Articles

by Lisa Whittaker, teacher at the WOW Zone

Placing emerald blocks, crafting tables and using a furnace are not ordinarily things that you would associate with primary-aged children. However, on the October 27th MinecraftEdu workshops hosted by The WOW Zone in Wythenshawe, this is exactly what over 30 young people did!

The WOW Zone is Wythenshawe Community Housing Group’s learning centre that works with local schools on a variety of exciting, creative, technology-based projects. The WOW Zone team aims to raise children’s aspirations and equip them with the knowledge and skills to enter this modern age of computing. The feedback from this event, from both children and parents, proves how relevant an event like this really is. Mark, a parent from Wythenshawe, said:

‘Athena and Zanthe enjoyed the Minecraft workshop immensely. It’s great to see such forward thinking ideas that will introduce kids to the world of code, whilst allowing them to socialise and share ideas.’
minecraft2The event, run by TeacherGaming, was part of their European tour, and saw children working collaboratively to navigate through the virtual world, build houses and program turtles. Mikael Uusi-Mäkelä, Learning Designer at TeacherGaming said:

‘Compared to all of the other places I’ve been on the tour, the room was very well equipped and the group actually worked well as a group, as opposed to working individually.’

Construction of a virtual house is much more complex than you might first imagine. Initially, student’s inventories were bare. They had to ‘mine’ for raw materials, and combine those materials to create new ones, thus learning about manufacturing processes and skills. Approaching Minecraft in an educational setting, using structured guidance, enabled the children to be creative without being destructive.
Daniel (aged 11) said:minecraft1
‘It’s fun, it’s great and it helps educate!’
Primary school teachers are now expected to deliver programming and coding sessions as part of the new Computing Curriculum. MinecraftEdu covers objectives linked with coding in a discrete way, so that children don’t even realise that they are learning. The sessions highlighted the children’s natural affinity to the language of code.

Chris Jones, Computing & Solutions Expert for over 20 years, said:
‘They [children] take to it like a duck to water. I’ve never seen kids so excited and enthusiastic about anything before.’

The WOW Zone are proud to have been the North-West host on this tour, and will continue to deliver high-quality MinecraftEdu sessions as part of their unique offer to schools.

by Yasemin Allsop

I am aware that the computer science aspects of the new computing curriculum creates extra work for some teachers as they need to learn many unfamiliar concepts. I know this can be challenging and time consuming, but I think we are very fortunate because there is a vast range of free programming environments /apps available for teachers to use for teaching computer science elements to children. What we need to remember is that the program itself doesn’t just make children develop computational thinking, the context we use, the pedagogical approach we employ shapes the learning experience of our students.

On the next page I have shared a simple activity which can be used as a main task or as an assessment task at the end of a coding session. The aim is to support children to design solutions for a specific purpose by selecting and using correct blocks in a sequence. These activities can encourage them to think in logical steps which is the main foundation of problem solving skills and at the same time provide opportunities for peer or whole class discussions.

Before this task there are some hands-on activities that you can do with children that will help them to design and use algorithms, which is a key element of programming. You could:
1-Ask the children to design their own dance routines in small groups on paper. Then let them try out each others dance algorithms. Remind them to use functions such as ‘repeat’, ‘If’, and ‘forever’.

2-Download the vector version of standard Scratch Blocks created by Paul Heather from the link below:
http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/resources/vector-scratch-blocks
Print the cards and laminate them. You can use these cards to practice specific actions with the children before moving onto the on-screen program. The children can work in small groups to give instructions to each other using the Scratch cards.

An example solution for the dance task can be seen at: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/43629216/

Click here to download the ‘Let’s Dance’ task in pdf

GOBO 1

The first teachmeet in the capital of Norway took place early in January, in the University of Oslo. Forty teachers and some representatives from ed-tech related businesses and startups attended, many more watched the live stream. This is part of a strategy to bring teachers and developers together in an ed-tech cluster, and a decent way to kick off a new year.
A teachmeet is a good way to meet other teachers, share practices and get updates on educational technologies. There is an abundance of excellent ideas and relevant technology out there, but content in school does not change by itself. Enthusiasts and professionals need support and motivation to keep up their good work. Distances in Norway can be difficult to overcome. The distance from Oslo to the Russian border equals a trip from London to Istanbul, and since there are far less people living there – they seldom meet.

