.jpg "Search Engine For Pakistani Kids")
My most respected teacher Dr. Shukat Wasi, Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Computing. Shared his thoughts with us. I thought I'd share those with you in his own words in the hope that you'll appreciate them and consider them for future research in Computer Science.
This is just a rough idea inspired by a recent article published in ACM Communications. The article discusses changing computing to improve children's learning.
Computing is everywhere around our kids. They play games extensively in various domains and use computing tools at school and home to find/design solutions to various problems. They learn to use computing tools for resolving their queries.
But it's all unattended.
As we as parents or even teachers do not know what they are actually learning; good or bad or even evil.
My 11-year-old son knows how to unlock locked levels in various games. He knows how to and where to get a game free of cost that is paid on Google Play. He knows how to install and play a game on a mobile for which google play said "your device is incompatible with the game". etc, etc., etc...
All these he explored and learned himself. Is everything he learned positive or max of the learned things positive?? Is he learning technology positively?
To me, I would say NO to all. Hence we need to redesign computing for a positive impact on future society.
To me, search played an important role in diverting my kid to various solutions. If the search is designed to pull/push towards positive aspects and restrict from or at least information about the negative impacts of the queries and desired results, it may play a role towards positivism. Sometimes, I feel, they believe more in google results than me :)
I have recently tried Kiddle, Kidzsearch (Google), Wacky search (Microsoft), and KidRex search engines with various combinations of "bad" words. All are designed to be safe for kids. Found Kidzsearch as the safest one. However, many of the results were safe from their perspective but not for us. Moreover, I really felt an extreme need to focus on human factors at both ends, interface, and interaction.
Hence, we intend to design a search for Pakistani Kids. I wish to focus on Pakistan, because our cultural values, thoughts, and many other things vary much from others.
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