the sofa ignoring the blaring television and staring unblinkingly at periodically vibrating phone screen, can be pretty unnerving, especially if they are still growing and developing.

 

It doesn’t help that the television your kid is ignoring is barking hyperbolic breaking reports of how video game violence is connected to school shootings, internet ‘trolls‘ driving people off twitter and how too much screen-time can liquefy your child’s brain. I know there’s a strong temptation to take the hype and run with it. To me these kind of reports feel like cries for attention, a boy crying wolf in a village with high tech wolf scanning technology (I wonder if the escalating of anti-technology rhetoric negatively correlates with the fall in print sales?), but their arguments do seem convincing; how can a child experience the outside world if his face is always looking down at a screen instead of out at the world?

 

These claims are given more weight by cherry-picked quotes and statistics plucked from what we just accept as being trusted and verified scientific reports. In reality, however, research into the negative effects of technology is largely inconclusive. Studies frequently fail to take into account other crucial environmental factors that are proven to have a bigger effect on levels of childhood obesity, IQ and attention span than technology, such as social class, the family’s wage and the children’s diet and lifestyle, which leads to largely irrelevant numbers that don’t really prove anything. The problem is, to truly research how children are affected with technology in a conclusive way, you would have to isolate all other factors that influence development, monitor them closely and have a control group of children who were denied technology for a comparison. Just proposing such a study would get you kicked out of a funding pitch quicker than you can say “ethical minefield”.

 

So even if we don’t know the true facts for sure, it’s comforting to know that these crazy claims that our children’s natural life progression is being perverted by ADD-inducing, anti-social iRobots is at least unfounded if not completely false. But where does that leave us?

 

Certainly removing technology from our children’s lives is clearly not a viable option if we want to raise our children suited for a future that will be increasingly technological. If they are not comfortable and fluent with the technology they will need to use for their jobs, their education, and their leisure time, they could be at the risk of being left behind by those who are. And while there are already many existing tools that allow parents to control how their children use technology, for some parents, that level of control may not be enough, especially if their children are tech-savvy enough to circumvent these measures.

 

Only time will tell the true impact of technology, but we can’t stand idly by ignoring the proven advantages of technology because we are scared of potential ones. It’s obvious (from watching the Jetsons) that our lives are going to be increasingly technological as we go forward and it’s going lead to an unpredictable storm of new wonders that will shape the way we live.

Therefore, we should stop being restrained by the question “is technology good or bad for our children?” Rather we should be thinking more positively: “how can we make sure our children are using technology to their full advantage”, or, “how can we adapt the technology to most benefit our children?” Remember that science and technology is funded by the consumer and the technology will follow the money. If parents embrace technology and how it can be used to educate as well as entertain their children, the investment will hopefully follow.

 

The worry in my mind when I see a child to just sitting there and passively consuming entertainment from their devices is not that they are going to grow up brain-dead but that they are wasting the potential for creativity built into to these same devices.

 

So, in my view, let’s step away from technophobia and instead, let us take positive steps that move kids away from consuming technology created by others and towards how they can use technology to create themselves. We should work with technology rather than against it to exploit its rich and exponential potential for learning and development in both adults and children alike.

 

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Children and Technology is a subject frequently under heated discussion, with one side trying to convince us that backlit screens will melt our children’s eyes and brains and the other championing learning technology in attempt to start an educational revolution. While which side is right is still, for some reason, under debate, it is easy to see that a child purely consuming technology is just wasted potential. Here are some tips on how to move your children from consumers to creators.

 

Do it Yourself: the Maker Movement

 

Involve your child in a creative community. The Maker movement is a grassroots community who aim to move DIY projects and creating tech away from big industry and into the garden shed. With open-sourced information and designs and a focus on inexpensive manufacturing you have a huge choice of projects that can be engaging for the whole family. You could buy a simple kit that allows you to make and programme your own simple machine – teaching you and your child basic coding and circuitry in the process. [If you want to find out more about the Maker Movement, try checking out Brighton Digital Festival]

 

Straight out of Star Trek: 3D Printing

 

3D printers really are a perfect demonstration of how creative you could be with high tech gadgetry. They combine the thrill of science fiction turning into science fact (they even make beep-boop noises like space ships from the 80’s) and show how a stream of digital information can be used to create something physical. While still a bit expensive now, they are becoming increasingly cheaper and may well be a standard household object soon enough. They allow children create a design and watch it slowly beam straight out of Star Trek into something they can hold in their hands. They can then print other parts and interact them with each other, maybe even adding electronics or an arduino to create your own little robot. This kind of interaction with tech can encourage children to stop seeing tech as something genius scientists make in laboratories, to something they can make themselves in the garage, while taking the first few steps towards becoming a genius scientist.

 

Drawable Circuits?

 

Technology doesn’t have to all be staring at screens either. What would you say if I told you your kid could use a conductive ink pen to draw a beautiful starry night with battery-powered LED stars supplied by the circuit created by the ink? This may sound crazy, but products such as Circuit Scribe really do exist and are seriously cool. Doodling suddenly becomes a creative science lesson, where you and your child could learn how to create simple circuits. Again, this learning through creation allows your child to see the theory behind the science in action.

 

TV Time becomes Story Time

 

Even seemingly passive activities like watching TV or web content can be used actively and creatively. Video content, just like books, can engage children with narratives and stories, stimulating their imagination and their visual imagination. In the case of young children, even if all they are watching is the Tele-tubbies using nonsense words for custard, they are still interacting with their imagination and language, and when Dora the Explorer asks a question in Spanish their answering develops their social skills. The key here, though, is to try and switch their ‘passive’ learning into ‘active’ learning. Instead of leaving them to just stare at the screen, watch shows as a family unit. Play pretend with them using the stories and characters on the show, talk to them about it, asking them about what happened in the story and whose their favourite characters. Making them excited about the fantasy world of the show will make them more engaged in the story and help create a love of narrative that can be translated into reading and writing.

 

Then, with the seeds sewn, when they grow older, buy them a Kindle. There is already a huge amount of children’s books, classic novels and learning materials available free and easily online, including the free Family Reading Experience created by the US PTA (Parent Teacher Association) designed to help families bond over learning to read. With a Kindle (or just the Kindle app on their smart phone) your kids can carry around all 3,407 pages of the Harry Potter series in their pocket instead of dragging them around in a horse-drawn cart, and could turn every bus ride they take to a ride in a mobile library.

 

Sticking to the Good Stuff: Go on a Consumer Diet

 

In the end, however, no matter how much your kids are creating with technology they are always going to be consuming a lot as well. But this is where you can introduce on of technologies strongest learning tools – the endless amount of information online. Whether it’s scrolling through pictures of amazing landscapes on Pintrest, watching a how-to video on Youtube or being part of an online community, the internet can allow your children to experience or observe the world in ways they may not even had considered. The web is full of documentaries, life stories and Wiki pages that can help children learn about other people’s lives and cultures from all around the world, and this global scale helps develop a sense of perspective and empathy. Forums and MMO’s can help children find large-scale communities they want to belong to, even if they feel alienated in their local community. Of course there are going to be topics online that children just aren’t ready to experience, so it is always important to stay aware of what your child is doing online so you are ready to intervene if needed.

 

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To find out more on how to engage your children with technology and to get involved in one of world’s most creative communities check out MakerClub.org and sign up to find out about our IndieGoGo campaign launching later this October.