Jumping Bunny

How to Get Our Kids Active – Outdoor Gaming

When you think about how far video games have come since the old Commodore 64 and Intellivision days, the evolution is incredible. The tank game, or the Dungeons and Dragons game that was so state-of-the art when I was a kid, now look so basic and sad when you compare it to something like Skyrim, a game that you could completely live in! But, the other games that we used to play, such as baseball, soccer and four-square (the old-fashioned kind of course!) have not changed.

I wonder if what we need to get the kids out and more active is to have a second revolution in outdoor games. Go way beyond Wii fit, and have sensors in baseballs for example, to measure the speed of the ball and you could make a game of that. Or, have some sort of graphics engine on the balls themselves to make them more exciting. This is just the beginning of the ideas, but I wonder if we innovated more in outdoor play, if more kids would get out there?

Cleaning up the blogosphere, one blog at a time

The enormous blogging site Tumblr, which at last count hosts almost 50 million blogs, recently made a quiet policy change. They will now prohibit a certain type of blog:

Don’t post content that actively promotes or glorifies self-injury or self-harm. This includes content that urges or encourages readers to cut or mutilate themselves; embrace anorexia, bulimia, or other eating disorders; or commit suicide rather than, e.g., seek counseling or treatment for depression or other disorders.

It may surprise some people that the Internet has countless websites created by people with eating disorders self-mutilation obsessions and suicidal impulses, mostly young women, that offer techniques for getting deeper into their illnesses while hiding the symptoms from the people around them.

That’s right, these are blogs designed not to help people with these deadly disorders, but to make them worse. Potentially to kill them — because not only are there sites promoting eating disorders, but there are also “suicide clubs” for people thinking of taking their own lives where they can learn methods to their liking, or “cutting” techniques, patterns, and so forth. The list is endless.

These are sites where people egg each other on, pat one another on the back for being unhealthy. Not provide love, compassion, support and healing, but further pain, illness, and perhaps death.

The folks at Tumblr are not just banning this toxic content; they are also going to start providing an automatic public service announcement:

… When a user searches for tags like “anorexia”, “anorexic”, “bulimia”, “bulimic”, “thinspiration”, “thinspo”, “proana”, “purge”, “purging”, etc., we would show PSA language like: “Eating disorders can cause serious health problems, and at their most severe can even be life-threatening. Please contact the [resource organization] at [helpline number] or [website].”

We at Jumping Bunny congratulate Tumblr on taking this step. It’s one of the Three Goals we believe are necessary to make the Internet a safe place for young people: corporate responsibility. Hosts of websites need to be aware of what is being said on their servers, and recognize the need for them to manage it.

By the way, if the tags in the previous quote mystify you, take a note of the following Google searches. WARNING: the content found in those searches can be highly disturbing; read it with caution and do not let children see it.

Google Searches:

Tragically, there are countless pro-anorexia sites on the Internet. Just a part of the world in which we let your children wander.

Passing the Torch to the New, Digital, Generation

I recently came across this very interesting-looking documentary by Keanu Reeves that looks at the advent of digital filmmaking and its ramifications.

Side by Side Official Trailer (2012) from Company Films on Vimeo.

No doubt about it, the film industry is currently undergoing a radical transformation: the adoption of digital technology.

Now, of course, digital video has been around for a long time, maybe a couple of decades or more. I certainly remember the early days, when video on a computer was restricted to a tiny little player window. The picture often stuttered, and editing was slow — and capabilities were extremely limited. At least for ordinary people; super-expensive top-end stuff was way better.

Over the years, digital video has gradually become more commonplace. Macs were running iMovie back in the 90s, and digital video camcorders were everywhere. And yet the “pro” level was still exclusively film-based. They used big, bulky movie cameras with cartridges of film, galaxies of little lenses, and a semi-trailer truck loaded with supporting gear.

But video technology has now developed to a very high level. One breakthrough was the arrival of dSLR cameras that made use of their superb sensors and lenses for shooting very high quality video. Another was the fact that today’s computers are very high-powered indeed, allowing for the everyday use of what were once “Hollywood” techniques like chroma keying, multitrack, multi camera editing, and advanced animated titling.

The end result is that digital video has now finally reached a level of quality equal to that of film. In some ways it’s even superior; for instance it’s recently become possible to capture footage at a mind-boggling one million frames per second – just for comparison the standard speed for motion pictures is 24 frames per second.

Personally I think the real advantage that digital has over film is sheer cost: you can get a high-quality digital video camera for a fraction the cost of a film camera (which are so expensive that they’re usually rented anyway), a few lenses, and a bouquet of memory cards on a very tight budget. After that all you need is a reasonably new computer and software, and you have a kit that will let you make as many films as you want for zero cost. No consumables, no processing, and no moving parts.

Really, the only thing preventing the wholesale abandonment of film is the personal taste of filmmakers. Lots of people don’t trust digital, or don’t understand it, and that’s fine. But the younger generation coming up will only have worked in digital, so old-school film-reel movie making is, in the long term, doomed.

But I think that’s a good thing. It means a formerly expensive medium is becoming democratized. Anyone can make a professional-looking film on next to no budget. It’s especially exciting to see young people take to the digital medium as if they were born to it.

This is sure to change the face of film for decades to come — maybe forever.

Encouraging “Educational Disobedience”

I recently came across a very interesting blog post over at Scientific American on a subject that’s very near and dear to me: the importance of creativity in education.

The blogger, Andrea Kuszewski, is a Behaviour Therapist and researcher, talked about how teaching methods strongly affect the ways students think later in life:

From the earliest days of school, we hammer specific scholastic values into our students: pay attention, watch the teacher, imitate what the teacher does, stay in your seat, don’t question authority, and receive praise. But instead of teaching children to think, we are teaching them to memorize. Instead of encouraging them to innovate, we expect them to follow the outline and adhere to rules.

It’s definitely something worth thinking about. The teaching methods of our education system haven’t changed all that much since the 19th Century. The teacher is still the expert with knowledge to dispense. There is little sense of discovery or exploration; certainly there isn’t a lot of creativity, which is, pardon the term, ghettoized in “arts courses.”

It’s time to stop forcing young minds, which are open and expressive and not bound by arbitrary patterns or rules, and jamming them into formal, linear moulds. Let them create!