The teachmeet in Oslo was organised by Digitalpedagogene, the Norwegian answer to CAS and similar organisations and companies who train teachers in technology and pedagogics. There are two different types of teacher educations in Norway, the Universities and the “lærerskole”, academies who are less oriented towards research. Both Universities and Academies are having a hard time keeping up with the development, and this is one of the reasons why private companies like Digitalpedagogene are in demand.

Building an arena for ICT in schools is important to the Oslo region. Every year, swarms of Norwegians seek out the BETT show in London – to get new impulses from abroad, but first of all to meet other Norwegians who are interested in school and technology. Some are there to sell, some are fierce network builders, and some are just there to hang out, but in the end, they are all part of a movement who agree about one thing: there is an urgent need for change in education, and ICT is bound to play an important role. The emerging coding movement, “Lær kidsa koding”, has also had an important impact.

norway1

First, there was an interesting introduction from a local celebrity. Professor Sten Ludvigsen, head of the advisory commission working on “framtidens skole”, the future of Norwegian schools, presented his views on what direction he would recommend to the politicians. A short resume: Cross- curriculum and problem based learning, self-regulation and collaboration – everything normally associated with the 21st century skills movement – is the recipe to success and innovation. It remains to be seen if politicians will choose to listen to Ludvigsen, one can only hope.
Norwegian schools have a tradition for being progressive and student centred, but the last ten years have been different. Old fashioned governance of schools and increased focus on teach-to-test has cemented the contents in schools, forcing teachers to take responsibility for school development themselves. The national authorities have also delegated responsibility for schools to a communal level, which has led to bad investments, confusion and increasing differences. As a result of this system failure, teachers went through a bitter strike last year, and the wounds between school leadership and teachers still need some mending.

A teachmeet must be both informal, informative and entertaining, but nobody expects anyone to have the qualities of a stand-up comedian and a professor in education sciences at the same time. Still, those attending, got excellent presentations on gaming, Arduino and robotics, the use of iPad in music lessons, Minecraft in kindergartens and how to use fan-art as a learning method. There was enough content for several teachmeets, and there is hopefully still more to come.

This was the first teachmeet in Oslo, and there will be many more. Once the word spreads, and more teachers loosen up to the concept, there might be hope that a new tradition has been born.

On 18th October Staplehurst School celebrated Code Week UK in style with our 2nd U Can Too – Mozilla Maker Party.  We saw visitors not only from our own school, but many schools from the local area, as well as schools from as far afield as Snodland, Romford in Essex, and Surrey. We even had two lovely visitors from Korea, who were performing government research on the UK Computing Curriculum.

U Can Too was so busy that we couldn’t register everyone who walked through our doors, but we do know that we had more than 350 who came along and gave coding a go at our event.  We were exceptionally lucky to be invited to apply for a grant from Google, even luckier to win that grant!  Our 1st U Can Too event saw just under 100 people attend, so we increased our publicity campaign and added many new activities; both enabled by the funding from Google.  With such an increase in numbers attending we were pleased that we made the right decisions and thoroughly excited to see families working together to create so many different coding based projects and having so much fun.

Our activities were very varied, including unplugged coding activities, like our giant version of Robot Turtles as well as the more obvious choices, such as Scratch.  We also had activities that we made ourselves with some good old-fashioned wood, these were very popular, especially our ‘Crack the Code’ game and our ‘Sphero Maze Challenge’ both of which our Code Club got the chance to get in on the coding.

Here are some of the other activities that our visitors spent their 2 hours doing: Giant Voice Controlled Human Crane, Life-Size Robot Turtles board game, Mozilla X-Ray Goggles, Sphero Maze Challenge, Sphero Arena, FUZE Raspberry Pi’s, Code Club Scratch Creation – Crack the Code, Scratch programming, Scratch Jr, Looming with algorithms, Zu3D Animations, Soldering, Minecraft, Lilypad eSewing, Electric Paint.  We also had a shop and an eSafety area.

