Consolarium

A  busy time over the last week or so since my last post.  As Ollie mentioned in a previous post I have been toiling away updating our Consolarium Glow Group.  In the past this group hasn’t been as successful as we had hoped and it was beginning to get a bit tired looking.  I have tried to restructure the way the group works so that you can more easily navigate your way around and find interesting and useful resources.  It is still very much a work in progress and you should see it develop over the coming weeks and months particularly with the addition of the Games Design section which will be forming a large part of the work of the Consolarium in 2010.  (I am sure that you are going to hear some very interesting things from Brian Clark in the not too distant future about this…)

In order for the Glow Group to be as successful as possible though we really need community involvement.  There is so much good practice going on in schools all over Scotland that should be shared and celebrated and Glow will provide an ideal vehicle for this.  Join in the discussions, add your own paperwork and weblinks and encourage others to do the same.  Let us know what you think about the group, about GBL in general and perhaps some topics you would like to see covered in a Glowmeet.

Other things on the go this week include a visit to Lourdes Secondary to see them using MangaHigh and hearing what staff and pupils think of it and if you follow me on Twitter (@BrianMcL) you will know that I was in Park Primary in Alloa watching some wonderful children drum their African rhythms with an energy and enthusiasm that would have made a Masai warrior proud.  I’ll be heading off to Fairview school in Perth and Loch and Calderwood Primaries in South Lanarkshire to discuss the use of GBL as well as a million other things including the next humiliation of the Wii fit weight loss challenge (I am away now to start looking out my lightest clothes to wear for the next weigh in!)

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.