Thesis response 4

I just got done reading a Thesis by Ayen Cabasag on math strategies and design during early childhood.

I read through this whole thing and thought it was going to be something different than it was. The title of the article was math strategies and design during early childhood, in my head I thought it was going to talk about the relationship between math and design. I thought that maybe she would talk about studies she had found where children that had been exposed to math at an earlier age effected the way in which they perceived or created a design. This thesis basically went through and talked about how children at a young age learn and through those studies how a designer can design for it. for instance designers need to know that when designing activities for children, using consistent colors, shapes, and patterns to grab their attention will help children retain information, and when Using consistency, children are more likely to remember those memories. She concentrated her article on how children's minds worked and how we, as designers could design to help them learn at a fast rate. However I found this conflicting because everyone learns and understands differently so these design methods don't work for everyone. 

She then went on to talk about Cultural and gender differences which addressed my disagreement in the line prior. She talks about how female brains work better with actual number and male brains work better with the mathematical reasoning . The same goes for cultures and demographics where some cultures there is a lack of confidence or pressures. 

Ultimately after all of the facts she had to back up her study it came down to the same way I feel like any designer would do to tackle a problem, and that is to know their audience. The designer will have to consider the design of the activities towards the child's background,and gender, then use certain colors, different shapes and sizes to get there attention. The only way in which the design is ultimately different is that you can't put things in a design and assume that they will understand it, it needs to be more obvious than that because, children don't see things the way adults do. It is good to embrace a variety of methods.

I felt like this was a good paper but I felt like it was a research paper not really a thesis.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1683194/ais_classes/portfolio_pres/12sp/theses/cabasag_ayen_thesis.pdf