Group tutorial

During our group tutorial we went through where everybody was with their cop3 and see how we could benefit from each others feedback since all of us in the group are working on applied animation.
Since our last tutorial, as advised I have restricted myself to the age group of 3-5 year old children since it is most significant for developmental milestones.
Skills such as naming colours, showing affection, and hopping on one foot are called developmental milestones. Developmental milestones are things most children can do by a certain age. Children reach milestones in how they play, learn, speak, behave, and move (like crawling, walking, or jumping). As children grow into early childhood, their world begins to open up. They will become more independent and begin to focus more on adults and children outside of the family. They will want to explore and ask about the things around them even more. Their interactions with family and those around them will help to shape their personality and their own ways of thinking and moving. During this stage, children should be able to ride a tricycle, use safety scissors, notice a difference between girls and boys, help to dress and undress themselves, play with other children, recall part of a story, and sing a song.
I also did some research on child development with the use of media. To be specific I found a really good book on it:

Strasburger, V.C., Wilson, B.J., and Jordan, A.B. (2008) Children, Adolescents, and the media- 2nd edition, Los Angeles: Sage Publications

Here is a few notes I took from it:

First of all media can act as "incidental language teacher". Research (Rice, 1984-1990) have established that television programs have the potential to encourage children to understand and use new words, however it is  still debatable whether it helps with grammar or equation solving skills.

Watching Dora the Explorer, Blues Clues, Arthur, Clifford and Dragon Tales resulted in greater vocabularies and higher expressive language scores; however Teletubbies was related to fewer vocabulary words and smaller expressive language score; Sesame Street was related only to smaller expressive language scores, Barney was related to fewer vocabulary words and more expressive language. The outcome showed that the more interactive the show the more it encourages children to use vocabulary, and the simpler the language the more it children learn expressive language instead of broadening their vocabulary.

Second of all, Anderson Cooper throughout his research with Sesame Street, Gullah Gullah Island and Blues Clues has provided convincing evidence that children are active and engaged viewers. In one study Anderson has replaced the Sesame Street soundtrack with Greek. They found that children pay less attention when they couldn't understand the content. They came to this conclusion that when the child is not engaged in the television program if they determine that the content is nonsensical. 

And Third of all I h ave learned that children are more engaged in the television program when a parent is involved in the viewing. Even if the parent is not saying anything just watching with the child, the child feels more engaged. This is why some child programmes try to involve adults as well by involving jokes or at least minor content for adults. However it is hard to engage parents without disengaging the children because of the huge age gap and therefore relevant topics.

The feedback that I got from it was to look into games and see if they could be relevant, however I am not so sure about broadening my research field because I have tried to narrow it down already because at the start it was too broad and i figured it would get me nowhere.

Another thing I was told to consider was the trans-media aspect of educational animation, how the narrative or characters would translate to games, books, applications and other. 

Also I got some good feedback on considering different strategies for educational animation such as Pixar. I argued that Pixar's animation is more entertainment than education, however the counter- argument was that maybe it is a clever strategy of education, after all children do take some educational value from Pixar's movies such as mental health (Inside Out) or growing up (Toy Story).

This made me think that it might just be a great strategy to take a more entertaining approach. 

In a nutshell a very beneficial group tutorial!