World of Classcraft is a role
playing game that is played in the classroom. The goal of the game is to
transform the classroom into an adventure and the brains behind the project is Shawn Young, a grade
11 physics teacher at a High School in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada.
In World of Classcraft (WoC) players
team up against the class, defeating monsters (homework) and bosses (exams). In
WoC, players have a class,
experience points (XP), hit points (HP), action points (AP) and power points
(PP).
The use of this
type of methodology is not particularly new and I first came across is after
reading The
Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Gamewritten by Prof. Lee Sheldon.
But what I love about Sean’s project is that he is not just taking the
methodology of playful learning in the classroom forward he is also working
hard in the background to build a platform that will support this type of pedagogy
in multiple subject areas.
Certainly a project
to watch overt the next few months / years.
There was also an
article on World of Classcraft on the BBC Technology Pages yesterday morning
with some comments from Shawn,
Dr Ladan Cockshut and myself.
I first met David
Goutcher a couple of years ago and he told me about his career as a former
Strathclyde Police CID officer who send many years as an undercover detective in
Scotland. When he left the Police force he put his efforts into developing and
interesting product called Spy Quest
(originally Super Spy Camp).
David’s Idea was simple
(the best ones always are). How can you combine the excitement of being a spy,
with a simple ‘text driven’ computer game and at the same time reinforce some
key learning principles of learning. This lead to the formation of Polybius
Games and the game was designed to be played in hotels and on Cruise Ships.
Now, if you think you
know about computer games and you have not heard of the Polybius Video Game (of urban legend) then you need to seriously
go away and revise your computer game history. Or just read this Wikipedia
article – Polybius
(video game).
One of the things that really
impressed me about David and his company
(apart from his sheer enthusiasm and passion) is at a time when the bottom
was falling out of the Scottish Computer Game Market (I’m sure we all remember Real Time Worlds). He
created a simple game, using a different business model which is now being
played by million of people all over the world and has been translated into 26
different languages. All this has happened in four years. It’s not just me that
thinks that this is good either Polybius Games has also won the John Logie Baird Innovation Award
in 2010 and has been recognised by NESTA
(the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) for educational
enterprise.
When I read through his
portfolio I found out his clients included Gleneagles, Center Parcs, Wyndham
Bonnet Creek Resort in Walt Disney World, Florida, and the Four Seasons in the
United States.
Over
coffee we chatted about how the game may be relevant to a more formal education
setting. For me the link with Spy’s was an obvious one – there is something about spy’s, secret agents, James Bond and solving
mysteries that captivates the imagination of children. But I also loved the
idea that many of the codes within the game were based on ‘real-life’ code breaking from
various times in our history. Thus, providing a link to history, numeracy and
problem solving.
In
fact the more that I thought about it – and just like most things really – I
could see that with the right learning and teaching approaches the game could
be effectively used in schools. I put David in contact with Dunbar Grammar School where I was
Head of Geography a number of years ago and they tried a custom version of the
game out with a group of ne P7 children as part of their primary to secondary
transition work. The guidance team at the school were impress with how well the
children took to the game, how it helped them get to know the school and also
how much they enjoyed the activity.
David
asked me to write a white paper - which I did. I was keen to support a Scottish
Enterprise and I’m always keen to support Playful Approaches to Learning. I was
also impressed with David’s future plans for his product and game. In
particular I enjoyed a
children’s book that he had commission titled Polybius - The Urban Legend, what impressed me even more was
that it had been written by Andy
Briggs.
Anyway, I was delighted
to see that David’s business (of training
future Super Spies!) seems to be going from strength-to-strength. So, much
so it has got a vary favourable write up in this weeks Times Educational
Supplement (Scotland). Apparently, even our Cabinet Secretary for Education
– Michael Russell, MSP has been playing it.
Well done David! – best of luck for the future and
with Spy Quest – as far as I am concerned, Scotland needs more entrepreneurs
like you!
Last month I had an interview printed with
and about me on the Guardian Teachers Network. The Guardian Newspaper is one of
the leading newspapers and media sources in the UK (an in my opinion globally).
The interview was on some of my thoughts
regarding Games Based Learning and Computer Games in Schools. Just like with
most interviews that you do for the media there are a few inaccuracies. For
example I am not a head of department, I don’t work for Education Scotland any
more and I didn’t invent the term ‘Contextual Hub’ - although I have contributed to its definition.
Overall the article reads pretty
well and it may be useful for others. As always I am greatful to those who have influenced my practice over the years (in partcular my good freinds Stephen Heppell, Derek Robertson and Charlie Love).
