One of the latest trends in geekdom is creating “mashups,” combinations of data from multiple Web sites that result in a new service for users. The best-known of these are combinations of Google Maps and something else: movie showtimes or house listings, for example.
My two-and-a-half-year-old son, showing his attunement to such innovations, has been creating mashups of his own. After watching Elmo talk about fire fighters, for example, he requests stories about Bob the Builder constructing fire stations. Other days he wants Bob to build train stations for Thomas the Tank Engine. Sometimes Mayor Fox from Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day asks Bob to build a new library, and afterwards everyone takes a ride on Thomas to celebrate. Sometimes I narrate the story to him; other times he asks me to tell it but then proceeds to inform me about what he wants to happen, so I end up merely repeating his scenarios. Occasionally he launches full-scale into a story of his own, and I sit back and listen.
I love the way he so easily synthesizes the various worlds to create something at once familiar and original. His creativity here is more impressive to me than his knowledge of letters and numbers (though I’m proud of that, too); it means he’s thinking, not just parroting. My goal is to help him maintain this ability throughout his school years, despite the test-based teaching that seems to be prevalent these days (as I discussed in a previous post). Maybe one of his high-school science projects will be to create a mashup of Google Maps 14.0 and some data source we can’t even imagine right now. I’ll definitely print a page and hang it on the refrigerator.