Dan's Technology Blog

May 05, 2014

Hi There,

What is exciting about 21st Century learning? GAMES!! I have included just a small writing on just a couple of excellent games that are helping students learn all over the world.

Scenario (ECE/Primary/Secondary):
You have a class of children with mixed abilities and learning styles. You have been working with them for a number of terms and feel you need a fresh approach to engage them in meaningful outcomes. A teacher at the school suggests games as they have had some success with them and the principal is very supportive. Find a game that you think will be appropriate for your class and describe how you will implement it and what you expect the response to be from the students including the possible learning outcomes.

Teaching games take on several different forms, but nearly all of them require skills and learning of a system to complete. Prensky writes: “Practice is project based, requiring students to solve new problems and address new challenges using the new ideas to which they’ve been introduced” (Shapiro, 2014b) and explains how by using games as learning tools, “Even more impressive is that in order to successfully manipulate one piece within a comprehensive and complex system, the students must understand every piece of the system”.(Shapiro, 2014b)

Recently NASA and GlassLab collaborated to design and produce a game called “Argubot Academy”. Shapiro writes: “ Argubot Academy is significant because it addresses a part of school curriculum that few games have tried to tackle: argumentation, logic, and reasoned thinking”. (Shapiro, 2014a)

Another popular game called “Simcity” by Electronic Arts has been around for many years. Simcity has expanded into an educational game aimed at middle school students in America called SimCityEDU. “Pollution Challenge! will not only teach students about the factors affecting the environment in a modern city, but the game will also provide formative assessment information about students’ ability to problem-solve, explain the relationships in complex systems, and read informational texts and diagrams”.(GlassLab, 2013) SimCityEDU incorporates developing key 21st-century skills, like systems thinking , time management , and collaboration.

Duolingo is free personalised language learning online game. The way the game is based is that it starts off with a tree structure. The first level is very basic as it provides the answer then prompts the user to complete the answer by asking a question.

The program is split into different levels and different groups such as family, food, everyday phrases. It teaches the user to write, to listen and to talk. The game is points based, when the user looses too many points, they need to restart the level. For the user to progress through the game, they must complete each stage to move onto the next. As each lesson is completed, coins are rewarded. For the mistakes the user makes, the game reviews them and incorporates them into later parts of the lessons.

Duolingo also has the extra feature of time limits. The course can incorporate up to two thousand words. Duolingo also has online translation of web pages, and sends reminders daily.

Duolingo has visual prompt for words, and when the user has to repeat a phrase or word, the speed can be changed for the user to understand. One advantage of the program is that old material has to be reviewed as the “game” progresses, for the user to refresh their skills.

Phonetics play an important part of the learning, as some words sound different to how they are written. This can also help dyslexic students learn.

After using this program myself to brush up on learning German, I found that my skills increased and my memory retention improved. Students are encouraged to go over and accomplish understanding of words and are rewarded at their own pace. Student can also compete with friends.

To incorporate Duolingo into the classroom, the program would be installed on the students own computer or terminals in a computer lab. Each student would sign up using their email address. Students can help one another out freeing up the teacher to help out students who are struggling. I anticipate that the student would embrace Duolingo in their language studies, and encourage them to continue at home. I would expected learning outcomes would be that the students would be able to improve on test scores and expand their vocabulary.