I’m doing lots of interesting Internet Safety and Responsible Use work at the moment. Last week this involved attending and presenting at The UK Internet Safety Centre’s eSafety Live Events in both London and Edinburgh. The Scottish Government supported the Edinburgh Event.
At the London and Edinburgh Event I was asked to share some thoughts on the Challenges and Opportunities for Computer Games in Education. Lots of people have been asking for the slides so I have embedded them below - I’ll write up the notes at some point soon.
At the Edinburgh Event as well as the Computer Games workshop I ran two additional workshops on the use of Social Media in Schools. Again, I have embedded the slides that I used below and will write a more detailed narrative explaining some of the key points over the Easter break.
On Friday night I attended the Naace Impact Awards and I was absolutely delighted that Derek Robertson won the award in the category for, ‘Adviser or Consultant or Support Service’. This was for his work on leading the Consolarium Games Based Learning and Games Design project in Scotland.
I’ve know Derek for a long time and I have also spent some time working within his team at the Consolarium during the early days of my secondment to what was Learning and Teaching Scotland.
The Consolaroum project was started in 2006 but Derek’s interest in Games in Schools stretches back to the 1980s when he was a Primary School Teacher in Dundee City.
The video below, that was prepared for the awards ceremony tells Derek’s story (it was also great fun to make!):
Derek has been an inspiration to work with. He is a whirlwind of ideas and enthusiasm. He is a person who generally wants to make learning exciting, real and relevant for young children. I can think of no one else who I would have rather seen get up on stage on Friday night to receive the award.
This is the second in a series of articles about taking risks with Education Leadership, Learning and Teaching. The articles are based around a workshop that I have been doing with the same name for Scottish Local Authorities and the EIS.
In the first article in this series I have already mentioned Monkseaton High School in Whitley Bay, near Newcastle. It is a school that has embraced controlled risk taking and does things differently.
But there are of course lots of other examples of education delivery around the world where doing things differently and risk taking approaches are encouraged.
"Tinkering School offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids – ages 8 to 17 – learn how to build things. By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational.
Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are, of course, encouraged and fertilized."
Gever Tulley (founder of Tinkering School) talks more about the project in his 2009 TED Talk (embeded below):
One of the key aspects of Tinkering School is its playful approach to learning and teaching. I’m a huge advocate of play and games in education. I think that if you think about any good game they tend to offer challenge, progressing and reward. Computer games are now so sophisticated as well as challenge, progression and reward they also offer personalization and real-time feedback.
Hmmmm… not a bad five words to describe what we continuously try to create in our classrooms and learning spaces. I’ve written a lot about games based learning before and this recent talk that I did for Microsoft sum up most of my current thinking.
Some schools have taken the notion of games and computer games to an extreme. Which brings me nicely onto my second example of different global practice.
"Quest to Learn [in New York] is a school for digital kids. It is a community where students learn to see the world as composed of many different kinds of systems. It is a place to play, invent, grow, and explore.
Quest to Learn has purposely responded not only to the growing evidence that digital media and games offer powerful models for reconsidering how and where young people learn, but also to the belief that access for all students to these opportunities is critical. We believe that supporting students, their parents and communities in a quest to become motivated, resourceful, life-long learners is a true aim of education."
Of course some people are skeptical about on-line teaching and I strongly believe that children should have a blended approach to learning. But part of this blend has to be exposure and use of digital technology.
It is however interesting that increasingly some learning delivery models are entirely available on-line.
Which brings me nicely onto my third example of different global practice.
"The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.
All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.
Here is an interesting thing to consider. The Khan Academy gets over a million unique views a week (and rising). What percentage of these come from the UK to do think? I would bet not very many. I’ve got no real data to back this up but I expect statistically many of the views come from Eastern Asia and India. Of course there is nothing wrong with this - in fact a free on-line education is in theory great for everyone. But we do need to consider why globally some people are motivated to learn and others are not.
I have said time and time again that in the UK we do not lack resources (I know we could always have more) but we do lack motivation and this seems to be a very hard thing to crack at a system wide level.
Now I am not suggesting for a moment that we replace our schools with The Kahn Academy or even smaller UK versions of it. But in the back of a taxi on the way to Reading Train Station Professor Sugata Mitra once told me, “If a teacher can be replaced by a computer, they should be.” I think he was quoting Arther Clarke.
Of course he didn’t mean that we should replace teachers with computers.But he is right and I have come across a few (luckily, very few) teachers in my career who’s only role seems to be to press the spacebar to advance the PowerPoint presentation while rows of children copy the projected side into their jotters.
This is not an engaging activity, it is very poor pedagogy (if done all the time) and is certainly not a great return on investment for a teachers time.
The work of Sugata Mitra brings me onto my forth example of different global practice.
