Digital Technologies

Three high school students use laptops for online gaming

An unexpected journey through eSports

Posted on April 8, 2021 by Duncan Trickey

“However, in the end, the real importance of good computer and video games is that they allow people to re-create themselves in new worlds and achieve recreation and deep learning at one and the same time” (Gee, 2003, p.3)

My name is Duncan Trickey and I am the teacher in charge of sports at Otago Girls’ High School (OGHS). For some time I had been wondering, “Why was it that the ākonga at OGHS did not play eSports?” (eSports is a form of sports competition that uses video games). This question made me curious. Why did this matter to me? Why did I think it mattered to the school? This became my research focus as a Dr Vince Ham eFellow in 2020.

Why was it that ākonga were not playing eSports?

I conducted a survey of OGHS ākonga in 2019, before the eFellowship began, and it showed that students were not competing in eSports though some of them thought they would like to. In response to this, I arranged to run a duty time in the innovation hub called the eSports and Gaming Club. We had two new gaming computers purchased through community funding which meant ākonga were not reliant on their own devices. During the lunch times students could play any games they wanted. We had between five and ten ākonga attend our weekly meets which showed that there was definitely an interest in playing eSports.

At first, Brawhala and Minecraft were the most popular free games. We then found League of Legends. This game requires a team of five players to play but forming a consistent team was a challenge. Ākonga in the eSports club were from different year groups and the team members changed depending on their afternoon timetables. Though friend groups came in, they often had different games they wanted to play. In addition, though we had just started this group all too soon we had to leave the school walls for our home bubbles.

Te pou herenga – navigating education through tricky times

Through our journey this year at OGHS, a colleague used the metaphor ‘te pou herenga’, the hitching or mooring post for our waka. Through the turbulent times of lockdown, we relied on our leadership to hold together the diaspora that school had become in 2020. Every educator had a part to play as we led our respective students, whānau and community through tricky times.

My research project on eSports and education became something I could relish. While all other sports paused during lockdown, my athletes were in the position where they were the only sport still going. Our communication through discord meant everyone could schedule games and though the digital divide meant I lost a number of ākonga, our meets were well-attended. For a number of students it was the first time they had been in a game chat and they seemed genuinely surprised to have a teacher talking through discord.

The eSports team was very new and it was unclear to me what we actually were. I did not teach any of the students, and the games we were playing were also completely new to me. I quickly realised that lunchtime sessions were not perfect. It was difficult to get the students into the game and complete the game within 45 minutes. This is when we initially started to do evening games, after dinner. This was an exciting move and was a foreshadowing of how the group would meet in the future. Within this distance setting it gave the group added excitement about finally meeting as a team and presented me with a hidden learning.

The hidden learning

The hidden learning was why our eSports team needed to be a recognised part of our school community and what the ākonga would gain through it. As with traditional sports, the social learning within eSports is the same. Like preparing for a rugby game, you similarly need to be prepared for an eSports match; you need to understand your role within the side; what tactics to use; how to complement each other; and how to communicate clearly during high stakes (digital life and death). Furthermore, basics like remembering your power cord and log in; organising your calendar; communicating with home and an endless number of other skills are needed that relate to being part of a team who can rely on each other.

There has been a huge amount of learning around who the ākonga were who joined the group. It was completely voluntary and attracted a diverse group of students and transcended conventional boundaries of year groups; it also attracted students from outside our school community. The ākonga had to adapt to who was in the team, negotiate what roles each student would take, and what character they were able to play. We also initially had to find common ground on what games we wanted to play and who we were to play against. Though my focus was gender equity it was quickly apparent that the ākonga at Otago Girls’ High School wanted to play, and beat the boys.

We aren’t going anywhere

Setting up our first competitive game against Otago Boys’ High school was an exciting step for the group. The tension and excitement through the week was tangible as the match approached. The game itself was hugely one-sided and the team coming in had thousands of hours experience on the OGHS students, being mostly Year 13 students. This did not put off the squad though we continued to meet and train and arrange games. In Dunedin we were breaking new ground as schools were often initially wary about eSports. The news of our eSports team quickly flowed through to others who were interested in playing against our team, even when their schools didn’t necessarily have a recognised school team.

Face-to-face games with other schools break down the often social silo associated with gaming: the image of teenagers isolated and playing games in their darkened bedrooms. Basic practices around sport like saying ‘good luck’ and talking to the captain before going into a game is just as important in developing the social skills within the team. The level of excitement at a win or simply just knowing the team has performed really well is akin to the emotions experienced by any team sport I have known, and as a manager and coach in other sporting codes, the ‘buzz’ is similar.

