Games Based Learning (Professional Studies and Research)

A few weeks back we were given interesting inputs from three professionals from Dundee University on their findings from studies they have been involved with in which various primary schools  were issued different "COTS" (Commercial Off The Shelf) games to possibly enhance children's overall learning.

David Miller carried out a study that involved the use of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training, MissyMack talks about this study in much more detail.

Divya Jindal-Snape spoke to us about the use of Guitar Hero to make the transistion from primary seven to first year of secondary smoother. See iFarm's blog for more detail.

I am going to focus on Jill Shimi's input on the use of Nintendogs in the classroom in relation to childrens social, personal and learning gains throughout the study.
This study was carried out among four primary one/two classes in the Aberdeenshire area during the summer term of 2010. There was no set activities for the children to complete and it was left to the class teacher to incoroporate the game into their school routine. (Support was available from the Education scotland website and other informal websites) As it was left to the teachers discretion of when to play the game there were a number of differing variables in each class including time of use, frequency of use and the teachers' management styles. Although, Angela McFarlane tells us that a particular advantage of using computer games is that they are not faced with "clearing up the debris" or collecting bits and peices to allow them to complete the activity. If children have a thirty mintue slot to play the game "they will spend the vast majority of that time working on the problems posed by the game" (p15,1997)

Findings

Social

Using the games in class proved to really increase the amount of social interaction each child experienced in the classes. In particular some of the less confident children were able to come out of their shell and chat to their peers as they were all doing the same thing and had something to talk about. This in turn led to enlarged friendship groupings within the classes which I feel is always positive in school.
In addition to less conifident members of the class talking more, another aspect of social interaction which was observed was the leveling of hierarchies where the "popular" children would happily interact with those with few or even no friends. All of this was able to occur due to the common stimulus of the game.

Quite a significant observation that was made was that an increase in collaboration and peer learning was taking place. This is a large advantage as according to Education Scotland "peer education initiatives can play a major role in helping schools foster positive relationships between pupils and teachers." (no page)

Personal

The overall findings in relation to this section was that the games increased the childrens motivation and self-esteem. This is backed up by Education Scotland where they state that benefits of games based learning include "motivating learners to succeed and to continually improve" and "fostering self-esteem, self-determination and enhancing self-image" (no page)

By using the game to increase the children's motivation this also complies with the priniciple "Challenge and enjoyment" of curriculum design.

Learning

Tremendous benefits were observed in relation to the children's learning in language. In particularly boys. By using the game as a context for writing, it motivated the children and both the quality and quantity of writing improved. Additionaly it also improved many of the children's oral langauge as they were able to discuss many of the apsects of the game.

In relation to maths however there was a mixed result. By using the game's context some children in the early primary years where being exposed to using large numbers. There was a clear divide in the number of children who were able to cope with such numbers and those who found it just a bit too difficult to comprehend. None the less, the enthusiasim to attempt to understand the numbers was there due to wanting to play the game.

Conclusion

It is clear that using the game has clear advantages for all social, personal and learning gains in relation to children. Even with the varying methods of implications from each teacher in their class the game still had positive effects. This leads me to believe that if enough thought and preparation is put into creating a number of different activites that could be implemented in classrooms as part of the curriculum then there will no doubt be even greater social, personal and learning gains for today's children.


References

McFarlane, A (1997) Information Technology and Authentic Learning Realising the potential of computers in the primary classroom. London:Routledge

Scottish Government (2010) About Game Based Learning. Available online at:

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/usingglowandict/gamesbasedlearning/about/understanding.asp

Scottish Government (2010) Peer Education. Available online at:

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/learningteachingandassessment/approaches/peereducation/index.asp

Games Based Learning Activity

After being given various inputs on Games Based Learning (GBL) we were given the opportunity to put what we had learned into practice. We were told that a primary six class from a nearby school would be coming into the university to take part in various GBL activities. It was up to us in our ICT elective groups to come up with an activity for around ten pupils to engage with for approximately half an hour. In order to give us some inspiration we spent an afternoon in the university experimenting with various games on different consoles and handheld devices. This definately helped us plan for our activity as it would have been much harder for us as a group to come up with ideas based on a game which some of us did not have experience on.

