Day: October 15, 2014

Categories
Gaming

Quantifying the Impact: An Interview with Dan Norton

Using digital gaming as an instructional strategy is being explored by many. Educators are attempting to leverage their students’ excitement to play digital games outside of school   by bringing them into the classroom. In this post, Joe Schmidt interviews Dan Norton, a founding partner and CCO at Filament Games. They discuss iCivics; a non-profit organization dedicated to reinvigorating civic learning through interactive and engaging learning resources. 

Screenshot of iCivics, produced by Filament Games
Screenshot of iCivics, produced by Filament Games

Original Source

Posted by: Ryan Schaaf

iCivics Teacher Council Member Joe Schmidt interviewed Dan Norton a founding partner and CCO at Filament Games who specializes in crafting educational game design documents and storyboards that originate from learning objectives. Here is their conversation on game based learning:

How did you get involved in creating games used for game based learning?

About nine years ago, I worked as an interactive designer at an online resource center in Madison that eventually partnered with the UW-Madison organization GLS (then called GAPPS).  That group was studying the effects of games and education and we got to work with them to get involved in game based learning. Combining what I had learned and my lifelong interest in games it was a natural fit.

Three of us saw an opportunity to make games that embodied the contemporary research about good games and learning, so we started Filament Games, and here we are today!

What does gamification in teaching mean to you?

I think as a term, it doesn’t just mean a development of reward system to what you are already doing.  I don’t believe that this [misconception] works and research tells us that just adding incentives doesn’t work.  If you are going to use games in the classroom, then you have to think about what you are adding as intrinsic rewards.  You have to develop ways of expressing learning objectives that have intrinsic values to them.  You can’t just add a reward to a boring lesson plan and expect it to work.  For example, with an egg drop activity, there are Newton’s laws and engineering  practices embedded in that activity, but there is a context with those objectives that allows students to be engaged and creative in the learning.  When you look deep enough into almost any lesson, you should be able to find the intrinsic motiving ideas for that lesson, that [motivator] can be tied to a gamified lesson plan.

What do you think are the benefits of using games to help students learn?

There are a bunch of them.  Games do a great job of helping more of the underserved students.  It is a different way to address literacy and hit different learning objectives. Filament looks to use games to help express: Identities– asking you to take on a role inside the game, allows different perspectives;Verbs– working towards a completion of a task; and System Thinking Rules and Principles– having to working within a set of rules.  These are all different ways that teachers are already looking to engage students.

How do you see game based learning evolving in the coming years?

I think what game based learning is good at is providing authentic assessments.  Games are the perfect way to assess learning objectives compared to taking a test.  In the future as we work towards more complicated assessment, I think that games will continue to evolve as the exemplar model of assessments that should be used.

What is your best example of how game based learning affected an individual/group/class?

Just about in every user test we do, there are always a couple students with a learning disorder or that traditionally underperform in the classroom and we see that they pull out all of the stops to play the game.  To try to pick just one is hard, because just about every time we have tested games, the students that seem to shine cover such a wide variety of student types.

How would you respond to someone that says, “They are not learning, they are just playing games”?

I would counter back that every game has value and the part of what we consider “fun” is just part of a learning cycle that takes place.  Games are naturally a learning engine.  When we no longer have fun, it is because we no longer find value with it.  Play is just an open learning environment and that is something that all living things do as part of a learning process.  The word “fun” is really just a code word for a learning in a game, and if that game is designed in such a way that the “fun” problems are aligned to learning objectives, we can create truly valuable experiences.

If you could tell teachers one thing about using iCivics games in their classroom, what would you say?

They shouldn’t just see iCivics as an arcade of cool Civics games, but rather as a robust and flexible curriculum that allows a great context for teaching civics far beyond the computer screen.

Joe (@madisonteacher) is currently in his tenth year of teaching and is a dedicated life-long learner that works to support social studies teachers in his district.  He is looking to change the world one student at a time, and continue to look for ways to connect students and classrooms to the world around them through a variety of learning experience.

 

 

 

Categories
Disruptive Innovation

Coding with the Kindergarten Crowd

 

Computer Science is an absolute critical area educators must address in their classrooms. There is always constant demand for programmers and coders in the United States (as well as abroad). Introducing students at a young age will plant the seeds of interest early. Laura Devaney at eSchool News presents educators with potential services to introduce young learners to programming and coding and some testimonials from educators leading the way. 

Original Source

Posted by: Ryan Schaaf

Introducing coding to kindergarten students helps them reflect on their own learning as they develop 21st-century skills such as problem solving and creativity, experts say.

Coding has emerged as one of the most popular learning trends in recent years, and when it comes to programming, young students are proving just as capable as older students.

Studies suggest that engaging students in STEM and computer-based learning at an early age will help students retain their interest as those subjects become more challenging in high school and college, and it is this line of thinking that has prompted such early introductions to coding concepts.