The next step – this project will not let me stop!

The next steps are to develop a sustainable Dunedin league and develop a support network for these students. If we ensure we value them as much as other athletes, we will reap benefits. Already I have offers to help coach our team from some of the students from the boys’ school. When looking at how we continue as a group I think this is a really interesting area going forward. Will these sports teams look like traditional teams, or will they take more of a cultural model with students from other schools joining teams where they feel comfortable and being managed that way? The possibility could be of a sporting hub model where students interested meet and form teams before looking to compete in regional or national competitions. Either way it is clear to me that the students are not only enjoying it but learning and gaining important skills. There is an exciting future ahead of us.

Find out more about the Dr Vince Ham eFellowship and read Duncan’s research report

References

Gee, J. P. (2003). What Video Games have to Teach us about Learning and Literacy. (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan)

Ngā kupu

Pou herenga, “(noun) hitching post, mooring post, rallying point.” Retrieved from Māori Dictionary
discord, a chat room where gamers often meet

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Zero budget gamification of online learning

Posted on September 11, 2019 by Stephen Lowe

In my last post I wrote about game-based learning and differentiated it from gamification. In this article I look at the gamification of online courses. I suggest that gamification is not only about points, leaderboards, and badges. It may simply be about the language we use, and our approach. However the learning experience designer chooses to go about it, I assert that it will always have three dimensions: harder, faster, and levelling up.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Gamification of online learning is a serious business. Let’s start by making a collaborative document and setting out a table of goals and actions. Let’s wrap some theory around this, and pull together a cross-disciplinary team. Yeah, right. Or let’s sit on the floor, behave like kids, think like Māui the Trickster, and have some fun with it. Which do you think will work best? Are you on for this? Press START.

Harder

Sure, you want to make it easy to get started, but soon after that you want to get busy putting artificial obstacles in the way. Not too many. You have to get just the right balance between difficulty and progress. If you ever played Machinarium (insert any dungeon crawl you did play) you will know that the thing that kept you coming back was that it was insanely hard to find your way out of one room and into the next.

Everyone likes to quiz

Quizzes, puzzles, and challenges are a great way to structure the content. You don’t necessarily even have to lay the content out first, rather you just embed it in the quiz. Or flip the usual layout: put the quiz first and put the content second, served up like a resource to be trawled for facts if required. Crafting Socratic questions into the feedback fields of a multi-choice will lead the learner to the right answer. Give them multiple attempts, encourage guessing, require a high passmark like 90% or even 100%. Moodle and H5P (and many other platforms) offer the learning designer different flavours of multi-choice, no longer are you stuck with radio buttons and checkboxes.

Demand submissions to unlock the levels

There’s a good learning model that lends itself well to gamified online learning: aggregate, remix, repurpose, feed forward (Cormier). Require your learners to collect new knowledge, synthesise it into something of their own, apply it to a problem, and submit it for examination by the Old Wizard to allow them passage to the next level. No passkey, no access. Learners of all ages understand and acknowledge this motif; that is why Rowling and Tolkien are such popular authors.

Instant feedback

For every hard thing there must be immediate recognition and reward for achievement. For every failure there must be a penalty, an instant fine. Forget higher-order learning strategies, this is pure behaviourism. That is not to say that learning strategies that work with the intrinsic motivation of the player-learner cannot be deployed inside each discrete activity. But progress through the learning landscape is old-school carrot and stick. It’s all about framing, you have to make receiving the penalty part of the fun. Drop and give me fifty, soldier. If that doesn’t sit well with you, then maybe this is time to go for a long walk and ask yourself The Big Question: Is gamification for me?

Well-crafted games are an artful blend of intrinsic pleasure and extrinsic scaffolding.

Amy Jo Kim

Faster

If computers sap your energy, they also eat time. When someone says to me ”online learning”, I see a pool of light from an angle poise light. The clock says one a.m. and everyone in the house has gone to bed except me. But you can do more with a clock than stare at it. You can use it as a powerful motivator. Just as a fitness freak says I wonder if I can run 10 kilometres in an hour, so a learner releases endorphins by saying I wonder if I can complete this quiz in under five minutes for 500 bonus XP. It’s a balance of anxiety against boredom. Yes, your river runs deep, but it flows swiftly too.

Far-off deadlines kill online learning

Like Christopher Columbus, online learners need rhythm for a compass. A strict weekly beat marked out by the Metro Gnome is what makes eLearning go. Practice it in the mirror: “I need you to do the reading, score 100% in the quiz, and submit the assignment by this time next week.” Depending on your context you might even want to substitute ‘day’ for ‘week’. Oh, and some points, tokens, awards, and a place on the leaderboard will really help to make this happen. It won’t work for everybody. You’ll need a rescue truck. Tick the boxes that enable multiple attempts and late submissions.

