This year I have been tasked with teaching Yr 9 digitech. Which has been a real challenge, but hopefully I’ve now got a handle on what we are doing. I have leaned really heavily on the AMAZING Gamefroot resource at https://takaro.gamefroot.com/ that Dan Milward and Gerard Macmanus put together, it was a real life saver for me as a non-specialist.
The course itself is a compulsory module that runs for 3 hours a week for 10 weeks. But, as with any school, by the time you factor in the odd public holiday, athletics day or camp, we have budgeted on about 26 hours of class time. A open book of do what you like was given. So after having a think, both about what I am comfortable with, and managing the work load, game design as a context was picked, and we are focusing on outcome design and evaluation, as well as Technological modelling.
We (a colleague is teaching the other class running in parallel) started with a fairly simple lets learn some things about games, about formatting, and about algorithms. We snuck in some hour of code in week 2 as it was a useful activity as we had different groups of students out for various camps and orientation events which then didn’t end up happening because if the weather!
My colleague was very proud of the horrendously awful doc he made for the students to reformat!! And the students generally did a very good job of spotting most of the errors. We gave them the doc via an assignment in teams.
And now we are in to the task. I really like the idea in the Gamefroot game design about incorporating a New Zealand myth or legend, but wondered how I could make it more local. So we have set the students the challenge of making a game to teach myself and Mr G the local place names around the Taieri Plains.
We decided to include the history as well as place names in English and Te Reo, because there are several mountains named for Cheifs, as well as street names and park names that are linked to early settlers to the area.
And what they need to do.
We decided that the games could be physical board or card type games because while their might not be a direct ‘coding’ aspect, students still need to look for patterns, write algorithms or instructions and extend ideas, as well as use a mixture of inputs. And there is the block coding component, which could be a dice on a microbit. Or perhaps the coding used to build a world in minecraft.
The students have been set this as an assignment in teams, and the whole doc is formatted so the title page is interactive so they can click to where they need to be
Students can work individual or in twos/threes (a 4 was split into 2 pairs!) Each group has been assigned a private channel in teams, so that they can work together but I can keep an eye of them.
The elevator pitches will be completed using flip grid, so that students who are uncomfortable sharing up front don’t need to, but also it means that feedback can be placed by multiple people which will assist meeting the responding to feedback requirements.
The check points will hopefully help students scaffold their project, and give me evidence of planning
If you are interested, here is a link to the whole doc (let me know if it doesn’t work for you)
We are also super lucky that our amazing Librarian Lauryn came to my rescue when I was panicky about how to support the students with their research of place names. She deflt provided me with two books on the history of the Taieri Plains, one including some excellent maps. So this has made life so much easier. The fabulous Lauryn also suggested having a show case of the games in the library at the end of the module, perhaps with some other games in her collection, so we will be working through this to make it happen.
So, students were given the task last week. Already they have started exploring and planning what they can do. Some are wanting to use Minecraft, others are using scratch, a pair is planning to make a Taieri Monopoly, while another group of girls who are into Saloon car racing are thinking of a racing game. Some were just spending some time thinking about what games they had played before that had maps so they could explore them. After being so nervous, it was a positive start. Hopefully the students have some fun, learn some things, and we make it to the end of the module in one piece.
Have fun and wish me luck.
ibpossum takes on tech 