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