shinkansen library

[cteno4]

this is a super cool idea of what to do with an old train car! what better thing to get kids into reading and going to the library and into trains!

 

http://www.japanprobe.com/2010/06/27/library-bullet-train-in-japan/

 

cheers

 

jeff

[to2leo]

That is such a neat idea and an excuse to turn some of your model train to our uses too!

[cteno4]

yes i was thinking about how to represent a car on the layout in a lot like this to be the 'library', its a bit hard to show this visually! was planning at least to have a steam engine and bullet car in the park as an attraction!

 

theres a used car dealership somewhere in japan that had some, i think, penn central rr cars as part of it!

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Bernard]

Anything to get kids to read is a great idea. My wife is an elementary school teacher and reading is a big part of their curriculum. I wonder if there has been an increase in reading because of the train?

[Guest ___]

Meh, good while it lasts, in another ten years, everything will be Kindles, Nooks, and iPad. I expect kids born today will only see print books in museums. 

[cteno4]

well i think a lot of the little kids books will stay. we actually tried to talk to parents, educators and home schoolers about this a couple of years ago to see what their reaction was to beginning readers and electronic versions, both computer screen and pads. we were trying to see if we should abandon the book version of our kids series that has the book and cdrom where the cdrom has the book on it as well and even narrated along with a bunch of other content about the story's subject matter.

 

feedback was pre ipad, but we were asking about mobile devices like the kindle and other pads that were on the horizon. the results were something that the ipad does not do well and thats tactileness and sharing.

 

small kids like the tactile feedback of turning pages, even the feel of the paper. while i love the ipad and it can do a book great, i still love holding a book and feeling the pages. parents noted their kids definitely had a different mechanical reaction between their books and electronic book toys. the electronic books they got into the poking around and less into just reading and calmer tactile things of pointing, turning pages, holding the book, etc. very subtle, but was consistent in their comments.

 

the sharing also is hard to do with a pad device, its meant to really present to a single person. glare, reflection, position, etc are hard to deal with two people looking at the same ipad together. just had that last night when a friend's kid was sitting in my lap and we were playing mahjong together on the ipad. we were constantly repositioning it for each turn and the pad's weight and shape made it awkward.

 

one other feedback we got (which may change as parents spend more time on ipads and computers) was that parents felt that they just didnt want their kids doing everything on the computer or with technologies. granted our sample pool were people really into kids development and making the time, effort, money to do it as best as possible, so they understood that moderation and variety works best in kids development like this. also why the whittle school all computer delivery go poof...

 

the last thing we noticed on our own, even on a medium sized computer monitor you still dont get the page size of a fully opened 2 page kids book spread. many kids books rely on a lot of these two page spreads and having to zoom in/out on a smaller screen really ruins the designed effect in the book format.

 

yes i see books as a lot rarer item in 10-20 years for mundane stuff, but there are still many places where they will survive and there is some thing intrinsically human about books that will keep them around for some things, even if its just nostalgia and the stalwarts that refuse to do otherwise.

 

cheers,

 

jeff