Panwapa Review

In Panwapa world a user encounters a home screen with various characters calling for you to come play their game. The site is geared for a wide age range of children from about 5-7 years old. The goal is to introduce children to knowledge about the world and different cultures.

Overall, the site is visually engaging with bright colors and characters, but lacks some depth. Many of the areas that I would expect to be able to click are not active on the home page and in the visitor area. For example, one of the sheep characters on the main screen speaks, but there is no active area near the character. The characters seem visually and personally engaging and the activities are also superficially engaging but it seems like their execution could be improved upon. Another thing the site does to its detriment, is require reading for navigation. So children who can’t read can’t navigate back to the “main” page. Even as an adult, “main” is not a typical Internet term. They could have put an arrow symbol that would have been more effective for children and the adults who might be using the program with them.


Two activities in Panwapa were the video activity and the hide and seek activity.

Video Activity Review
In the video activity, children view a short video on a particular topic and then they are asked to watch it again, this time looking out for places where something in particular happens. When this thing happens they are asked to press a button to identify the instance. For example one that I watched had Navajos bringing water to their farm and the bug asked you to click when you saw water, which is an example of gathering information and scanning for clues. The video itself seemed educational, they clearly presented the challenge of getting water to a farm in the desert. However the subsequent activities didn’t seem to support that learning. Interrupting the flow of the video to click a button and hear the bug say something seemed illogical. Especially when the child is just identifying water. That wasn’t the educational point of the video. I’m pretty sure kids are able to identify water pretty well by the time they are able to interact at this level. The questions afterward pertained to how people around the world get their water, and the user is asked to identify where the water they drink comes from AKA question posing. Afterwards they are presented with a bar graph that seems a little advanced if the user is just barely at the level of identifying water on sight. The learning level of the activities seems inconsistent.

Hide and Seek Activity Review
In the language/hide and seek activity one of the first things a child is asked to do is to select the language they want to play in. These are all written down with no visual or audio cues. They could easily have pronounced the language upon rollover to let children make independent choices here. I would have to do research on language acquisition, but on instinct I feel like the penguin character might have been a poor choice for language learning. I assume one of the ways people learn new words is by looking at someone’s face and watching how their tongue and lips move. Simply hearing a word in a totally unfamiliar language doesn’t give much structure or scaffolding. In this case it may have been helpful to write the word so that an adult who is assisting the child could have attempted to pronounce the word and help the child with pronunciation. Aside from language learning, the hide and seek game changed the active objects each time. This was slightly confusing since there was no reason why the penguin couldn’t be hiding behind the books one time and could be there in the next round. I would say that this involved the ability to explore or perhaps interpret data and select from multiple solutions, but really I doubt if many kids get that much out of this activity. I’d have to see someone interact.