I recently met Ryan Cummins from omaze at the Intersection Event. At the speakers' table during Friday's conversation he prompted us to include humor in our work and messages, and demonstrated to us the positive effects that humor has on memory and experience.
I tend to be a very serious person, but I must say that I love late night comedy shows and if I can stay awake I enjoy watching Carson Daly, Jimmy Kimmel, Saturday Night Live, Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon and more--like most of us, I love to laugh.
Children love to laugh too. So how can we intersect our learning events with humor? Last year some of the most memorable endangered species public service videos included humor. Yet, there's always that balance of acceptable humor when it comes to working with young children.
I'm thinking that I'll connect our upcoming math screen casting project with humor. Rather than prompting students replication of my drycast, I'll promote student creation of mathcasts w/a bit of humor to make the explanations informative, funny and memorable.
Let me know if you have any suggestions as to how I can promote the use of humor with young children to grow this project. I believe the project has potential! Thanks for the inspiration, Ryan.
