- [William Dewey] We're going to include in the exhibition
a game board from Liberia. And so, my question for
you is; did you ever play these kind of games?
And what do you call it, what do you call it in
Cameroon? And did you play it when you were young?
- So but in Cameroon we called it Songoo, but they have
different versions of it though because depending if you are,
I just learned that in the western part of Cameroon,
the English speaking part of Cameroon they have a different
I think its "B" or something? - [William Dewey] Can you explain
a little bit, what were you writing about, and what's it
about? What did you want to find out? About the game board.
- So I sat down, and I remember being intrigued
by this board game I would say "Wow, what is it
that happens in board game?" so that's how the idea came up,
I'm like, why don't you set out to see what is it that
people are doing, and what is that people are actually
learning. Why are the literacies that are coming out
of it. Scaffolding, computational thinking,
collaboration, and also one thing that I found out that was really
interesting to me was that, culture and cultural context
impacts the type of literacy you evolve in.
So everything that it did was tinted, With cultural context.
The way the collaborated was different because I
compared that group in in Cameroon to a group that was
playing the same game here in the US. Everybody started with thirty five seeds.
So to be the winner you have to have forty seeds.
So you have to be a good mathematician. You have to count, and be
really fast because nobody has time to wait for you.
So if you make mistake thinking that it is fourteen instead of fifteen,
then you can make the wrong move. So in Cameroon, you were
allowed to help your opponent if you see that he, the
counting was not right you would go "oh no your
counting is not right." But then I asked some day
"how can you help somebody knowing that" but for them
because you are showing you have to help your neighbor right?
Because the whole idea, there's a whole philosophy behind
that. So you have to help your neighbor to make sure that
he's okay.