December 24, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Entertaining and Fun.
Issues: Education, Environmental, and Food Waste.
Yo Gabba Gabba! (http://yogabbagabba.com/#) is a live-action program aimed at young children. Like programmes such as Sesame Street and Teletubbies, it has an educational element encouraging positive behaviours, such as learning a new skill or interacting with friends, but dressed up in the vibrant colours, catchy music and awesome characters that make entertaining TV.
We also think its clever that they frequently feature household names such as Elijah Wood, Jack Black, Tony Hawks and members from internationally successful bands like The Killers, so the secondary audience (parents watching with kids) are kept interested and encouraged to stay tuned. They cleverly select these cameos from the pool of celebs that would be of greatest interest to this audience – so 90s bands such as Weezer have made an appearance. Inspired.
There are lots of Yo Gabba Gabba! branded products that can be purchased from their online shop, ranging from CDs to clothing, from interactive books to lunch pack accessories. One that is of interest to our work on food waste (https://wearewhatwedo.org/portfolio/food-waste/) is their “Party in My Tummy” book, which familiarises children with healthier foods and encourages plate clearing. This is a good example of a very implicit approach (https://wearewhatwedo.org/what-we-do/) to behaviour change – kids aren’t told to reduce waste, rather the positive behaviours that reduce food waste are encouraged via an engaging product that has incentives to use and buy it beyond social change, including entertainment for kids and an easy life for parents.
Yo Gabba Gabba! is broadcast in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and Ireland and performed live shows throughout the States last year (often to sell out venues) and won the Best Non-Animated Series and Best Music at The Kidscreen awards this year.
August 6, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, and social.
Issues: Community and Education.
As part of the yearly series of Priceless London Lates presented by Mastercard, spanning London Zoo, The Victoria & Albert Museum and The Natural History Museum, The Science Museum Lates (http://bit.ly/ZXvdVh) provide a fun and nostalgic experience for big kids looking for an alternative night out in the city. Filled with after-workers and friday night socialisers clutching beers whilst rehashing the science lessons of their youth, the Science Museum pits itself as a quirky alternative to bars and pubs for over 18s.
We think Lates, as well as being a cool night out, are a great device for kick starting adult learning, taking grownups back to school with all the fun of not being a child.
July 9, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Entertaining and Fun.
Issues: Education and Health.
This week’s Good Ideas Blog is all about The Walking Classroom (http://www.thewalkingclassroom.org/), an amazing not-for-profit set up by American teacher Laura Fenn. After noticing a direct link between the academic performance of her students and regular physical activity, Laura came up with a way to fuse the two.
The Walking Classroom provides teachers with Walkkits for their entire class, preloaded with age appropriate literary content based on national education standards and the school curriculum. The Walkkits, which are iPod sized audio players, make it easy for teachers to get students out of the classroom for 30 minutes. This helps to wake up sleepy kids, entertain active ones, and kick start students’ learning potential. We think this is a really simple and interesting product which bypasses the need for communicating the benefits of exercise for childhood health and education, and gets right down to business. It encourages children to get moving, pay attention and learn, all by letting them do the one thing that any kid wants to during the school day. To get out of class.
Currently hundreds of teachers across the United States use Walkkits as part of their lesson plan, and we hope to see products like this becoming more pervasive throughout the educational sector.
June 25, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Entertaining.
Issues: Community and Education.
For anyone who didn’t catch the latest BBC Two series “Toughest Place To Be A….” our first question is why not?
Based on the simple premise of taking British workers halfway across the world to do their jobs in some of the planet’s most challenging conditions, this programme has seen a bus driver, a paramedic, a firefighter, a fisherman and many more cross oceans to find out just how much tougher their jobs could be.
As well as being incredibly interesting TV, we think this programme is also an excellent device for encouraging cross cultural awareness amongst TV watching Britain. Helping to teach people about new cultures while highlighting similarities between ourselves and people who we might ordinarily never get a chance to met. We think this is a quite and clever way to encourage cultural awareness, acceptance and empathy in a mainstream audience without lectures, lessons or force.
It’s an idea we’d like to experiment with on Historypin (http://www.historypin.com/) more too, connecting people around the world with shared interests, hobbies and jobs.
May 7, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Digital Inclusion and Education.
There will be something else to do on the tube in the future. Three students from the Miami Ad School came up with the idea of setting up a virtual library shelf in underground carriages. Commuters can use their smartphone to swipe the book poster and download the first 10 pages. After finishing the pages, the service will direct them to the nearest library where they can borrow the full book. This project gets people back to the local library, enjoying reading and borrowing physical books again.
April 30, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Community, Digital Inclusion, Education, and Environmental.
