Week 3

Week 3 – I/D, P&E & Quia Game Design

I/D, P & E

Game making on Quia

· Summary of Class Activity

In this class we took some time out from the computers and focused on with design using the Investigate/Design, Produce and Evaluate model (I/D, P & E). We were set the task of making a frog that jumped with materials limited to card, elastic band, sticky-tape and a little frog print-out. Working with Young, we did make our frog jump, though not in the most elegant possible way. It was interesting to see all the different methods people had come up with around the class, and I can see how setting such design tasks would be invaluable as a classroom activity. We also looked at the Quia web site, and utilised its free 30-day trial to experiment with making different games that could be used in the classroom such as hangman, word-searches, balloon pops, and good old-fashioned multi-choice quizzes. The program was easy to use, and allowed you to devise a game around the subject of your choice, and is useful in this regard. However, I feel that the graphics and whole visual appeal of the games isn’t very exciting (or perhaps it was just the game I made?!). Considering the high level of the games you can find and download off the computer, I think I’m more inclined to use those rather than my own generated one. I have found so many good games this way, but if I had trouble finding a suitable pre-made game, I would use make my own using Quia. What is more, I feel that many of these games such as hangman or quizzes would be better played away from the computers. I have had some great prac lessons where the class formed groups and took part in an imaginary game show, and there are many other great (manual) games that students and teacher can enjoy together as a class. Basically, if it adds something, then definitely use the computer; if not, stick to the conventional form.

· Readings/Major Issues/Key Concepts

When I was reading Developing Ethical Behaviours in Students: What Schools Must Do, by Doug Johnson (listen in the research articles section of LMS) I realised that I have cyber worries galore! I have already experienced some during my teaching prac. They come in two categories: ‘pull-your-hair-out’ worries, and ‘pain-in-the-butt’ worries. The first category is a teacher’s worst nightmare, and includes things like cyber stalking and pornography. I haven’t come across anything this serious. The worst thing I’ve seen is a student (unwittingly) looking up Queen’s ‘The Bicycle Song’ on YouTubem, which is basically a clip of fully nude men and women riding around on bikes. The student, stunned and intrigued, meekly told me after a few moments that he thought he should stop watching it – a mature response, given the circumstance. The 'pain-in-the-butt' worries are less serious, perhaps, but still very concerning over the long-term. My 'pain-in-the-butt' cyber experience was the amount of copy and pasting of information from the Internet students would do when researching on the computers. By the definition of “ethical” in the paper sited above (“…an 'ethical action' does no harm to oneself, other individuals, or society”) we can say that this certainly is an ethical issue: both because it harms the student and because, if carried on into later years, it harms the party whose work is being plagiarised. We spoke about this in class. The students concurred that there is not much learning that takes place when they copy someone else’s work, and we also decided that it turns out to be quite embarrassing when you are reading out your work and you can’t read it properly because you haven’t written it.

I will end with a bold prediction that students will become increasingly used to copying work from the Internet, and this will actually change societies understanding of “plagiarism” in the future. The teacher will always be fighting against this tide: we can see this in the lengths universities go to when checking students’ work for plagiarism. But, ultimately, just as our understanding of copyright has been shifted with the proliferation of illegal downloads of music, movies and games from the Internet, we would be naïve to think that our understanding of ownership of information and the way we use this information wont be radically altered as well.

· Application in classroom

As discussed above, I feel that I’d use the Quia games function sparingly – only if I couldn’t find a pre-made game on the Internet, and if we couldn’t play the game away from the computer. I feel that some of these games don’t present rich learning opportunities for students; tasks such as word finds, for example, don’t require the students to use any higher-order thinking and involve only very superficial understanding of the material being learned. On the other hand, I have seen the advantage of devising your own multiple-choice quizzes at my last prac school. Here, the teacher wanted to test the kids’ knowledge about body systems before they started the unit so he would know what needed to be covered. I guess you could hand out a written test, but this way he got instant feedback about how the students were going without having to mark them individually. Just to finish off, I would suggest that maybe you could use the Quia program with the kids by getting them to make their own games and playing games made by other students, as this would engage them more than if it they are made by the teacher.

· Websites

Link to Quia books & Quia Web http://www.quia.com/

IXL Maths (associated with Quia) http://www.ixl.com/

Media Awareness Network, Cyber Pigs game incl. teacher’s guide. http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/games/privacy_playground/ This site has great graphics and sound, is fun and not too daggy. (I love the idea of a virtual pigsty - I think I’ve created my own on my laptop).

Readings

Developing Ethical Behaviours in Students: What Schools Must Do, by Doug Johnson (Director of Media and Technology, Mankato Area Public Schools, Mankato (MN), 2002; posted on LMS - research articles):

http://webct.latrobe.edu.au/webct/urw/lc17802779087071.tp17802779120071/displayContentPage.dowebct?updateBreadcrumb=false&pageID=17802779908071

VELS Design, Creativity and Technology Downloads: http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/dct/downloads.html