Hi everyone, my name is Lisa Gielis and I am a Year 5/6 teacher at West Pymble Public school. My class is full of very bright students who are always up for a challenge so I figured I would sign us up for this project! We are studying The Hobbit at the moment and I also felt that was a great tie-in for a role playing game and another great way to explore narratives.
The class is just about to start storyboarding and designing their games after spending the past 7 weeks or so exploring Kahootz. Some students are fairly tentative, many are happily animating and keypointing away and a few are really roaring ahead - one student has already designed a game and it works quite well! Everyone is enjoying Kahootz and a session in the lab is always loud and engaging. Many students are working at a level that exceeds my own but I encourage them to team up and work things through and usually they come up with a solution (excellent higher order thinking here!). Although, Anthony, I am encouraging them to keep a list of questions for you for our first VC!
I'm looking forward to seeing how the students go with the pen and paper work and I'm not really sure whether to make them fully complete this section before they can create in Kahootz or whether to work a scene or section at a time?
Anyway, it's all systems go at West Pymble and we are really enjoying the project so far.
Thanks Lisa for your great blog post. I have had a lot of success with students building games around a shared novel and look forward to seeing some of you games based on 'The Hobbit'. I agree with you that this is a great way to explore narrative. It's fantastic to hear how many of your students are collaborating together to solve problems. After the training stage, we often find the students want to skip the design stage and go straight to building. We do encourage you to get your students to design their games before building and we have found from collecting many, many student responses, that most students (after building their game) appreciate the value of designing their games on paper first and realise that by doing this, their games are much better.
ReplyDeleteWe are looking forward to catching up with you again and meeting your class at your upcoming Good Game Design Video Conference. Bring on the questions:)