Lesson #5- Primary Social Studies

Media Messages for Kids

As part of the critical thinking standards in the social studies curriculum in Ms. Fabunmi’s primary grade classroom, students are studying the effects that media messages have on people. Students have been learning about the ways in which commercial messages influence our buying decisions. Students have learned several of the “tricks and techniques” that marketers use to appeal to young children, such as making toys seem far more fun than they might realistically be; using movie stars or cartoon characters; or making products look bigger than they really are.

As a culminating activity, the students are devising an experiment. The class has created a fictitious game called Robot Adventures. Students shared responsibility for creating the materials for this game: cardboard robots, a colorful board, etc. Students were divided into teams and each team was comprised of a writer, videographer, and editor. They worked together to create a commercial.

One team created a very factual commercial for the game; simply describing Robot Adventures as a game that takes about 20 minutes to play and is appropriate for children ages 6 through 9. The other teams each created a commercial that used one of the marketing techniques that they had studied. All the commercials were videotaped very simply using the video camera built into their laptops and the Windows Movie Maker software.

The subjects of their experiment were drawn from the other three classrooms at their grade level. Thirty student volunteers were identified and were shown each of the commercials. These volunteers were seated in front of laptops and, after each commercial was shown, the volunteers were asked to respond to three simple questions about Robot Adventure including, “After watching this commercial, how likely would you be to ask your parents to buy this game?” The responses were entered into the free PollEverywhere.com website.

After the experiment, students used Poll Everywhere to review the results of their experiment in graphs and Ms. Fabunmi led a discussion that explored which commercials had been the most effective. Students were asked, individually, to write up the results of the experiment both describing the method they had used to conduct the study, as well as a few sentences describing what they had learned. This writing served as the evaluation for the content of the learning activity. In addition students completed a peer evaluation of their collaboration and contribution to the team. Finally, Ms. Fabunmi used a simple media project rubric that she had refined, based on an original found online at the Intel Assessing Projects site, to evaluate the quality of the commercial created by each team.

Tools used in this scenario:
Audience Responses System: Poll Everywhere http://www.polleverywhere.com/
Creation and Publication Tools: Windows Movie Maker
Rubrics for Technology-based Products: Intel Assessing Projects tool http://educate.intel.com/en/AssessingProjects