Triple Helix

Brainstorming for a new Adinkra symbol.

Like I said in my last post, we originally thought there was a lack of information and an adequate level of acceptance. As the interviews have shown, this does not seem to be the case. Rather, access to condoms is relatively easy- they aren’t prohibitively expensive, nor are they hard to find. The problem is the social stigma attached to requesting a condom in the pharmacy. Reactions range from shy, to outright fear of retaliation (mostly from men). The condom-finding SMS system reduces the anxiety of asking for directions to a place that sells condoms, but does little for addressing the stigma at the point-of-sale.

We hope to address this in a two-pronged approach. First, condom points-of-sale must be put in less-intimidating locations and customers must be given the option to engage in an automated transaction (vending machines). Condom vending machines can be placed in women’s restrooms and even hair salons. This, however, does little for acceptance once the condom is acquired and when sex is performed. The second prong involves a culturally-informed ad campaign that uses the native Ashanti adinkra symbols to change attitudes towards condom use. Our interviewees have consistently replied that condoms are seen as something you use with someone you are not faithful to, or love. We are working with a family of adinkra cloth makers to come up with a new adinkra symbol for using condoms. The above picture, is a rough draft of one of the contenders. The Sankofa symbol (represented by, among other things, a bird) represents a proverb indicating one’s ability to go back for something forgotten or left behind. The addition of the condom in the bird’s mouth is a straight-forward addition to an existing symbol. We are also considering a modification of the classic, internationally-recognized- aids ribbon. By linking the international symbol for AIDS awareness to our specific campaign, we hope to connect Ghana to existing AIDS prevention programs while also leveraging existing symbols and iconography.

I’ve uploaded a few condom seller locations, and I hope to test the service this evening or tomorrow morning. Street addresses are even harder to come by (and less used) that originally expected, and so the form we use to enter new locations may have to be modified. Hope to work on it more tomorrow.

The Albany School District requires all science students to take four interval tests over the course of the school year.  They are mostly multiple choice tests with a few short written response sections.  The tests are poor indicators of achievement in my opinion.  While there have been great pedagogical arguments against standardized testing, I think they all run past a simple, fundamental problem:

The tests look terrible.

Which is to say, they are designed very poorly.  The instructions are only written once, at the top of the test, and in the same font and size as the rest of the questions. The diagrams are very abstract, to the extent that the question becomes unnecessarily confusing.  They assume the best way to test knowledge is through a linear progression of a series of numbered questions that ask for recall of atomized pieces of knowledge.

First of all, it is considerably unfair that we inundate kids with hyperbolic, in-your-face advertising and media, and then wonder why they can’t sit down for a 30 question multiple-choice test that was written out in a word processing program, and not given the slightest attention to design.  Why aren’t we trying to get these kids attention when the future of their education is at stake?  But most importantly, rote memorization and recall is not how they learn, so this is not how they demonstrate what they’ve learned.

Students who have been flagged by teachers as “gifted” in elementary school, are often given an aptitude test that may involve moving around a series of vague images to tell a story of their choosing.  Demonstrating cell division can be done in a similar way.  I would suggest we provide much more open-ended, written responses, but writing skills are a whole other problem altogether– not to mention the extra resources it would take to grade free responses versus multiple choices.

What still doesn’t make sense, is why we still take tests on paper.  Computer interfaces can provide a much richer experience in which students could be engaged in an interactive learning assessment tool, rather than subjected to the test-anxiety of a cold room and a number 2 pencil.

Having looked at the graded interval tests, I think the data backs up my claims.  The questions most students got wrong, were ones that involved looking at a figure and explaining what they saw.  When they saw their tests, and the right answer explained, students often understood what they had done wrong.  Students were confused by the diagrams.  When they live in a world where movies are capable of rendering the impossible, picture-perfectly real, poorly designed diagrams don’t make sense.  Video clips make sense.  Manipulating images in a virtual 3D environment makes sense.  An abstract line diagram of a cross-section of a series of sediment layers and poorly photocopied pictures of fossils are arcane, confusing, and undecipherable.

We need to take the technology we’ve spent so much money on to make videogames, and start making learning assessment tools with them.  Or maybe we need to start making videogames that are learning assessment tools.