When designing the EHEapp we quickly realised that we wanted to take whatever activities we were doing with our children and get the app to reflect the educational elements the activity actually encompassed. We wanted all the great things we do with our children and that contribute so much to their development to have their true educational value shown.
In some cases this might seem relatively easy; if my child does an hour of maths then they’ve clearly done some numeracy, but even something as seemingly simple as an hour of maths is actually educationally much more complex. An hour of maths isn’t just numeracy, understanding maths takes literacy skills, the more complex the problems the more literacy is involved.
For everyday activities this becomes even more complicated and time consuming. So, for example, if I’m baking bread with our children I just want to be able to enjoy baking bread. At the end of a long day I can just about summon up the energy to enter ‘we baked some bread’ into my child’s journal and maybe add a nice photo. What I can’t be bothered to do is think about what my child learnt from baking the bread in terms the government approves. This is just way too much effort and frankly would put me off baking bread!
So we quickly hit on the idea of tags and of breaking each tag into the educational elements the government is interested in – numeracy, literacy, socialisation, life skills and STEM. This was fine apart from the fact that every time we talked about these elements we had to list the whole lot. As is the way with language, after a while we got bored so we started using an acronym but acronyms require prior knowledge which makes them horribly inaccessible.
Eventually we decided that rather than list all the elements every time or use a rubbish acronym we’d just call them ‘the educational elements’, often abbreviated just to ‘the elements’. Now we fully appreciate that saying the elements means very little in any broader context but in the EHEapp if we refer to the elements of an activity it is short hand for the educational elements of an activity that the government is interested i.e numeracy, literacy, socialisation, life skills and STEM.