The topics below were examined in web sites created by teams of students enrolled in Education 122, "Children, Learning and Material Culture." Additional information about the assignment and guidelines that students received for creating their web sites is provided at the bottom of this page.

Teen Movies
Children's Forts
Pets
Body Piercings
The game of "Mash"
Pets
Barbie Dolls
GI Joe
The Simpsons
MTV
Trees
Video Games
Audio Books
Shrek
South Park
Harry Potter
Cinderella
Tamagotchi
iPods
Recreational Drugs

Working in teams of 5-6, students will investigate how adults and children think about the learning potential of one commonly accessible material artifact (or set of artifacts). To complete this assignment, you will need to talk with or interview adults and children about the material(s) you are investigating. Based on your observations and interviews, you will prepare an oral report and a web site that includes the following:

-A profile of the material artifact you have chosen, its history, variation, distribution, etc.
-Vivid examples of the material artifact in use
-A synthesis of adult ideas about the educational value of the artifact
-A synthesis of children's ideas about the educational value of the artifact
-An assessment of whether the child and adult perspectives you've investigated are consistent or inconsistent with specific course readings
-Your own assessment of the pedagogic potential of this artifact

You will work on this assignment for about six weeks. Your team will make an oral progress report on January 28th and complete your team web site by February 21. In both the oral reports and the web site you are encouraged to use photographs and audio or video recordings as well as text. To facilitate your team's work on this project you will be given a web site template. You can build your team web site by filling in the fields on the template or you can create your own design from scratch. Your complete web site should also describe your data sources and provide a list of "credits" for the work of individual team members.

After your web site is completed, you will write a brief (300-500) word report that describes your contributions to the project and summarizes what you learned from these efforts.

To help students follow through on this assignment, they were given a set of Web Design Guidelines and some additional guidelines for using Dreamweaver to create their team web site. Before uploading their websites to the class server, students had to get a perfect score on a Web Design Test that assessed their understanding of the Web Design Guidelines. Students also were given a Web Site Template that they could use as a point of departure for designing their own web site.