After playing a range of games we came to the conclusion to use Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games (Bejing) for the Wii as the engaging context for our activity. We decided to use this game as it is very relevant to today's children with the upcoming 2012 Olympic Games being held in London in the summer. This in itself addresses the principle, relevance, of curriculum design. "They should see the value of what they are learning and its relevance to their lives, present and future." Education Scotland (no page)

The actual learning that we decided the children would take part in was stop motion animation through the use of plasticine models and digi-blue cameras. We choose this as we collectively thought as a group that the children would enjoy this actively engaging task which involved very little writing and was very hands on. iFarm, a member of our group has displayed our full lesson plan in her blog post which covers our learning intentions, success criteria and implementation of the tasks in much more detail. (Also shown is an example of a digi-blu camera)

In order to make the over all experience for the children as exciting and engaging as possible we put a lot of work into decorating  working station and created detailed plasticine models and olympic race track for the children to use.

Shown above is the board on which the Wii game was played and a large scale model of the Olympic rings symbol which we hung from the roof. Also shown is the detailed models of Mario and Sonic which the children moved on the race track, which we also created. All of these details definately enhanced the children's experience as I witnessed their faces light up as soon as they saw the colourful rings hanging from the roof alongside all the other bright decorations.

Evaluation of the Activity

Overall, I felt the lesson's activities went really well. Everything fitted in perfectly within the half hour slot and almost every child engaged with both the Wii game and the animation section which was our main intention relating to the Curriculum for Excellence's experiences and outcomes for ICT.

All the children were actively engaged throughout the half hour and if we spotted anyone just sitting and watching we encouraged them to either help with creating the animation or to even just cheer on their peers who were playing the game.

In order to gain first hand feedback from the children we created a short evaluation for them to complete in their teams (see lesson plan on iFarm's blog). The results from these evaluations were largely positive with many of the children expressing that they really enjoyed the activities even though they were quiet challenging. I feel this was great feedback to recieve as it shows that we were successfully able to address another principle of curriculum design, challenge and enjoyment. "Children and young people should find their learning challenging, engaging and motivating." Education Scotland (no page) Additionally, all of the children stated that the Wii game helped to give them a visual representation of the movements that the plasticine models should make which was our intention of using the game to enhance the learning.

The only negative feedback we recieved was that the Wii game was unfair and that the overall activity was boring. On closer inspection of these evaluations we noticed that these were generally from the pupils who lost at the Wii game. One of our downfalls was splitting the teams into boys v's girls. Almost every time the boys seemed to win the race. One conclusion we drew from this was that possibly the boys were more physcially fit and stronger than the majority of the girls and therefore had an advantage when it came to repeatedly moving the Wii remotes. This in turn demorlalised a number of the girls and we had to try and keep them feeling positive. In the future, I think it would probably be best to have mixed groupings to avoid such issues occuring.

References

Education Scotland (undated) Principles for curriculum design
Available
http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/understandingthecurriculum/howisthecurriculumstructured/principles/index.asp
Accessed 20/2/12

Digital Literacy and ICT (Fife Council)

Back on the 2nd of February we were paid a visit by four ICT eduactional specialists from Fife council. I found this visit very interesting as they introduced us to a few of the main stream software that is being used in today's Scottish classrooms in order to enhance children's learning as well as their technical prowness. These included Comic Life, Pivot and Sequal. (iright has posted a blog which goes into more depth on these types of software mentioned.)

 What really contributed to my enjoyment of this visit was the hands on appraoch they provided. Everyone in the class was given access to a small notebook which had all the software installed on them. This allowed us to engage with the software the specialists were talking about as well as being told its benefits and possble uses within a classroom. I felt this was a great way to really get us involved and motivated about the software they were praising.