Treasure hunts are fun

Put those potentially isolated individual learners into teams. Give those teams fun names like ‘The Tigers’. Put up a prize like 1000 XP for the winning team and 250 XP for entering. Now, set the Challenge. Imagine you can contrive for each individual to find a nugget of learning, carry it to some forum or wiki where the first team to assemble all the nuggets into a golden chalice wins. I’m being metaphorical here, I’m not suggesting you have to be a world-class animator. What I am saying is that dividing the learning, running with it along some pathway, collecting it into one place, and combining it into an exhibit is a powerful model. This kind of thing will get the majority of the learners through into the next Level. I’m assuming you’re either a teacher or a learning designer, so you no doubt have a rich repertoire of creative ideas you can bring to dry old online learning.

Nano-learning builds skills

Provide resources that learners can do in the interstitial spaces in their life: waiting for mum, stuck in traffic, medical centre waiting room. Flip cards are a good example. If you get 25 XP every time you run through them, why would you not run through them 4 times? Drag and drop, same story. Barbara Oakley emphasises retrieval practice. She says it’s easy to kid yourself you’re learning when all you’re really doing is repetition. Try breaking this cycle by creating a five-question quiz of the text box type where the learner must actually type five remembered words, correctly spelt, to gain the XP. Repeat the quiz on each level, but progressively reduce the time in which it must be done. Now the learner is tapping right into their neural networks, retrieving, and articulating. Harder. Better.

Level Up

In games, we are the protagonist—the person with agency, facing a series of choices and challenges along our journey towards mastery.

Amy Jo Kim

The reason progression through Modules 1, 2, 3, and 4 can get boring is that there’s no sense of getting stronger to face greater challenges. Too often it’s just more of the same, resulting in attrition from about mid-course on. In games your character gains knowledge, skills, tools, and powers in each Level to prepare them for the challenges that lie ahead. Online learning is sometimes doing that, but it’s not worn on the sleeve like it is in games.

Mind your language

Gamification of online learning could be achieved simply by the language we use. For example, “Be sure you know the twenty terms in the glossary by heart because you are going to need this knowledge to complete the challenges in the next Module. There is a twenty-question quiz on the terms in the glossary, you must get 90% to unlock the next Module.”

Nudge, tempt, shove

Gamification of online learning may be no more than using some well-crafted well-placed nudges. We are herd animals. Some will be happy to be the stragglers at the back, but they won’t want to be left out altogether. Try announcing “half the class have now moved to the next Module”. The principles of universal design for learning apply to gamified courses just the same, so you want to offer multiple pathways to unlock the next Level. However, if one of these pathways has a track-record of success you may want to make it the default pathway, or sign-post it as ‘recommended’, or simply call it the Yellow Brick Road.

Provide real time support

Pretend you’re Florence Nightingale and create a cool chart. It might show how half the learners drop out when they fail the first level-up quiz. Watch the activity logs or if you’re geek-gurl set them up to notify you. Get in there at fail time with consolation prizes and words of encouragement. Throw XP around like confetti (after all, it’s virtual and it doesn’t cost a cent). Do not do what so many online teachers do, and abandon them in their hour of need. Richard Bartle, in his wonderful book Designing Virtual Worlds, calls this the Live Team. You are the live team.

It’s a wrap

There are a lot of products on the market. I am assuming, reflected in the title to this piece, that you are not in the market for those. Moodle continues to be one of the most powerful free environments for online learning. Each release it gets better and better. Now you can record video and audio directly into a forum post. How good is that? This is where the individual learners could bring their nuggets of new-found knowledge to assemble them into that golden chalice.

As a teacher you must design it. You must create situations that demand sharing.

Jesse Schell

If you’re a teacher you may like to approach it from first principles and know why you’re doing it before you address the how. Like me, you may have to approach this in a creative way and hack your way to success on a shoestring. Good luck, and follow the code: harder, faster, level up!

By the way, did you uncover the Old Pirate Pass Phrase hidden in the text? Clue: “Let no word go unturned until you have the key. Hover your mouse my hearties only then I’ll set ye free. For where you see gold, there treasure be!” Email the pass phrase to stephen.lowe@core-ed.org to claim your share of the treasure!

