Week 3: Playful Learning

I am a big believer in making learning fun, or at least interesting. What better way to do this than with games? That was our challenge this week, to create some educational games at the Quia website (http://www.quia.com/web). This website has numerous templates for you to use, I used them to create a multiple choice quiz, a hangman-type game and a matching game. 

To try my quiz go to :

http://www.quia.com/hm/671382.html

Below is a screenshot of my quiz:

To try my hangman game go to:

http://www.quia.com/quiz/2538632.html

Below is a screenshot of my hangman game:

To try my matching game go to:

                                                  http://www.quia.com/mc/2004708.html

Below is a screenshot of my matching game:

 

Aside from using the website to make games for our students, we can also let our students make their own games using this website. For example, the process of making a multiple choice quiz requires the student to show that they themselves know the answer to the questions. It also gets students to evaluate information and determine whats worth knowing as they consider what questions to ask.

During our workshop, once we had made our quizzes, we all swapped computers and did our peers' quizzes. This was great fun and lead to further discussion of the quiz topics afterward. The same activity could be done with primary school students, provided you are in a school that has sufficient computer resources.

The other activity we did in this lesson was making a design brief using the ID/P/E approach. 

This stands for: Investigate/Design, Produce, Evaluate. Things I liked about this system are it's problem solving approach, and promotion of higher order thinking.

The lecture for this week was about protecting students online. I found the discussion of cyber-bullying quite disturbing. It is sad to think such young children can be so deliberately unkind to one another. Yet I suppose if I think about it realistically, bullying happens in the physical playground, so it shouldn't surprise me that it occurs in the virtual playground. Yet it is so weak to bully someone online when you are sitting safely at home behind your computer. Thankfully there are campaigns that are trying to educate against cyber-bullying. The Leader Newspapers have recently launched their 'Don't Hurt' initiative. This initiative is backed up by The Alannah and Madeline Foundation's eSmart schools campaign. 

You can find more information at:

http://leader-news.whereilive.com.au/news/story/dont-hurt-schools-win-10m-to-fight-cyber-bullying/

and:

http://www.amf.org.au/Cybersafety/