Venturing into Panwapa without having seen the TV show, I was a little unsure about where I was.  It looked like a zoo or carnival outside of a tropical rainforest. My initial exploration took me around to see what characters I could interact with and what activities I could explore.

After playing the hide and seek game in Mandarin and watching a movie about Navajo Indian children getting water, I got the sense that this site has something to do with exposing children to different cultures.
After exploring the outside or first page of the site, I still got the sense that the site was just a place where you could go and explore a few activities that seemed loosely tied together but it took a while to get the concept of the site or where I should begin.

After exploring for a while, I clicked on the globe and saw how you could make your own place and travel around.

This site does a good job of exposing students to the idea that there are different countries and different cultures all around the world.  Many students may never leave their city block or neighborhood.  They have an undeveloped sense of geography and how their culture compares to others around the world. I also like how the site is multilingual and has activities for different types of learners and incorporates educational gaming.

If the goal is to introduce children to the concept that there are different people all over the globe, then it hits its mark.

I think the site doesn’t create even a make-believe environment that is concrete. It seems that the activities are just thrown into this zoo-like area.  They don’t really scaffold or relate to each other.  The characters know when you complete an exercise but besides that, they aren’t tied together.  It doesn’t seem rich enough. Without having read Wikipedia or the seen the show, I didn’t get the concept that I was on a floating island that could travel around the world.

However, the site does touch on the following problem solving skills:

Scanning for clues  -  students explore the site and look for interaction
Ability to explore  -  students explore the interface and the globe
Interpret graphical information  -  chart at the end of the water movie

The movie game – not the videos which are on a TV – teaches students to pay attention while exposing them to different cultural concepts.  Students watched the movie once to get a general idea and then were asked to watch the movie again and click on the button when they saw water. It also ended by asking students where they got most of their drinking water. This made the student reflect on their own lifestyle and think about how it is different then their own.  It was a clever way to introduce interactivity to a normally passive learning experience.