Suggested resources

Jesse Schell, Learning is beautiful. YouTube Video (23 mins)

Amy Jo Kim. Game Thinking: Innovate smarter & drive deep engagement with design techniques from hit games. (Available from Amazon)

Richard Bartle. Designing Virtual Worlds 1st Edition. (Available from Amazon)

Ploy Buraparate. Dungeons & Dragons & Design Thinking on the UX Collective Blog.

Moodle plugins Level Up.

Featured image by N. on Unsplash

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Recognising Authentic Context in Digital Technologies

Posted on July 24, 2019 by Jess Bond

Earlier this year while wandering through the toy aisle at a store an item caught my attention. The toy, reacted to its surroundings, hurtling itself across the floor with more gusto and louder than the noise from the excited tamariki nearby. It interested me, because I could see the link to Computational Thinking, which sits in the technology learning area within the New Zealand Curriculum. If I were to code it I would break it down. A sensor, reacting to noise. The more noise detected meant more speed moving forward. It seemed fairly accessible for learners, they would be able to grasp the concept behind it. A great metaphor for teaching in some ways – the more that was going on around us the faster we had to move and react.

Mindfulness

The more noise about a topic, the faster we feel we have to move to catch up. But what was the purpose of that toy? Apart from a great Christmas present to annoy a parent, I would have to do some thinking. The new Digital Technologies content can feel a little like this. As teachers, it is hard not to get caught up in the noise but if we allow this, then we miss the best part of this learning area is that we have the space to slow down. We no longer have all the answers or the best ways of doing or even the years of experience behind us to help us choose the best and most relevant parts for our tamariki. What I want to encourage kaiako to do now is to make the most of this opportunity to give back the time and space to our learners and let them find their own authentic context.

Redesigning roles

Kaiako are so used to being givers of knowledge. Able to tackle a task from a variety of angles, rearranging, reevaluating and finding new ways for our tamariki to engage. We have become so good at sharing resources that we know are tried and true, we know what lessons were a success and why. We can change and adapt them in different ways to help those students who need to see it in a different light or context. With the revised digital technologies content this knowledge is, for a lot of us, more foreign. Suddenly we are on the same playing field as our students and, for some of us, it can feel like we are at the beginning again. It can feel uncomfortable. The story of Maui and how he obtained the secret of fire helps us consider the benefits of approaching things in a new way.

His curious nature helped him to think beyond the comfortable norm. Māui’s bravery meant that he fearlessly acted on his hunch to explore beyond current circumstances. His steady tenacity enabled Māui to persevere in his pursuit of a new, more effective solution.

Renee Raroa (2019)

If you are familiar with CORE’s 2019 Ten Trends you will know that one of them is the Changing role of teachers. Where in the past teachers were expected to be givers of knowledge, now we need to look at how we can help our tamariki take risks, celebrate their mistakes as an expected part of the journey, and how we can help them identify authentic needs and help them engage with these needs creatively. The New Zealand curriculum states that;

“Technology is intervention by design. It uses intellectual and practical resources to create technological outcomes, which expand human possibilities by addressing needs and realising opportunities.”

NZC, Technology Learning Area

Technology is driven by our desire to create something that can help us. Our outcome could be something that connects people to the land, helps them embrace their culture, assists with communication or understanding. That leaves a wide playing field. How do we narrow down what our purposeful outcome will be? We do this by encouraging our tamariki to look around them and identify problems they can relate to, are passionate about and connected to.

Authentic context

A colleague of mine told me a beautiful story about a kura she was working in. Conversations were started by identifying needs from people they knew, what ideas do we have to address those needs? This brought them to a discussion around how a peer was hearing impaired and as such the school bell was irrelevant for them. They explored this concept and began to talk about lights. The students talked about how lights warn us, convince us or help draw attention to something. From here developed a natural and purposeful inquiry that led to a prototype around how their school could code lights to flash and signal to their peers that the bells had rung. The context was authentic, meaningful for the students, and the outcome was purposeful.

An important discussion and starting place for delivering this content in an authentic context are the discussions around the ethical responsibility we have as creators. Just because we can create something should we? Kia Takatū ā Matihiko, The National Digital Readiness Programme, has a recurring theme around identifying the skills and qualities that help us engage with Digital Technologies. Mahuika, the goddess of fire is one of the characters showcased through the programme. She is a Kaitiaki, a guardian, and when we look for that authentic context to drive these learning opportunities, we need to check and ask ourselves some of these questions.

What needs do we have in our school or community?
What are our tamariki passionate or interested about?
What exists already and how does it work?
What are our initial ideas or prototypes?
What could the repercussions of this be? Is our design ethical?

These questions will need to be continually revisited, and at the beginning the outcome or destination that is driving this learning may not be yet clear. Technology in the New Zealand Curriculum has a spotlight section on authentic context which has multiple examples of what teachers have been doing in schools. A quote here from Aaron Duff that sums it up well.

