JediMom Blog

This weekend while helping my daughter with her Club Penguin blog, I got an inside look at one of the more popular online virtual worlds for kids.

We found Sensei

Immediately, I noticed the must-have Club Penguin blog bling is a tracker. After some tutoring by my daughter, I discovered that the trackers are designed to help you find celebrity penguins. This weekend’s hot celebrity was “Sensei” who my daughter describes as a wise old penguin and the leader of the penguin ninjas. How cute is that? It’s totally cute until you spend three hours hopping from server to server looking for Sensei!

From what I observed, the trackers merely act as a way to broadcast rumors of sightings that are shared online. I found chatter about Club Penguin on Twitter so my contribution was to create a widget out of the RSS feed from an advanced Twitter search. I was incredibly impressed with myself for this web trick until I started to test the accuracy of my Sensei Tracker.  I then realized a there were more than a few issues with my tracker. Namely, sightings of Sensei do not generate as many tweets as you might think, kids don’t use hashtags and the accuracy of these sightings is highly questionable.

My quest to help my daughter find Sensei convinced me there are at least three modern skills that Club Penguin is teaching our kids:

1. Patience is required
2. Some crowds lack wisdom
3. Online sources are not always reliable

Patience seems to be an essential skill for dealing with online glitches and overcrowding not only on Club Penguin but also other services like Twitter. The Club Pengin user’s first challenge is finding an available server.  This weekend’s visit by Sensei generated a mob of penguins in the dojo of whatever server he was rumored to be on. The tiny penguin avatars would pile up at doorways and anywhere Sensei was supposed to be. My daughter has been active on the site for years but has never found a celebrity penguin. But the odds and crowds do not deter the kids. One waiting penguin in the crowd shouted out, “I believe in Sensei.”

Penguins can also learn that there can be a lack of wisdom in crowds. It was quite interesting to see that there were two theories at work. In some of the meeting places penguins were busy trying to clear the floor insisting that this was necessary for Sensei to visit. Yet in other spaces the penguins were doing the exact opposite — trying to gather the penguins in the middle of the room. When I finally did track down Sensei neither tactic appeared to be needed.

The trackers as well as the online experience in Club Penguin also revealed the folly of trusting unreliable sources. In an effort to enter a jammed space, some penguins would attempt a misdirect by suggesting that Sensei was not there or that they just saw him on another server. One Club Penguin member tweeted about seeing Sensei 18 times, promising that pictures were forthcoming for proof. Hunting myself for many hours, I can tell you that those odds are highly improbable.

Our kids are growing up completely entangled in technology. From virtual worlds to text messaging and Facebook, our children are learning how the world works online. Practical life skills such as critical judgement and patience can be reinforced online as well as off. A Sunday afternoon playing in my daughter’s world is definitely time well spent.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Kids and Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.