There is more info on our event blog, please find the link below:
http://www.staplehurstschool.co.uk/school-events.php

As well as our U Can Too event we got up to many other activities during Code Week UK.  We delivered training to parents sharing with them several of the programming tools that are available to their children at home, we took our Digital Leaders along to present an ‘unplugged’ coding workshop at Code Week UK’s London event, which was an amazing experience for us all and our Key Stage 2 children presented an eSafety Expo, including acting, singing and debates on a variety of eSafety topics.  As well as all this our Code Club and Digital Leaders had some extra special sessions during Code Week UK.  Code Club were visited by Vicki from FUZE who delivered a fantastic workshop using FUZE Basic to Code Raspberry Pi’s and controlled a robotic arm using the Raspberry Pi.  Whilst our Digital Leaders were visited by Lego Education for a Lego WeDo workshop challenge, our DLs worked in pairs to see who could make their Lego WeDo Motorized Spinning Tops spin for the longest… it was a tie, Samantha and Eleanor v Sam and James.  It was impossible to tell which finished first when both spinning tops stopped in unision!

As you can tell, we had a very busy week exploring the world of coding, and most importantly we loved every minute of it!

Our U Can Too event, was the biggest part of our Code Week UK endeavours.  We are very proud of the success of our event (and the week in general) and attribute much of it’s success to the funding provided by Google.  With this in mind we would like to say a huge thank you for your invitation to apply for it and also your support for our involvement in Code Week UK.  I am still working on creating a video of the DLs review, I should have it done for you by the end of the week.  In the meantime, here is a short review from one of our DLs about our presentation at your London event:

James says:

“CODE WEEK UK on 15th October
This activity was very fun. I particularly enjoyed talking to Ross and Mathew who were computer scientists, as well as teaching grownups our unplugged activity. Ross & Matthew taught me that there are different ways of sorting which are quite exiting. If I was offered the opportunity, I would definitely do this activity again. It was very informative. Personally I think it would be a school trip that all of Year 6 would enjoy, but it would be too crowded. If next year’s Digital Leaders are given the opportunity to represent us again, I would say, go ahead, it’s a great experience!”

2014-10-15 18.52.59

You Can download the starter kit from:

http://codeweek.it/cody-roby-en/diy-starter-kit/

More than 90 millions people have tried an Hour of Code so far thanks to the playful massive open online course made available worldwide by Code.org. The Hour of Code is the most famous of the many cloud-based visual programming methods that have provided effective support to computer literacy campaigns targeting not only IT-gifted pupils, but neophytes of any age, regardless of their aptitudes and dreams.
Unplugged activities can further contribute to the diffusion of computational thinking, spatial reasoning and problem solving skills, lowering the access barriers in terms of age, infrastructures, and socio-economic conditions. This paper presents a method for organizing unplugged activities that retain the immediacy and effectiveness of the Hour of Code.

The method is called CodyRoby to emphasize that computer programming entails two roles: the role of Cody, a coder who provides instructions, and the role of Roby, a robot who executes them. At the beginning there are only three instructions: move forward, turn left, and turn right. Each instruction is represented by an arrow drawn on a playing card. While playing, Cody selects the cards to be passed to Roby, who moves on a chessboard accordingly. No equipment is required. Cody and Roby are just characters played by the players of the game. Having not only to write a code segment, but also to interpret and execute it, adds to the learning experience provided by CodyRoby with respect to its online counterpart.

The Cody cards
Cody cards are used to represent instructions as the blocks of visual programming tools. In order to make the game as intuitive as possible, instructions are represented using only symbols, with no words. The three basic Cody cards are shown in the Figure. They represent spatial instructions Turn Left (turn to your left without moving), Move Forward (make a step ahead), and Turn Right (turn to your right without moving).

Each card has the size typical of a playing card (about 1.97 x 2.76in) in order to be easily handled and packed in a deck. The instruction associated with the card is represented by the big arrow in the middle, while the two drawings in the upper part explain the effect of the instruction, showing the position of Roby on the chessboard before (to the left) and after (to the right) execution. The borders of the cards are shaped to suggest that they can be concatenated either vertically (top-down) or horizontally (from left to right) like pieces of a puzzle.

