April 12, 2009 Passover, Easter and religious convos aside, let’s just say EVERY generation seems to love spring fun and festivity. My parents hosted a pack of 85 year olds in an impromptu ‘just do it’ session awhile back and you’d think those ‘kids’ were 8 and 5 not eighty-five.
In my house today, the Easter bunny got a bit creative with the teen scene, to hide her basket under a pile of laundry that needed folding, tucking the now ancient recycled plastic eggs in all the areas that needed ‘picked up’ in a ‘hop to it’ moment of spring cleaning.
Nothing like a solid motivation to get the ol’ task done. Speaking of which, we’ll get into this concept in a big way soon with a full report from the executives of SmartyCard, a new ‘learn and earn’ card to ‘reward’ tweens with digital prizes for task completion.
I’m almost finished with my interview with GM Chris Carvalho, including some tough grilling on ‘entitlement’ issues for neuro-theory on rewards-based learning and his answers to ‘the power and perils of praise.’
We’ll get into the ‘best practices’ for using SmartyCard as a cool tool for school and summer school ‘workbook’ replacement in the digital fun and games arena and look into some of the positive 3D sites like ZooKaZoo, Elf Island, and even commercial sites Bella Sara coming aboard. Intriguing…
Have kids outgrown Easter egg hunting in your world? Not by a long shot here…
Granted, the ‘tricks are for kids’ challenge of the hunt has become more severe (the orange one in the orange basket, the plain white one matching the wall, etc.) and the basket has escalated to ‘edible green grass,’ Billabong board shorts, an itunes card, and 99cent French manicure polish, but hey, this teen ‘chick’ is just as as happy hopping from floor to floor on the hunt as she ever was…
Kids free to be kids?
It’s a concept I hope we’ll NEVER outgrow. Even at 85.
Visual Credits: ClassBrain.com
Special thanks to K’s godmother, Kathie Steinwinter for sharing this sweet animal clip with us, set to a favorite musician of mine, the venerable Louis Armstrong...
Gives me smiles and warm fuzzies everytime I play it. Enjoy!
Happy Spring Everyone! What a Wonderful World.
YouTube’s embedding code is glitching on the video for me, so just click the link! It’s sooooo sweet and worthwhile. 🙂
For those in the Tech world who consider ‘Easter Eggs’ to be hidden gems and insider jokes among software digerati, here’s a good Tech Crunch article explaining the very first Easter eggs (Atari) as well as wild things like a Google Earth Flight Simulator…Here’s where to find all of these goodies:
Hunt for ’em here:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/12/some-of-our-favorite-easter-eggs/
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