“Authentic learning is not discovered in a textbook, but rather at the crossroads of contemporary societal issues and student passion.”

The challenge with using textbooks, and online resources is that although it can be a wonderful way to initially engage and build confidence around new learning, it tends to take away the authenticity. As soon as you give tamariki a problem to solve you are removing the potential to drive and connect children in a meaningful way. In saying that, your students may well share the same passions as others and sometimes we can be shaped and influenced by seeing examples of innovation. Many schools around New Zealand have embraced taking risks in this space and you can see lots of examples in the resource section of Technology Online or connect yourself with other educators in Aotearoa in spaces such as Ngā Kiriahi. The collaboration available from other tamariki and kaiako can inspire us and help shape our own authentic contexts.

Looking at the potential

What else could authentic context look like? One of the Kia Takatū Meetups this year was held at the Wigram Air Force Museum in Christchurch. Because of the unique opportunity this presented, teachers wanted to give back to the hosts and look at how that partnership could be strengthened, both for the Museum and for the participants. The teachers were invited to create a digital outcome to help with an identified need. The Air Force Museum wanted to engage with educators and their schools more, allow their visitors to interact with the exhibitions and also to have their voice and ideas listened to. They wanted schools to be able to connect with their history and allow more accessibility to more New Zealanders.

The range of responses from our digital creators was impressive. Some of the ideas and prototypes included, a virtual guide, interactive exhibitions, and the creation of LEGO planes that moved and behaved like some of the ones they currently had on display. The idea of using virtual reality to allow access to planes that are no longer open to the public was another discussion point that began to ignite ideas and excite learners as they began to see the potential for various prototypes.

Connection to place

Aotearoa is the perfect place to start connecting tamariki to the technology learning area within the New Zealand Curriculum. Our connection to our physical environment and meaningful ways we can express our culture and identity provides a wealth of starting points for these conversations. There are some incredible technological opportunities currently happening in Aotearoa that you could talk about with your tamariki, and if they were interested you could reach out and get involved.

Image by Nita on Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0 — Kōkako by Nita on Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0

The South Island Kōkako Charitable Trust has recently put out a Facebook post asking for help creating a device to help them locate the once thought extinct South Island Kōkako. You can read more about the Cacophany project here.

This report about a drone eliminating a hornets nest also ignited my interest, as the Department of Conservation currently has a focus on pest control. These ideas are but to name a few and they are definitely biased towards my own personal interests and ideas. So when you start this with your own children think about identifying what is already in your community, and what things are exciting and inspiring for your students.

Thinking back on our hurtling toy, I wonder if we can change the metaphor? Stop and appreciate the quiet, the long pauses where the thoughts start to take place. The action will come, but your job is not to know where you’re going at the beginning, or even halfway through. You may even find the outcome changes constantly the more you find out about it. But the learning is in the journey and with teachers sitting alongside their ākonga. We will make mistakes and we will have lessons that flop. But the opportunity to grow from these mistakes is something to remember, embrace and most of all enjoy.

References

Renee Raroa (2019), CORE blog, Whakatōhenehene. http://blog.core-ed.org/blog/2019/04/whakatohenehene-disruption.html

CORE Education. (2019). Ten Trends. http://core-ed.org/research-and-innovation/ten-trends/

Technology Online. (2019) Technology Spotlight https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum/Technology

Ministry of Education. (2019). Kia Takatū ā-Matihiko. https://kiatakatu.ac.nz

Technology Online (2019) Technology Spotlight http://technology.tki.org.nz/Technology-in-the-NZC/Planning-programmes-and-units-of-work/Spotlight-Authentic-contexts

Ministry of Education. (2019). Kia Takatū ā-Matihiko. Ngā Kiriahi. https://ngakiriahi.kiatakatu.ac.nz/

The New Zealand Curriculum Online. (2019) Technology.Digital technologies questions and answers http://technology.tki.org.nz/Technology-in-the-NZC/Digital-technologies-support/DT-questions-and-answers

The Cacophony Project (2019) https://cacophony.org.nz/using-cacophony-project-technology-find-south-island-kokako?fbclid=IwAR36Dcga4kiELIefaP82D8CiRItud_8JLaUgb6K91STloeeciA8unUGl7mA

The South Island Kōkako Charitable Trust (2019) Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/SIKCT/?__tn__=%2Cd%2CP-R&eid=ARA46AuUn0sbBBQw7l-gkP8oGRzNLRFWxvJcg0anBZWrRkMH51UX-GyomZhWg5VNxGZ6pddkCrzYcqCJ