Would you know where to find some parsley growing wildly near you? Strawberries? Rosemary? Pears? If not, it is time to think about starting your urban foraging journey. ‘Edible Cities’ is a not-for-profit organisation, created after an observation that there are many fruit trees and edible plants around our urban environment but we do not really use the resource properly. They decided to create an intuitive service platform which offers information based around a map on wild food growing near you, as well as allowing users to contribute to the archive of food sources on the website. The results have been very positive, successfully increasing people’s awareness of their local environment, encouraging them to eat food that would otherwise go to waste, getting people doing exercise outside and eating healthy locally grown food, all in a fun and accessible way.
April 23, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Communication, Digital Inclusion, and Education.
Asking children to catch up with the latest economic, political and social issues is difficult, especially when all traditional newspapers are designed for adults. But Tokyo Shimbun cooperated with the agency Dentsu Tokyo to lunch a groundbreaking augmented reality mobile app which translates the articles from dense text into a child-friendly format. This app enables kids to scan specific areas of the newspaper with their smartphone to activate an onscreen pop-up with simplified language and cartoon versions of current issues. Kids might be hooked in by the prospect of a cartoon,but are inadvertently educated about the current affairs.
February 19, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Saves money and Useful.
Issues: Communication and Education.
Learning a language can be very expensive. Duolingo (http://duolingo.com/), is great as it is completely free. Fun and engaging lessons are professionally curated, gaming theory is employed so users gain points as they learn progressing them up skill levels, but you never have to pay a penny or be interrupted by annoying adverts.
In addition there is also an amazing and enormous ‘incidental effect’: the service is designed so that, as users progress through the lessons, they simultaneously help to translate websites and other documents, thus contributing to making the web more accessible to all. The task of translating the web is enormous and benefits enormously from human input, as in this crowd sourced model.
The site currently offers Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian courses for English speakers, as well as English for Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian speakers and there are plans to offer Chinese.
February 5, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, and social.
Issues: Community, Education, and Poverty.
When Skateistan’s founder Oliver Percovich first travelled to Afghanistan in 2007 he was met with groups of local children very eager to learn how to skate. What began as informal lessons, and Oliver giving away the boards he brought with him, has expanded into a real skateboarding scene in Afghanistan and the development of an International non-profit charity providing skateboarding and educational programming in Afghanistan, Cambodia and Pakistan.
The charity works with anyone between the ages of 5-18 but tries to keep a focus on street working children and girls. In the charities own words, ‘Skateboarding is simply “the hook” for engaging with hard-to-reach young people’ and from there they work to provide the children with new opportunities in cross-cultural interaction, education, and personal empowerment programs.
http://skateistan.org/
January 29, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Saves money and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions, Education, Environmental, and Health.
The Waka Waka Light http://www.wakawakalight.com/ is a solar powered device that can charge electrical gadgets or provide a minimum of 8 hours light (and up to 80 depending on the setting used) from a single day’s sun. They are a much cheaper alternative to kerosine lamps so are becoming popular in Haiti, Ethiopia, Kenya and other developing nations for families looking for the cheapest solution.
However the benefits of these nifty lights extend much further. Not using kerosene improves air quality and reduces house fires and injuries from burning. Most inspiringly, there is research that highlights the improvements to school results that can be seen when free solar lighting replaces kerosene lighting. This is attributed to a number of factors including more income free for the parents to spend on education and more time in the evening for the children to do their schoolwork. Lots of hidden benefits for a lamp bought for its low price point.
January 22, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Fun and social.
Issues: Communication and Education.
The idea, Nick Hornby declares, is that kids “are basically duped by the fun they have.’’ Very Incidental Effect. To the kids it’s simply a world of crazy tales of monsters, zombies, spies and detectives. But the Ministry of Stories http://www.ministryofstories.org/ aims, through running creative writing workshops, to inspire children to transform their lives through storytelling. Using one-on-one mentoring, young people can enjoy improving their language skills, increasing abilities in communication as well as developing their social and educational confidence.
Inspired by the work of a friend, who opened a similar centre in San Francisco, Nick Hornby, Lucy Macnab and Ben Payne founded the Ministry of Stories in 2010. The project involves mentoring young people aged between 8-18 in the art of creative writing from a centre in Hoxton, East London. It encourages and assists the children in writing films, horror stories, soaps or whichever other form of storytelling they wish, without being too prescriptive. So far they have worked with 5000 children in East London and with the right donations and sponsorship they aim to set up a nationwide network.
June 8, 2012, 2 comments. See and add yours.
Good is: Cool and Fun.
Issues: Education.
Minecraft is a great example of using an addictively fun game (especially of you’re an 11 year old) to engage people in issues and thinking they would otherwise consider boring. A computer game that gives a child a sophisticated understanding of alloys, compounds and elements, for example, as well as an ability to explain the need for a subtle balance between competition and co-operation is a great example of the Incidental Effect. Within formal education, teachers are exploring these features of this game and many more. See minecraftteacher.net for example
Minecraft, and other games like it, can achieve profound, progressive collateral effects on users and society because it is really good and people love it (over 21 million people in fact).
