Government kids website pays £6 for every visitor The Department for Children, Schools and Families spent almost £60,000 developing a temporary website which has had less than 10,000 visitors since it was created and which is due to close next month. The site - called "Build your PlaySpace" - cost £50,000 plus VAT to build - and was meant to encourage children to get involved …
'Get yourselves over to the Playspace consultation tool site here and pretend to be an 11 year old to get their figures up.'
Isn't that just asking for trouble in today's paranoid society?
At least the hardware could be re-used again for something else, so I doubt the final cost will come out as £6 per visitor - still, knowing our government, it probably will...
It seemed more like another bit of government propaganda, the questions certainly push you to a certain way of thinking.
In general government consultation seems to work like this:
We're thinking of doing A:
Q1; When we do A will you be:
a. Happy.
b. Ecstatic
Q2. How many people you know are desperate for us to do A?
a. All the people you know.
b. Even people you don't know.
Q3. Obviously the alternatives to us not doing A are worrying. Are you:
a. Frightened.
b. Terrified.
Finally, for those who stil can't understand that we're going to do A anyway: Please provide us with an evidence based argument as to why we shouldn't do this (no more than two words).
I fear this might be a terribly accurate summary.
Funnily enough, playing seems to come naturally to children. Maybe they're just doing it in the wrong way? Maybe its that most of the things that were most fun are now considered far too unsafe as the country rushes headlong into paedogeddon.
Requiring everyone who has seen, heard of, or made a child pass a criminal record check is a step in the right direction. Maybe tagging and tracking children so they don't wander into potentially dangerous environments (these include "outside" and "near adults, especially men") might help matters more?
The questions are ridicules... one asks why you don't play outside
a) its not safe
b) there is nothing to do
c) it cost too much
d) I I prefer to stay at home
kind of assuming they never go out isn't it!
I thought we had "packs of feral youths roaming the streets". Have the media been misleading us?
>> £50,000 plus VAT to build
On the plus side the government raised almost £9,000 through VAT.
£50,000 for a questionaire, it really is obscene.
BTW, I love the way that on the image on the main page the wall at the back is covered in grafiti/art - whereas in the 'game' the same scene has a rainbow painted on the wall.
They actually expect kids under 8 to understand those questions? Or even stay focussed long enough to read the words? Took me a couple of read-throughs before some of them made sense! I don't think this was about consulting children, this was more about making it look like the big bad government was actually kinda soft and cuddly. It doesn't take a genius to see that children are getting bored and need better, safer facilities to congregate/play/get drunk. How many yoof clubs have closed in recent years? I guess 60k wouldn't have gone a long way towards actually building/maintaining these new sites, but it really was a waste of time.
Yup it's lemmings. The kid even walks like a lemming.
Also you don't have to answer any questions just hit submit and keep building treehouses (most expsnsive item) getting more and more into debt.
What's this trying to teach anyway? 'Answer what the govrenment ask you and you get money'? 'Ripping off Lemmings for fun and profit'?
"The UK Government's Foresight programme, alongside the Horizon Scanning Centre, uses science based methods to provide visions of the future."
http://www.foresight.gov.uk/index.asp
A fine example on this site is the use of Future Arcs, a technique that has been used "to help London Underground assess strategic risk; to help a key Government Department test their strategic crisis response and disaster recovery planning; and to help Transport for London develop a new strategic vision for an internal team."
(towards the end of this page, at 'The Fan Club':
http://www.foresight.gov.uk/Horizon%20Scanning%20Centre/FanClubNews/Feb2008.asp)
"Thinking in arcs supports the development of non-linear and adaptive strategies that are robust across the broadest range of plausible futures; visualising the organisation on multiple arcs at the same time helps create the elusive ‘strategic agility’ that is often talked about but difficult for organisations to realise. Future Arcs includes tools for anticipating and creating future options, identifying decision windows and managing human cognitive and psychological tendencies such as confirmation bias."
... there is a pocket park about a mile from here that has a way- cool climbing structure (it has a panel that resembles a rock- climbing surface, rope swing, and stuff *I* never had back when *I* was a boy ...) and, according to various gossip- mongers, the parks department has a manual that teaches kids how to play on it. I can see having someone point out the cool/ safe features that might not be obvious at first glance, but "how to play"? Have the kidlets had ALL their imaginations sucked away? (Not sure I want the answer to that just yet.)
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:)
Yeah, come on 50K is nothing when you figure in all the bureaucracy that would have been involved, all the toing and froing, that was probably two people lives for 6 months, I think they got it for a song. So, it didn't work out, if it was multi millions perhaps there would be some cause for concern, but that figure is paltry.
It is not cheap to do stuff on the web, just less expensive than physical reality. How much would it have cost to send out questionnaires and get people to collate the results? Probably substantially more than 50K.
In addition to all the other problems with this "survey" which have already been brought up, I'd like to mention that surveys conducted across the internet are already worthless from a statistician's point of view, for these reasons:
1) Web based surveys are not given to a random sample. What about people who don't know about the website, or don't have a computer, or don't care to spend the time?
2) The sample you do get are clearly skewed towards behaviour (such as filing out a lengthy survey on your own time) that the 'average person' would not do. Also skewed is the economic class distinction, which is heavily weighted towards those who can afford a computer and internet access. I'm rather certain that poor children play as well.
3) There's no way to tell (aside from watching IP addresses carefully, to an extent) if any of the sample group is gaming the system for their own ends. While unlikely in this farce, the doubt it creates is more than enough to disqualify any results gathered.
the problem is now that kids seem to lack imagination.
when i was a nipper a cardboard box and soem selotape would keep me happy building bases for my lego and star wars... kids these days just sit and stare at things.
the mrs was doing some stuff with kids recently and they couldnt figure out how to make anything new out of lego - they could only build from the manual. complete lack of imagination.
wtf is happening to society? is it just that thick people outbreed the rest of us?
anyone seen the film idiocracy? seems we are going that way!
There's a link on the home page which says:
"If you are an adult you can respond to the consultation here" (http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/consultations/conDetails.cfm?consultationId=1543)
but clicking it takes you to an error page saying:
"A system error has occurred, we apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused."
I guess they don't care what parents might think!
Is that the way to jump off a swing? By salto? What about jumping off the top of the tree house?
Good education site... I can here the kid in me saying: I'd like to jump off a tree house with a salto... and not break my bones.
Paris because she knows what playing in a tree house really means
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