A Font Design Patent from the Blue Jays`23 (age group 4-6)

No matter how nature-oriented an education system is, it doesn’t mean that technology should be left out as an educational element. The following process is a story about how we integrated the much-stigmatized "screen" into our project-based learning concept, which revolves around natural and raw materials and children's imaginations.

In our continuous process of making books, one of the outcomes related to it was the opportunity to practice pre-writing skills provided to the children. The initial idea was to have them trace the content, which was also created by the children.

So, we decided on our topics and themes, carefully selected our graphics, compiled our photos, illustrated our pages, and now it was time to type the text.

In a book where everything else was decided and created by the children, having the usual crisp and solid lines of your everyday fonts seemed to be against the EBI spirit, where the original work of the children is promoted over any other kind of fancy preschool aesthetic that relies on the belief of what adults think children would like, instead of what children would actually take pride in.

We had already been working on our pre-writing and tracing skills by tracing the recipes in our cookbook, the text in the invitations, and letters to our friends who moved abroad. So, our 4 to 7-year-old group was ready for the big task of designing their own fonts using this amazing online tool called Calligraphr.

After months of immense work put into our phonics and pre-writing skills, we dived into the world of typing and fonts. This process was followed by easily printing our templates and tracing the letters. The lines were crooked, the ink was smudged, the dots were a bit too big, and some of the letters resembled everything but the Latin alphabet, but it was just perfect. It was something that could be recognized by the children as something to take pride in. Imagine, in 10 years' time, when typing a letter to a beloved relative or an old classmate who lives abroad, they can just opt for their own handwriting all the way from kindergarten.

Also, when compiling and working on the contents of the cookbook, it occurred to us that the age (3-4) children start tracing would bring a limit to content solely created by children. What about the recipes cooked or baked by the 2-3-year-old class? Just because this age group was working on different sets of skills (which are also the baseline for fine motor and pre-writing) didn’t mean that their pages must be printed with the same old "bubble letters."

As an unintended outcome, we are proud to add that our very own font design was approved by the Turkish Patent Office, allowing us to take pride in the unique outcome of a part of a unique project.

By Ilkim Ayse Mükan (EBI Teacher)