Consolarium

May 29th, 2009

Games-based learning galore at Lairdsland Primary School, East Dunbartonshire!

kaplin

Comments: 1 Comment Tags: Tags: games based learning, Glow
 : Categories Consolarium, East Dunbartonshire, Glow

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! 

August 15th, 2008

Turn it up to eleven at SLF ’08 with the Guitar Hero Challenge!

Derek Robertson

Comments: 4 Comments » Tags: Tags: Consolarium, games based learning, Glow, Guitar Hero, LTS, SLF2008
 : Categories Consolarium, SLF08

Rock and Roll is helping the Scottish Learning Festival ’08 turn it up to eleven this year in the form of the Scottish Schools Guitar Hero Challenge! If you think that your pupils have the potential to win this then get involved in this year’s Game Zone Challenge at SLF’08. All you need is one of the following: a PS2, PS3, XBox360 or Nintendo Wii along with a copy of Guitar Hero III (with a guitar).

Over the next few weeks we are asking you to let your children play When We Were Young by The Killers. Pupils validated scores should be emailed by their teacher to consolarium@ltscotland.org.uk and we will then upload this to the leaderboard The competition heats will end on Friday 12 September when the top four on the leaderboard will be identified and invited to Glasgow to compete in the Game Zone Challenge. Travel costs will be covered by LTS. This event will take place at the SLF’08 on Wednesday 24 September, 4:00pm.

It promises to be quite an event what with the finals being held on a stage with a PA, large screens, lights AND a dry ice machine…eat your heart out Spinal Tap! Oh, and the champion can win computer games goodies for their school.

We have established a Guitar Hero Glow Group for schools to share the associated curricular work that can go on around a game such as a Guitar Hero but if your school is not yet in Glow don’t worry you can still participate…send your high scores to me and I’ll add it to the leaderboard. If you like you can send me any other material your class may have done in relation to Guitar Hero and I’ll post it in Glow.

The song that we want you to play does not immediately appear in the game so you have two ways of accessing it.

1. Play the game until it opens the song
2. Use a cheat. If you don’t know how to do this then follow these instructions:
   1. To enter cheats, from the main menu in Guitar Hero III go to Options -> Cheats -> Enter New Cheat. For each code, you have to strum while you press the given buttons. Notes in parenthesis are held together while you strum .i.e. (RY) denotes Red and Yellow buttons held at the same time and strummed once.
   1. The cheat code is as follows: GRBO, GRYB, GRYO, GBYO, GRYB, RYBO, GRYB, GYBO, GRYB, GRYO, GRYO, GRYB, GRYO

Please contact us if you have any difficulties with this. Good luck and maybe we’ll see you and your pupils at SLF’08!

December 11th, 2007

Sony PSP project in East Lothian

Derek Robertson

Comments: 5 Comments » Tags: Tags: Consolarium, Glow, LTS
 : Categories East Lothian, Sony PSP

Most, if not all the handheld games device projects that have emanated from the Consolarium have so far been based on the Nintendo DS platform. We have for some time been looking at the Sony PSP as a learning tool and after much deliberation and discussion we eventually managed to initiate a project that will explore the potential of this platform as a learning tool.

I have been in discussions with Connected Education, who are educational resellers for the Sony PSP, for some time now but I was always doubtful about exploring this device due to the fact that I was not greatly convinced of the educational application of the range of games that were available.  However, I met with Mark Stimpfig and Andrew Goff from Connected a few months ago and during this meeting my attitude towards the PSP changed. I was shown a number of applications that I felt added that extra dimension ands accessibility to making the PSP a worthwhile device that could play a significant role in out classrooms. These applications allow content to be created away from the PSP but then played, shared and enjoyed via the PSP. The applications that we looked at included:

•    Crazy Talk
•    Vlog
•    Lecturnity

The PSP plays video, audio, images, it has a wireless browser built in and it plays games. There is also a camera that fits on to the PSP and this offers the chance of a wireless and mobile video-conferencing device. There are also applications such as GoEdit that allow you to create content on the PSP and we are looking at those too.

One local authority had expressed a real interest in looking at this device and so after a meeting with Karen Robertson and the team at East Lothian it was decided that we would host the project in P.6/7 in Campie PS in Musselburgh.

Yesterday we held our first meeting with the school staff, technical support, ICT development team and LTS representatives. Tony Giddings from Connected Education gave us a tutorial about how to use all the features within the PSP. It was great to see how easy it was to access the web via the wireless network in the school via the PSP. The screen on the device is really quite large and it was simple enough to navigate through a series of web pages using the PSP interface.

Ollie Bray and Tess Watson were very keen to see how the Glow portal would look on the PSP and when it cam through it really looked good. Compact, accessible and there! This does ask questions and opens doors for pupil accessibility to Glow as it becomes more widely available. Logging in to your work or your own personal space in Glow via a games device seems quite an exciting prospect to me. On another note we are also looking at making Glow available through the Sony PS3 but more of that later.

Today we met with the class teacher, Alicia Macfarlane and the PT Steven Woods where we initiated discussions about appropriate areas of next terms curriculum that would best suit the application of the software and their devices that we are giving the children. Their topic is WW2 and already we have developed a range of ideas that would allow the gradual integration of the PSP as something that will become integral to the teaching and learning experience within the class.

Amongst other things that are currently in the planning stages this is another interesting games based learning project from LTS that will hopefully continue to contribute to the evolving body of evidence about the successful application of handheld gaming devices in teaching and learning.