Imagine for a moment you have a Nintendo Wii, or similar, in your classroom (perhaps you do already) which you use for games based learning. Topics or subject units you teach are centred around the use of a specific game and you are in the middle of one such topic.
One day a parent comes into your class and tells you that as a punishment at home their child is banned from using their own games console. The parent knows about the work going on in your class and wants to know what you are going to do about it?
What would you do?
This interesting situation was posed to me recently (some of you might be able to figure out in which context) and is completely fictional. Nonetheless it is a very interesting point for discussion with more and more games based learning work going on in schools.
I think that every classroom should have a console.
That is basically what this blog post is proposing, you can read on and find out why I think that, but that is it in a nutshell. You could stop reading right now, but please take away that first sentence, those first 9 words and consider them carefully if you do.
I have made the most of games based learning in my classes over the last 3 years and I passionately believe in the impact on learning it has. We have explored the world of Myst, done stealth written subtraction using Wii Sports Golf and even driven a whole curriculum topic with the sheer joy that is Endless Ocean. I have seen our whole Year 4 year group working with their Nintendo DS consoles and using Maths Training everyday. Besides my own use I am always amazed and inspired by the cadre of great innovators using games based learning.
The children become excited, engaged and wrapped up in their learning. They want to do well, they want to find out more, sometimes they don’t even realise the learning that is taking place because they are so immersed in the places we can take them. They invest in the learning that is going on because the return is something they understand and appreciate.
Radio Daze by Ian Hayhurst Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Gaming on consoles falls into the “Home” bracket and not in the “School” bracket. For some people those brackets need to be separate. Boundaries never to cross. In my opinion, as educators, we need to open our eyes to the potential gaming can have and merge these two realms. We need to leverage the children’s natural engagement and use it to their learning advantage.
Six years ago we installed SMARTBoards throughout the school and I also installed video players. In those six years DVD players have plummeted in price. We wouldn’t be without access to a DVD player now. Broadband in UK schools has become a standard, cheaper, faster and for some countries a basic human right. We wouldn’t be without internet access.
The internet, the DVD player, the class computer are all platforms to deliver content that makes learning fun or more engaging. So why do we not consider a console in that same bracket? They often do a better job.
In many ways I think that console games like Endless Ocean deliver even richer content because it provides a space that can be defined by the learner. The platform that they are delivered on is cheaper – a class Nintendo Wii can be less than £150 (with games). I think it provides amazing value for money in the right hands.
I hope that the Building Schools of the Future project in the UK has found that small amount of money to equip classrooms with consoles. Seems a small drop in the millions that have been invested. Yet that small drop can lead to an endless ocean (sic) of learning. (I nearly deleted that one but it is so cheesy it is staying in!)
Is it suddenly some big surprise that games based learning is engaging our learners? Not to me. If not then why is this type of learning still such a niche. I am going to say it again, I think that every classroom should have a console.
You can take away the first 9 words or the last 3, it is up to you.
We have been working with Endless Ocean on the Wii for a couple of weeks now as crucial element in our Sealife topic this half term. I thought I would grab a few minutes and return to the surface to reflect on it’s impact so far.
Manta Ray by Kawa0310
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Lic
The game has been perfect for our work in class as it is so open ended. There is no specific path or “levels” that need to be completed in a certain order. Once you are through the brief tutorial, which covers some of the basic controls, you are free to explore the ocean depths.
These open ended, sand box style simulations provide great learning opportunities for classes.
The currency of progress comes in the form of fish of course, or indeed any marine life you encounter. During our first week we organised a set of 5 activities in our literacy lessons that were rotated (a carousel) throughout the week. These included a teacher led (guided) reading session, some online research on the species we had already found and a group playing the game to explore it for themselves. It is important to allow children time to play it independently or in a small group.
I provided a simple factfile template (differentiated for a couple of levels) that gives the children some structure to their research and has proven useful for them to collate notes from the game. Here is a little video of some of the gameplay you would experience in Endless Ocean.
Each species that is found is recorded in the game’s Marine Encyclopedia (See 2:05 in the film above) which is proving a useful record. I also have lots of fish shaped card and written the names of what we find for display in the classroom. Children can then choose something from the display to go away and research without being tied to the game. I think it is useful to display your progress of discovery in this way. Taking the game out of the console into your room continues the engagement.
When you find a fish in the game you have to interact with it to learn something about it. In the film you will see each species has 3 facts to discover. The longer you interact with the fish and the more frequently you discover them, the more facts are revealed.
