Evaluation of Community Construction Kit (3/25/99)

Tom Snyder Productions' Community Construction Kit (CCK) is an impressive attempt at coordinating students, teachers, computer software and classroom learning. Although the CCK is primarily computer software, Snyder includes a 75-page Teacher's Guide on how to use the software within the framework of different curricula and different classroom settings. The software company is obviously going for something much bigger than just any old piece of educational software. Unfortunately, evaluating the program's success and/or possibilities for success are nearly impossible when taken out of the context of the classroom. Most importantly, what is removed from the scenario is the teacher, and we do not see the CCK as being an effective piece of educational software without that guide. This evaluation, although able to give a rough feeling of the software itself, is hard pressed to determine the program's strengths and weaknesses in the classroom. However, we imagine that with a good teacher, this is good software, but with a bad teacher or none at all (as is the case with us now), this is uninteresting and ineffective software.

The documentation for the Community Construction Kit starts with a set of learning objectives that the program generally fails to fulfill in itself, but works to fulfill with the help of a teacher. This list of objectives covers five different topic areas: social studies, math, language arts, science, and art, and has forty different educational points. This is the software's first major flaw. A piece of software that looks to accomplish so much is bound to fail simply by nature of the amount that it sets out to do. Our response: quality not quantity, please. Because the software claims to tackle all these different topic areas, the developers set themselves up for some major criticism. With our situation, it is impossible to determine all of the topic areas in which the program fails, however we do have reservations about the material.

For instance, the goals for advancement in Social Studies include, tacked on somewhat haphazardly, local, US, and World history, but the program seems to specifically avoid these issues. Only by way of teacher discussion will students gain an understanding of architectural history as more than the building categories of Medieval, Native American, Colonial America, and "Today." In fact, an understanding of these time periods through the software includes working with the styles of those periods but does not include the wherefore behind them. The closest thing to a historical explanation comes from the Photo Gallery, from which, upon playing five-second QuickTime movies, the user gets an explanation such as "This is a castle. People would fight from here. It is made of stone." No indication is given to the nature of the different materials used to build or why one would use them. Why, for example, would one have a well connected to a castle on the outside? We keep wanting to know what things are and why, and but the program refuses to tell us. Clearly, the Community Construction Kit fails in the areas of social studies and language arts. There is simply not enough substantive material within the program to even try and claim that those two topic areas will be learned. Again, we note that a good teacher could incorporate historical information into the curriculum, but the software alone does not do this.

We have brief opinions on the other topic areas as well. The science goals seem a little overzealous, but there is some 'engineering' and 'use of tools' involved in the software. There is no governance related to the buildings constructed, so the goal of "selecting ... materials ... suitable to the environment ..." seems to mean that the teacher will grade you poorly on your project if you make a bad building, which, again, has nothing to do with the software. The art goals seem to be well realized because of the incredible number of tools the user has to change the colors and textures of the buildings and because of the tools' ease of use. And lastly, math and geometry are executed relatively well as we learn a lot about shapes and forms. Terminology such as "A-frame" is important knowledge, and the user comes across it time and time again by choosing the initial forms of the buildings. This is great reinforcement. (No pun intended.) It is also sort of fun to play with the shapes. However, we wish that the names of the shapes would appear in text on screen as well as spoken out loud. The text would give the terminology more credibility, in addition to spelling out hard words such as "castle-ated roof." (We still don't know how to spell that and neither do our pocket dictionaries.)

Thankfully, the Teachers' Guide for the Community Construction Kit is particularly strong. It has an impressive number of lesson plans, each with clear goals, time estimations, material demands, introductory activities, computer activities, and "extensions." The book is clear and easy to use, and to a good teacher, would be a great resource for developing innovative classroom activities. The guide also includes an extensive bibliography of additional children's books and teacher resources (books, organizations, materials, and Internet sites) . We see the bibliography as a particularly novel feature of the package because it encourages greater teacher involvement in the subject and in new educational technologies. It is good to see the industry trying to advance itself in the minds of teachers.

Presentation of the content is relatively simple. The software is divided up into five different areas: print goodies, photo gallery, ready-made buildings ("ready-made" is not hyphenated in the program-definitely a language arts failure), creatures and things, and make a building. The primary unit of the software is the make-a-building area, which, as mentioned earlier, allows the student to choose building styles, building shapes, then edit the building as much as possible with various tools. Playing God is always fun, so we thoroughly enjoy this aspect of the program. The quantity and quality of tools is great, and their use seems to be rather intuitive. Figuring out all the cool things you can do to your building is a great hook into the program; however, we wonder if, left unsupervised, students won't turn these buildings into their own renditions of the scenery from the latest episode of South Park. (We happen to think this is a worthy task, but many educators may disagree.) Lastly, the Community Construction Kit allows the user to print out his design and build it in three dimensions by cutting, folding, and taping the building together. Although we did not actually use this aspect of the program, it sounds fun. It also allows students to have a better visual understanding of the facades and simple shapes of buildings. Despite the frequent Tom Snyder software plugs spread throughout the course of the program and Teacher's Guide, building a community of buildings like in Neighborhood Map Machine encourages students to become thoroughly involved in the CCK and excited to use it. Building these communities also encourages collaboration amongst students.

Besides the photo gallery, the other units of the program basically allow students to work with pre-fabricated designs of architecture. The photo gallery, as mentioned before, is a rather odd addition to the software. The component allows students to look at examples of building styles from the four different periods of architecture covered by the software. The interface is simply a list of styles or types of buildings with a small window next to the list that displays the building selected and runs a voice over. Not encouraging exploration whatsoever, the style of this interface suggests its use as a reference tool, but the component does not have nearly enough information in it to merit it as a legitimate source of reference. (Although, we do like the inclusion of "trailer house" as a form of today's architecture.) This component may be useful to teachers who wish their students to look at an example of a particular style of architecture, but in and of itself, this is a dry aspect of the program. Additionally, we wonder why Tom Snyder Productions chooses to use the most bland and generic examples of architecture in the photo gallery. Why not use famous buildings around the world? In all, the photo gallery seems to be a rather useless aspect of the program.

Overall, the Community Construction Kit is comprehensive enough to be used within the classroom as an effective teaching supplement; however, we do not see it as a necessarily exciting nor informative piece of educational software for individual use. Tom Snyder Productions recognizes this fact to a certain extent which is why it includes such an impressive Teacher's Guide. A good teacher is also essential for this software's success. Without the teacher and the guide, this would be a considerably weaker piece of software. But on the whole, the Community Construction Kit is a noble attempt at integrating the student, teacher, computer, and classroom into learning about the concepts involved in architecture. We know of few other pieces of software like it.