Professor Mitra’s work is fascinating and if you have never seen his TED Talks (one and two) you need to spend some time watching his projects on the use of technology to educate children in places where no one wants to teach.
"When I last visited India, I asked the children what they would most like to use Skype [the internet telephone service] for. Surprisingly, they said they wanted British grandmothers to read them fairytales – they'd even worked out that between them they could afford to pay £1 a week out of their own money," Mitra said.
He had already recruited one woman to spend a few hours a week reading fairy tales to the children, with her life-size webcam image projected on to a wall in India. He appealed to Education Guardian readers to volunteer. And some 200 people stepped forward.
"Many are retired teachers, who are now regularly on Skype teaching children in the slums," says Mitra. "The children are forming relationships with them, and the teachers, many of whom were upset at the thought of having finished their careers, have realised they're more important than ever."
More information on the Granny Cloud in this short YouTube Video:
Again, I am not saying that this is the answer to our literacy issues within the UK Education System. But I am constantly surprised with how few schools have grasped the concept that it is now very possible to beam and expert into your classroom for real-time engagement with children and young people.
We simply must make more of these opportunities to turn our schools and classrooms into child centred exciting places for young people to learn, question and imagine.
It is also important to remember that you could never lift one of these models and retro-fit it into a new community. Some of the learning plazas in Wales have tried this and it just doesn’t work.
What risk taking schools and leaders do is take the best bits from a global recipe and create a model to serve their local circumstance and need. As long as the model they work towards is flexible and agile it doesn’t matter if some parts or ideas do not work - the important thing is that it is kept as child centered as possible and the philosophy of trying new things is built into the very foundations of any new school.
In the next post in this serise I'll talk about solving problems with empowerment and experiences.
The Sunday Times Festival of Education at Wellington College (near Reading) seems like a long time ago (June 2011). I was presenting under the technologies strand (which was supported by Microsoft).
My presentation was on Computer Games Based Learning in Education and really serves as a summary for a number of projects I have been involved in over the last few years and some of my current thinking within this area.
I'm a huge fan of Manga High and often mention it in my Games Based Learning talks and presenations. Manga High has been free to UK schools for a while now but I thought it would be worth mentioning at the start of the Scottish school academic year.
Manga High is collection of fun and very educational maths games - they have been designed with good pedegogy at their heart. The games are suitable for primary and secondary school children and you can even sign your son / daughter up to a free after school virtual maths club.
If you work in a school then you have to sign up to use the free service but if you want to get an idea of the quality of the games then you can play some trial version here.
An infographic is a visual representation of a set of data, facts, statistics, and images that often support a point of view. In lots of ways they are not dissimilar to large classroom posters that you often see in classrooms and school corridors.
Jen Deyenberg wrote a post on using inforgraphics that is worth a read and Neil Winton offers some alternative advice on the use and point of inforgraphics over on his blog.
What ever you think – I think they do have a place in schools and we certainly need to be working with children to make sure that they understand how to decode and interpret inforgraphics. I find some of them quite interesting and they certainly get you thinking about things!
I’m going to post five that I have bookmarked recently over the next week.
There is no doubt about it computer games are addictive that is one of the reasons that games like Angry Birds and Farmville have done so well in recent years. Why? Well, computer games are well made.
A recent report from the BBC references a government advisor (presumably from Westminster?) who warns that adolescent addiction to computer games is set to rise steeply over the next few years.
There is no doubt in my mind that computer game addiction will rise over the next few years.
The reasons for this are simple. We will have more games than ever before, greater access to technology than ever before and more teenagers than ever before. But it is important to remember that addiction to gaming is not new – people have been addicted to card games for years (its called gambling…).
However, making these basic comparisons are not really the point of this short article. My point with the BBC story is something that I have been talking about for years and concerns emotional intelligence – lots of people disagree with me on this one.
In the BBC piece it comes across that Jane Whalley (the mother of addicted son, Jack) blames the game for her son’s addiction. Jack who is obviously over 18 because he states that his favorite game is ‘Call of Duty’ where you go around ‘shooting things up’. Everyone knows that Call of Duty has a PEGI 18 age rating on it.
Hmmmmmmmmm, or maybe Jack has been playing games that he is not emotionally ready for? I wonder what we can learn from this? From an education perspective one thing is for sure. We probably need to do more surroundingteaching about games as well as how games can be used for learning.
What ever happens we can not let the media reporting incidents like this in any way impact on the good work that is going on in many schools. Games based learning has huge potential in education as has been demonstrated by the Learning and Teaching Scotland Consolarium time and time again.
If you want to find out more about Games Based Learning in Scottish Schools why not come to our Games to Learn – take 2 Conference being organsied by JISC and the LTSConsolarium on March 19th 2011.
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