The one part of the visit which particulary caught my attention was that of the use of Games Based Learning (GBL) within a classroom.

"Research is beginning to suggest that computer games can help to stimulate a successful learning environment and provide motivational learning contexts that suit many learners."

(Education Scotland, no page, undated)

Many of todays present teachers and parents are still very critical of the use of games in the classroom as a tool for learning. Prensky (p1, 2002) states that these people belive "that computer and video games are "mindless", i.e that kids don't learn anything beyond hand-eye coordination from the thousands of hours they spend playing video games". However, this simply is not true and Prensky (p1, 2002) himself states "For whenever one plays a game, and whatever the game one plays, learning happens constantly, whether the players want it to, and are aware of it, or not."

We can not blame today's teachers and parents for their skeptical view on the use of games in the classroom as they are themselves are not adapt to the use of such things in the classroom. Unlike today's children "who have spent their lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones and all other toys and tools of the digital age." (Prensky, p1, 2001), modern teachers did not. They are what Prensky refers to as Digital Immigrants. Digital Immigrants did not grow up with technology surrounding them so have to now learn about the advances in technology. As with somebody learning anything new for the first time they will be tend to be slow and less confident compared to those who are more competent. This is possibly the main reason in modern schools why GBL is not more widely used.

During the section on GBL I learned about an "open source" game. This is a game that has no copyright infringements attached to it and it is free to download to anyone. The open source game which was used as an example was Super Tux.

We were given the chance to play the game itself and one of the specialists made the observation that as soon as we began to play the game, everyone was immediately engaged and motivated to try and comlpete the various levels on the game. This would no doubt be the same for the children and would in turn address the principle of "Challenge and enjoyment" of the Curriculum for Excellence as Education Scotland state "Children and young people should find their learning challenging, engaging and motivating." (no page, undated)

After playing the game itself, it was stressed to us that GBL is not used for teaching ICT and that it should not just be used as a reward for comlpeting work, which is very often the case when GBL is used in some schools. GBL is most effective when a lot of planning and thought has been applied and is used as an engaging and exciting context for a range of learning across many curricular areas. We were given examples such as creative writing for language, creating a new level/world for the character to explore for art and various other activities covering many curricular areas. his again address another of the principles of curriculum design. This time "Breadth" as Education Scotland state "All children and young people should have opportunities for a broad, suitably weighted range of experiences." (no page, undated) A huge advantage of using an open source game as the context for learning is that the characters and background world can be edited to suit any particular topic, for example if the topic is the vikings, your character can be a viking and the background image can change to a more suitable environment. This will again engage the children.

In conclusion, GBL does have a huge amount of potential to allow relevant (another principle of curricular design as games are possibly prominant in almost every childs life), engaging and motivated learning to take place within classrooms. The only problem in the present is that many of the teachers are not confident and competent enough in using game technology. On my first placement, one particular meeting after school hours was held to discuss the potential of using a number of Nintendo DSs' in the classroom to enhance learning. This was probably when I first noticed the main issue of today's teachers not being able to use the technology as it was mainly myself, except one or two teachers, who could switch the handheld devices on and start up the games without any trouble at all. I feel that GBL will eventually start to play a much larger role in schools in the near future as newly qualified teachers, who have the skills and confidence required to implement it successfully, begin to take charge of classes.

References

Education Scotland (undated) About Games Based Learning
Available
http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/usingglowandict/gamesbasedlearning/about/aboutgamebasedlearning.asp
Accessed 10/2/12

Education Scotland (undated) Principles for curriculum design
Available
http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/understandingthecurriculum/howisthecurriculumstructured/principles/index.asp
Accessed 10/2/12

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.
Available
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
Accessed 10/2/12

Prensky, M. (2002). What Kids Learn That's POSITIVE from playing Video Games.
Available
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-%20what%20kids%20learn%20thats%20positive%20from%20playing%20video%20games.pdf
Accessed 10/2/12