New Atlas (2019) https://newatlas.com/drone-spray-hornet-drone-volt-france-asian-hornet/43642/

Department of Conservation | Te Papa Atawhai (2019) https://www.doc.govt.nz/about-us/our-partners/our-regional-partners/wasp-wipeout/

Posted in

Inside-out learning

Posted on July 10, 2019 by Anne Robertson

Looking Inside Out by Anne Robertson via Flickr CC-BY 2.0

I spent the last week on the road in our campervan with my husband, visiting a part of the country we didn’t know, and tramping up some mountains. We escaped, went off the grid…. no, actually we didn’t! We are social media and news junkies so being disconnected from family, friends and what’s happening in the world is not really an option. We had our mobile phones with us at all times, even on the tops of misty, windswept mountains. Why? We were making the most of the technology we had to keep ourselves safe and informed.

Before leaving we researched on the internet to plan a rough route and activities to do on the way. We connected with people online who had experience in the mountains to seek advice on the best routes to undertake. This gave us a variety of options to choose from. We checked the weather forecast daily, made observations on the ground and used our prior knowledge and understanding of how weather conditions in the mountains can change to decide our option for the day.

The TOPO maps we had downloaded onto our phones didn’t get soggy or blow away in the wind. We could zoom in to see the features and contour lines more clearly and cater for our ageing, myopic eyes! The compass, altimeter and GPS functions on our smartwatches let us know how far we have travelled, how high we are and helped us navigate.

But what has my holiday got to do with education and learning?

Children learn best when they interact with their environment, when they are able to link present content to previous experiences and knowledge and when they take an active part in their own learning.
John Dewey

In the past, we may have carried multiple field guides for flora and fauna but now we have all that information available through phones. Back at our van we would check into the online guides and identify plants from the photos. With the images in our heads and the photos we had taken we could explore the history and geography of the land and the stories behind the names of places we visited. Our learning was instant, connected and contextual.

Outside-in learning

I have long been an advocate for Education Outside the Classroom (EOTC) and the positive impacts it has on teachers, learners and their joint engagement with learning. School camps are traditionally the time when formal learning is put to one side, pens, paper and digital devices are left at home and kids get a chance to reconnect with the environment. Ākonga challenge themselves physically and emotionally, push themselves outside their comfort zones and have fun. They are active, outdoors, developing their hauora, working collaboratively with each other and learning together.

EOTC is not just about camps. EOTC activities can be planned to take place in the school grounds, down the road at the local park, in the art gallery or museum, at the marae, at places of worship, in the old people’s home or the library. EOTC and informal learning are examples of learner-centred learning. Dewey described a philosophy of learner-centred pedagogy which is outlined in this article by Steve Wheeler. The digital environment in which we live makes it much easier to provide opportunities for learners to make connections between their environment and learning across the curriculum and to ‘rewind’ what they experienced in an EOTC context.
One of the arguments for getting kids ‘off-grid’ for a few days is the concern about well-being and overexposure to digital devices. But this piece of research argues that well-planned use of digital devices increases the emotional connection that ākonga have to learning and ongoing engagement.

“Students without mobile devices were not as emotionally connected to the environment, nor were they as empowered in learning the content as the group that was given technology and a field guide.”

My belief is that school camps and EOTC activities provide essential non-formal learning which should be celebrated. But we need to go further and leverage the power they have to connect learning across the curriculum and explicitly plan to ensure that they do.

Coherence

Embedded in our New Zealand Curriculum is the idea of coherence across a curriculum in which “all learning should make use of the natural connections that exist between learning areas and that link learning areas to the key competencies.” (p.16 NZC)

EOTC presents opportunities to make connections across the curriculum and learning in a local context. It also offers us opportunities to use and create with digital technologies to enhance the learning before, during and after the EOTC activity.

In a previous role, I had the opportunity to reframe the concept of the ‘end of year’ camp so that there was coherence in terms of context and experience as ākonga progressed through the school. In CORE’s Ten Trends 2019 it is recognised that;

“Cultural narratives are increasingly recognised as powerful enablers in connecting our past to the present and acts to build a platform to a sustainable future. They enable schools to situate themselves in the context of the places they co-inhabit, and recognise the influences of people, places, time and events in shaping who we are. When learners are enabled to make connections to where they live, when they create links to significant events, people and the land, they develop a sense that they are part of a larger story. As such, cultural narratives are as much for non-Māori as they are Māori. They help learners examine knowledge, issues and events from where their feet stand first, in their local environment.”