The children have been very engaged with the topic so far – we were using the Wii in our first literacy lesson in Year 5. A pretty interesting start to the year for them, not what they were expecting perhaps.
Many of the children have discovered fish during their time playing the game – you may have seen from our class Tweets of our dives we have been excited to find, amongst others, the Japanese Bullhead Shark, a Red Stingray and the Leopard Whipray. The children take great ownership of these discoveries. After I remarked on a certain type of fish I had not seen before, a boy proudly turned to me and stated, “I found that yesterday!”
Their engagement goes beyond the discovery. It continues onto trying to find out about the species in more detail. I think they make a connection between their simulated experience in the game and the desire to find out more. They want to find out more as they have invested something. With a trip to an aquarium planned for later in the term we will hopefully close this loop of experience with real life examples.
The experience of using the game so far shows me that a rich, games based simulation adds an ingredient that is hard to replicate in any other way.
I said in my last post I wanted an edge to our learning that provided moments of shared discovery and we have had many of those. For example, as a group has found a species like the Scalloped Hammerhead or the first sighting of a dolphin we have all downed tools and just enjoyed that moment.
In one shared dive with the whole class we swam away from the coral reef (which we have been learning about too) and in the murky depths I could see a large grey and white tail swishing away from us. We began to realise what it could be and I had to swim to catch up with it…suddenly we were surrounded by a group of Indo Pacific Sailfish. We thought it was a shark. It was a lovely moment of discovery we shared as a class and one that captures what is possible with these games.
You can probably see that these moments offer some excellent opportunities for narrative or recount writing which we have been exploring in the last few days. There be a story in them murky depths…
We have had our Nintendo Wii in our class for about a week now and the children have been busy making their Mii avatars. They have truly engaged with it and seem to appreciate and understand the valuable role it can play in our class to have fun and support learning.
One idea I mentioned a few posts ago was that of using Wii Golf for addition, here are some more lucid thoughts and experiences of using it in the classroom.
Wii Golf Subtraction
We had 20 minutes at the end of the day so as whole class we talked about using Wii Golf to help with some subtraction work. The children have been doing the chunking division method (!) which requires them to use all four operations so more subtraction work was going to be valuable.
I started up a quick round of golf and took a shot. I was expecting to get some information about how far the ball had gone and then subtract this from the total yardage for the hole.
Hole Length – Shot length = Distance remaining
However when you have taken a shot in Wii Golf it displays how much further you have to go. There is no information about how far you have hit the ball. Consequently we had to change our sum and I asked the children about how we could work out the shot length – it was a good teaching point. The children at this point had their own small whiteboards to do work on. Our agreed sum for Wii Golf would be:
Hole Length – Distance remaining = Shot length
Soon the children were busy on their boards and were immediately totally engaged with the task. That comes as no surprise to me – about 95% of the class have a Wii at home, this is what they enjoy being engaged with. The shots will always be 3 digits or less and in that way are perfectly differentiated for my year group.
Wii Baseball Addition
Whilst the children were having a break time my teaching colleague Rick and I had a little play on Wii Baseball and soon more ideas for supporting maths were being batted (sorry) around. If you go to the Practice in Wii Sports and then Baseball you get the chance to hit 10 pitches – on screen you receive information about how far you have hit the ball in metres, perfect for generating addition sums.
As a class I showed them what I wanted to do, hitting the ball and recording the length of the shot and then we worked on the addition to come up with the total metres. I asked children to come up and take 10 shots and we all then recorded as they went on our boards. If they didn’t hit the ball we just recorded the metres they did make. I soon discovered a baseball demon who hit about 6 home runs and 10 excellent shots. I asked the class to split the 10 numbers into two groups and then do 2 sums. Again the highest number was 187 metres, which is pretty good for a ten year old by the way, so the addition sums were ideally pitched to the Year 5 age group.
An added bonus was that after you have hit the ten shots the total length of the home runs are added up and displayed on the following screen. So if the children who were batting hit home runs we had to do a second calculation for home run length. i muted the projector display until we had done the calculation, modelled the work and then revealed the answer.
As a whole class I was able to see on their whiteboard the work they had done and picked up quickly on errors with their method or setting out. However this could easily be done as a small group activity during a lesson.
The children in that 20 minutes were happy, engaged, focused, on task and doing 3 digit subtraction and addition practice. It is important that we begin to realise the potential of these gaming platforms to support learning. I look forward to exploring more Nintendo Wii ideas soon.
