Consolarium

A day this week at Lairdsland Primary School surrounded by engaged and motivated children and creative and enthusiastic teachers was a real privilege and a pleasure.

I had been invited to visit Fiona Angus and her P4/5 class who have been using the Nintendo Wii game Endless Ocean as a contextual hub for cross curricular learning.  Endless Ocean is a game in which the player explores the ocean and swims on a coral reef, interacting with a huge variety of sea creatures. 

The children have been keeping diving diaries about what they find whilst exploring the ocean in the game, producing tourist guides, creating newspaper reports about discoveries on the reef,  researching the animals they find, exploring many different media in art and design in producing art work of different kinds of marine animals and inventing their own exotic sea creatures.  During my visit, we brought some of these creatures to life using CrazyTalk which allows a digital image to be animated and a voice added.  The children were keen to share their writing with each other in this way (even those who were usually quiet and reserved!) and had been rehearsing some great accents!  What wonderful ideas they had for their creatures and what fun!  Children are bringing things in from home connected to what they are doing in school and are keen to continue with their activities even when the bell rings for break time or lunch time! 

Fiona is using the Endless Ocean project as a starting point for a study of Australia and the children hope to have the opportunity to ask questions and to exchange ideas with visitors from Australia next month.  Endless Ocean has already proved to be a great resource for creating a rich context for learning and has done it again at Lairdsland.

I also had a chance to talk to Vicky Mackenzie and Fiona Morrison about their Guitar Hero World Tour project currently running in P7 and P6/7.  They have replicated a lot of what has been highlighted as good practice with this resource but this year the topic has the title ‘Making it BIG in the USA’.  The idea is that the children are members of a successful UK band and they are now trying to break into the American market.  The children are going on a tour of America and are responsible for budgeting and managing their own tour.

The children have their ‘Making it BIG in the USA’ glow group. This group contains these sections:

Notice board - used to target news such as promotions on hotel rooms, deadlines for budgets etc
Classified Ads - this will be used to advertise for staff (such as security) and will also be used to advertise band merchandise (which they have designed), to raise funds.
Band Banter - this is a discussion page where the class teachers will set questions that the children must respond to in the style of their band.
Useful Websites - this has been categorised into Travel,  Accommodation,  Restaurant and  General Websites.  The children will use these when booking their flights to the USA and between states, finding appropriate places to stay etc.
Band Budgets - this is for the children to store their Band Budgets. These are excel spreadsheets that the children are creating throughout the topic. They will keep a record of everything that they have spent and earned.  At the end of the topic the band with the most money in their account will be awarded a prize. A good way to use the context for learning about currency conversion and financial education and a great way to use Glow!

My last stop was the P3/4 classroom where class teacher, Catriona Calvert, is using Nintendo’s Cooking Mama World Kitchen as a starting point for another interdisciplinary project.  I was shown the chefs’ hats that the children have made and the instructions that they wrote for that process. They have researched countries and have made fact files, they have written menus and are in the process of setting up a restaurant in the classroom for role play.  They have just completed a really successful enterprise project in which they wrote, produced and sold their own cookery book, selling over fifty copies on the first day!  I have been promised photographs and examples of the children’s work as the project develops which I can’t wait to see.  Well done Vicky and Catriona for spotting the potential of the game for classroom use!

What a great day! 

The Consolarium’s attempts to bring games based learning to the Scottish Learning Festival culminated in the final of the Sonic and Mario at the Olympics competition at the Gamezone Challenge. The past month has seen Scottish schoolchildren attempting to qualify for the finals by playing the trampolining game and their expertise left me with a little bit of egg on my face… I had thought long and hard about which game to set as the qualifier and after much deliberation I chose the trampolining because I thought it was far too difficult to get a perfect 10 and that the children’s efforts would be a real spread of scores that would allow me to get my 8 qualifiers for the final. Great thinking on my part because on the final day of qualifying no less than 19 children had registered a perfect 10 on the leaderboard! As a result of this four of the qualifying schools had their own play-offs to select the two children who would represent their school at SLF ‘08.

The event itself was brilliant. Children from Lairdsland PS & Woodhill PS (East Dunbartonshire), Clepington PS (Dundee City) and Cathkin HS (South Lanarkshire) came to compete and compete they did. A large crowd had gathered to see the competition and they gave superb backing to all the competitors with Simon Tait from Cathkin HS just taking the title in the last game. Simon won an Xbox 360 with Guitar Hero plus a Nintendo Wii with Mario Kart and a Wii Fit for his school.

The Gamezone Challenge proved to be a real hit and hopefully it will become a fixture of the Scottish Learning Festival in years to come. Well done to all who participated.

We had the great pleasure of welcoming colleagues from West and East Dunbartonshire to the Consolarium today.

We spent some time discussing the role that new technologies and in particular, games, can play in teaching and learning in the classroom of today. Luckily enough we had some game literate people although this did not stop everyone else having a go at playing the games. Again, we have found that much of our rationale for games based learning received an understanding and willing ear from today’s visitors and it looks as though both authorities will feature in the ‘Sharing Practice’ area of our site before long.

Two of the primary representatives spent some time looking at Cosmic Family for the Wii. This game is in a similar vein to Buzz Jungle Party in the sense that it contains lots of mini-games that teachers could use particularly in the Nursery setting. Pre-reading, pre-number activities also colour recognition and problem-solving tasks abound in this quirky and enjoyable game. This is one game that we suggest is worth looking at for nurseries…
Accompanying the local authority people were two representatives from Engineering the Future at Glasgow University. Games based learning is reaching out to a number of agencies and the interest from this one is all about looking at how games may impact on developing school children’s interest in engineering. Hopefully this initial meeting will be something that we can report on in future. In the meantime if anyone can recommend any games that they feel have relevance to engineering then please let us know.