Teaching coding in kindergarten helps young students learn important creativity and problem-solving skills that will position them for success as they move through school, said Amanda Strawhacker, DevTech Research Group lab manager and research scientist on the ScratchJr Project at Tufts University, during an edWeb webinar on kindergarten coding. The DevTech Research Group identifies ways technology can positively impact children’s development and learning.

Tufts University and MIT collaborated to design ScratchJr, a free app that teaches programming concepts to K-2 students. ScratchJr differs from Scratch, Strawhacker said, in that it “makes it as simple as possible to get at the core of what you want to do.”

After piloting Scratch in classrooms and with groups of students, collaborating researchers developed a version of ScratchJr that is aligned to younger students’ developmental stages. The program tasks students with making colorful blocks jump and move, and Strawhacker said developers eliminated the possibility of syntax errors to help students focus less on how to use the tool and more on meeting coding challenges.

“Many technologies are ‘digital playpens’–they’re safe, narrow, and adult-directed,” Strawhacker said. “Digital playgrounds allow children to be creators of their digital or tangible content, rather than consumers of digital content. They let students explore what it means to make a mistake in that creation.”

The notion of making mistakes, or the popular “failure is a positive outcome” concept, is especially important for young students as they engage in coding.

“We believe that if your student or child succeeded on the first try, then your question wasn’t hard enough,” she said. “It’s not a failure, it’s just not the best opportunity for you to learn something new and be engaged.”

Students can emulate the engineering design process when they focus on their own creation challenges. That process uses the following sequence: ask, imagine, plan, create, test and improve, and share.

The process also helps to break down the idea of perfectionism.

“We love when children ‘mess up,’ because it’s an opportunity for learning,” Strawhacker said.

Teaching coding and programming concepts to kindergarten students is “a lovely way to introduce design-based learning concepts … When you teach something how to think or be or act, you really are thinking about how you yourself think or act–you’re reflecting on your learning,” she said.

Coding also touches on a handful of skills student develop as they enter school.

Communication and self-expression: Programming is a non-verbal way to represent thoughts or personality on a screen

Sequencing and order: Young students focus greatly on patterns and ordering, including learning how to create and discern patterns, telling stories, and even learning to tie their own shoes. This more mathematical or structured way of thinking lends itself nicely to coding, where students can see the immediate effects of changing a sequence or order.

Problem solving: Kindergarten students learn as much about social behavior as they do about academics, and coding helps them develop social skills when they collaborate with peers. “Problem solving is excellently addressed when we introduce programming with ScratchJr,” Strawhacker said.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that computer science and IT jobs will continue to grow into 2020, but the current and future U.S. workforce may not be prepared. Code.org statistics indicate that just 1 in 10 high schools offer computer science classes.

In an effort to build lasting enthusiasm for coding and programming, many schools and districts are bringing coding programs down to the elementary levels, first experimenting with older elementary students before expanding the coding programs to kindergarten students.

In Pittsburgh, the Kids+Creativity Network offers a number of programs to bridge the coding skills gap, such as the Remake Learning Digital Corps, a gropu of mobile mentors who focus on robotics, coding websites, and programming mobile apps; the Computer Science Student Network, which gives teachers out-of-the-box computer science tutorials and games provided by robotics and coding instructors; and Arts and Bots, a robot building program for students.

The focus on creation, whether through coding for the web, app creation, or robotics, “builds on the theory of connected learning—we meet kids where they are, engage them in a social setting, and provide them with project-based learning,” said Cathy Lewis Long, executive director of the Sprout Fund, the force behind Kids+Creativity.

“A lot of skill adoption is deep at the middle school level,” Long said. “How do you get kids turned on to coding and computer science? How do we extend that learning and how do we do it in a way that kids are prepared to understand the coding or science behind it?”

“When we think about computer science in the past, it was in high schools,” said Linda Hippert, executive director of the Allegheny Intermediate Unit (AIU), an educational service agency serving 42 school districts in Pennsylvania. AIU works with the Pittsburgh Kids+Creativity Network to introduce students to digital concepts and help them develop digital skills.

“Now, it’s beginning at a very early age, and it’s intentional. It’s going to the elementary levels. What students are doing with that, and how they respond to coding, is very exciting,” she said.

Students in the districts served by AIU are using coding programs such asScratch to program and operate robots, said Rosanne Javorsky, AIU’s assistant executive director.

“When I really knew things were changing in our classrooms was when students as young as second grade talked about the new skills they learned and how school is different for them,” she said.

“The kids aren’t just listening to info the teachers are providing; they’re actually doing and teaching others,” Hippert said.

She estimated that coding and programming courses and opportunities are available in more than half of the schools AIU serves. Most of those schools offer it at both the high school and middle school levels, with a fair number of programs trickling down into the elementary grades.

“What we see is students engaging with tools they’re familiar with,” Hippert said. “Through the Kids+Creativity Network, initiatives such as coding and programming and the Maker Movement have grown in our schools, to the point that the enthusiasm for it is almost contagious as students learn from one another.”