I wanted to develop a holistic vision for camps with a theme of sustainability and a sense of knowing where we are and how we fit into the environment and the culture in which we live. We start close to home and gradually move further away building on our learning and making connections through stories and activities that develop key competencies and an understanding of place and identity.

Starting locally and then moving further afield fits with Wally Penetito’s idea of us starting where our feet are, building on prior knowledge and moving from the known to the unknown.

“Start where your feet are but never let it stay there; it’s the beginning point only, everything else moves out from that.” Wally Penetito

My vision was for these camps to be further developed through strong collaboration between learning areas and integrated and planned use of digital technologies. The flow or progression from one to the other provided rigorous learning opportunities that increased in depth, complexity and richness on camp but the opportunity to make explicit the pathway for learning for ākonga and their whanau in school was still not there. Points to consider;

How might we have re-designed the curriculum so that these camps provided rich opportunities for learning that ākonga, teachers and whānau could clearly understand?
How could we have worked together to connect the learning experiences on camp with deep learning in school across learning areas before and after camp?
How could we have built stronger, sustainable connections with whānau, iwi and other organisations so that there was a strong sense of ownership of the learning experience?
How could digital technologies have been used to plan for learning on camp, enrich learning on camp, rewind it back at school and produce digital outcomes to share learning?

Come and join the discussion in edSpace on how to frame your thinking around the EOTC activities you currently do and how you could develop them so that they are rich opportunities for learning, connected across the curriculum and based on ākonga strengths, needs, identities and aspirations.

References

Featured image by Alex Siale on Unsplash

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Rocket science

Posted on April 10, 2019 by Stephen Lowe

Game-based learning is a big subject, and you could go broad, or you could go deep. It means very different things to very different people. I’m thinking about just one facet of it, gaining an introduction to computer science and computational thinking through the design of games.

Before we go any further, we need to do some disambiguation.

This is not gamification. Gamification is the application of game techniques in non-game environments. It is used as an extrinsic motivator in regular courseware, and it usually takes the form of points, a leaderboard, and badges. It may be used in more subtle ways, like upvoting in forums and a reward for best post.

Nor am I talking about fully-worked strategy games like Civilization, or fast action multi-player games, not in this article. Creating games like these is at a level of human achievement second only to building a railway through the jungle.

What I am talking about is scrolling platform games, like Super Mario, and top-down adventures, explorations, and simulations. The emphasis is on storytelling, and there are strong links to the curriculum. Using a web application such as Gamefroot, which supports block coding, students can start from a young age exploring the wonderful sense of agency that happens when you tell computers what to do.

In this initial sketch the scoping exercise is done. It is easy, for example, to draw a robotic arm for manipulating rock samples, but to animate and code it would truly be a mission into deep space. Note that the learner is starting to consider the forces acting on the rocket: gravity, weight, and drag and the thrust that will be needed to overcome them. Graphic by Stephen Lowe, All Rights Reserved. — In this initial sketch the scoping exercise is done. It is easy, for example, to draw a robotic arm for manipulating rock samples, but to animate and code it would truly be a mission into deep space. Note that the learner is starting to consider the forces acting on the rocket: gravity, weight, and drag and the thrust that will be needed to overcome them. Graphic by Stephen Lowe, all rights reserved.

In the future everyone will not be a computer programmer. So what is the point of students learning coding at school?

Edsger Dijkstra, the revered matua of computer programming, is famous for saying, “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” What he was trying to say is that Computer Science is a way of thinking, a lens through which to understand the world. Living in a world where even your wristwatch is a computer, where robots do factory jobs, and driverless taxis take us across town it has to be important to have this Computational Thinking lens in your kete. It’s the new literacy.

“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes”
― Edsger Dijkstra

Isn’t Computational Thinking just a buzz word for mental arithmetic?

I’d be the first person to lament the passing of mental arithmetic. It’s a skill, a knack, that was distributed through all layers of our society in a time when we still carried notes and coins in our purses and calculators were heavy mechanical devices. Take the slide-rule, a more portable calculator of the recent past. For an engineer or a navigator to use a slide rule they had to know the order of the answer before they started, the slide rule merely filled in the detail. Shop assistants working the till could do mental gymnastics at light speed. Gone. Now the domain of eccentric hobbyists.

Computational thinking is a different animal altogether. It’s about decomposition, abstraction, algorithm design, and pattern recognition. When we do stuff like that, far from weakening our brains, we start to see the world in a whole different way. Seeing things in a different way is one of the most important things we as humans can learn, because it gives us what we need to adapt and survive.

Firm foundations

Game-based learning as it might be practiced in schools today stands on firm foundations. Surprisingly perhaps, it is neither new, nor is it experimental.

