I’ve written about this site once before, but I shared it with my students as part of a larger discussion about remixing content, and (ironically enough), about stereotypes that they were discovering of Americans and Muslims as we are finishing up our critical look at Three Cups of Tea. The way I brought those two discussions together — along with a foray into companies targeting young kids with advertising — is with the HTML5 Gendered Lego Advertising Remixer.
If you have not shared this with your students, you should. It’s a great, and entertaining, way to show how audio, visual and the selling of a product to a girl or boy (as opposed to any gender kid) is done. The site allows you to mix the audio tracks from one Lego commercial targeted towards one gender with the video from the other. So you get the soundtrack to the Star Wars Lego set mixed with the video of the Lego Friends video. You should have heard the hoots of laughter from my room.
But it was serious, too, as we held a discussion about why pink is always girls, why explosions are always boys, and what happens to the kids who fall in-between those two worlds (which is mostly everyone). It was a pretty amazing discussion, and all thanks to the remixing effects of this one site.
Peace (in the remix),
Kevin