Seymour Papert’s book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas was published in 1980. That’s forty years ago. In the foreword Papert refers to the transitional object. That’s what the sprites in the game become, objects that embody higher and more abstract concepts. Objects to think with.

Mitchell Resnick, who was a student of Papert, started Computer Clubhouse in 1993. This free after school club instantiated Papert’s thesis of social constructionism. Today it has matured into The Clubhouse Network “where young people from underserved communities work with adult mentors to explore their own ideas, develop new skills, and build confidence in themselves through the use of technology”. It is a worldwide network with nodes in eighteen countries.

Sugata Mitra is best known for his Hole in the Wall Project in 1999. It has come in for quite a bit of criticism, but personally I buy into it. The gist of it is that, left to get on with it, children learn naturally. The role of the teacher changes, providing the learners with a safe environment, resources, and encouragement. Game-based education has elements of MIE (Minimally Invasive Education) and SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environments). This is in keeping with modern trends in education where children are afforded greater agency.

Here the final artwork has been completed. Fully saturated colours have been chosen, and some of the finer detail dropped to create a pleasing cartoon representation of a rocket. Note that the learner has had to explore the genre and will have tested their colour scheme against intended backgrounds. Graphic by Stephen Lowe, all rights reserved.

Objects to think with

I’d like to quote Seymour Papert here, from the transcript of a speech he gave in 1998: “My goal in life, which has been my major activity over the last 10 years, has been to find ways children can use this technology as a constructive medium to do things that no child could do before, to do things at a level of complexity that was not previously accessible to children.”

So what are these transitional objects called sprites and where do you get them?

Sprites are the actors in a game. In a gaming world an object like a planet or a rock might be as much an actor as is a rocket or a cosmonaut. Learners drag objects from a library onto the stage, at which point they become sprites. Scripts are attached to them to cause them to do things like move, interact with other sprites, and interact with the scene. The scene is made up of tiles. Learners can use ready-made collections of objects, or they can draw their own according to the time they have available, their level of study, and their aptitude.

What are the powerful ideas, the higher and more abstract concepts?

So, it’s pretty easy to understand that you can attach scripts, and tell your rocket to move. But let’s extend this just a little bit and see where it goes. Assume in the first place you want to escape Earth’s gravity. How much thrust will you need, and for how long? The space shuttle needed 1.2 million pounds of thrust for 6 minutes to reach orbit at 17,000 miles per hour. Now do you see where this is going? How this meshes with STEM?

Let us now visit three planets, each with a different gravity to Earth. We want gentle landings and successful escape from their gravitational fields. This simulation, with some timely prompts from a game-savvy teacher, will cover Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths. It’s going to be fun. But it’s going to be “hard fun”, a term Papert himself used.

And the higher and more abstract concepts, what about them? Computational Thinking, as we explored earlier, is not just maths. Computational Thinking is about how to think and how to solve problems. It’s about Decomposition, Abstraction, Algorithm design, and Pattern recognition. The meat in tomorrow’s sandwich.

While Gamefroot comes with a good library of game objects there is something satisfying about drawing your own. Gamefroot is about learning coding, but it can be about creating game art too. Note that in the attached script values are assigned to the concepts of gravity, thrust, acceleration, and drag. Experimenting with the balance of these values will affect the behaviour of the rocket. Graphics by Stephen Lowe and Gamefroot, all rights reserved.

The challenges we face

I hope the argument I have presented here helps in the challenge to convince sceptical parents that games-based learning is not an ill-defined liberal whim, but a well-established pedagogy standing on solid foundations of research and practice.

Working with individual students to move them from fun to hard fun will sometimes be a challenge, but in many cases will be surprisingly easy. The joy of the games-based learning approach is that each learner will be able to perform to the best of their ability scaffolded by a framework that really knows no bounds.

Teachers will face challenges. It is important to remember that you do not have to keep one click ahead of the kids, you can happily let them overtake you in that respect. If this aspect of game-based learning is stressing you I suggest you follow the links I offered earlier to Sugata Mitra’s work.

Suggested resources

Kia Takatū ā-Matihiku CORE Education are partners in this valuable self review tool. Find out how ready you are to implement the new curriculum content and catch up with students. Completing the review takes five to ten minutes and all of the results are confidential to you.

Educational Games Design Fundamentals: A journey to creating intrinsically motivating learning experiences by George Kalmpourtz. (Expensive but comprehensive).

Algorithms to Live By The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths (Requires no maths to get the most from it).

The Art of Game Design A Deck of Lenses by Jesse Schell (Useful in the classroom).

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