The DIY Starter Kit
The starter kit is freely available online (http://codeweek.it/cody-roby-en/diy-starter-kit/). It consists of 6 A4 pages to be printed out, cut out and folded in order to obtain a deck of 40 Cody cards, a card box, a folding chessboard that fits into the card box, and the Roby pieces to be placed on the board. A silent video tutorial is available that shows how to cut out and fold the kit (http://youtu.be/D5hQ9UTDQ6s).
Instead of using the kit, teachers could engage pupils in DIY activities aimed at the design of more creative Cody cards and pieces.

cody1

The Unplugged Games

There are many unplugged games that can be played with CodyRoby. Some of them are described on the CodyRoby website, many mores will be posted soon. Hereafter I outline only two of them, that are particularly suited to experience the unplugged Hour of Code: The race and The tourist.

The race
cody 2The Race is a board game for two players (or two teams) of any age. The players draw a random path across the chessboard by marking with a pencil all the squares along the path. The suggested path length is of 8 squares, that can be marked by the two players in turn (e.g., two at the time). Cells must be contiguous, i.e., any new cell must share an edge with the previous one.

The Roby pieces are placed at the beginning of the path and all the cody cards are placed at a side of the chessboard, separated by type into three decks to be easily found and picked up. When everything is ready, the players clap their hands and the game begins.

Each player (or team) has to take the cards from the side decks and to place them in sequence in from of her/him as fast as possible in such a way that the sequence of cards can drive Roby along the path. The player who finishes first presses the GO! button and tests her/his solution. This is done by moving the Roby piece along the path according to the instructions provided by the cards. The other player follows the test and tries to find an error or to think at a smarter solution (i.e., a solution which makes use of fewer cards). If the solution is correct and no shorter sequences are proposed by the other player, the fastest player wins.

The tourist
cody4The Tourist is a spatial game for kids to be played by two teams. The game play is similar to The Race, with three main differences: i) it is played on the floor, ii) Roby pieces are replaced by a girl or boy playing the role of the tourist (an impartial referee possibly not belonging to the two teams), and iii) the path leads to the image (picture of drawing) of a monument.

Being a real-world spatial game, the path has to be drawn on the floor. The ideal material to be used to this purpose are puzzle play mats, but simple sheets of paper can also be used to compose the path.

As in The Race, the two teams start by composing a random path. This is done in turn by placing puzzle tiles (or sheets of paper) on the floor. Then a drawing representing a local monument (possibly drawn by the pupils) is placed at the end of the path, while the Tourist takes place at the beginning. Cody cards are divided by type into three decks placed on a school desk. The two teams work on two desks placed at the same distance from the main desk.
The game starts when the Tourist asks directions to the monument. The two teams have to run to get the cards they need and to put them in sequence to compose the directions. Then the cards are stacked up in a deck with the first instruction on the top. The team who finishes first provides the instruction stack to the Tourist who tests the solution following the instructions under the supervision of the other team. The fastest team wins if the solution is correct and no shorter solution is provided by the other team.
The Unplugged Hour for Code
The Hour of Code (http://hourofcode.com/) challenges online users to provide spatial instructions to a videogame character to help him/her find the correct path throughout a maze. There are 20 mazes of incremental difficulty. The first 5 mazes make use only of the three basic instructions, while the following ones introduce loops and conditional branches.

cody5

The unplugged hour of code consists of playing CodyRoby games using as paths the mazes proposed by Code.org. In particular, the first 5 mazes of the hour of code can be directly played with the starter kit on a 5×5 chessboard, as shown in the Figure. These 5 paths can be proposed as a warm-up activity before allowing pupils to design their own paths.

Cody cards representing Loops and Conditions will be released in February 2015.

The focus on teaching children programming skills is growing every day. There are many tools that have been designed to support children to develop their logical thinking and problem solving skills. We talked to Filippo Jacob and Matteo Loglio, the founders of Primo, wooden programming blocks, designed to teach logical thinking to children aged 3-7 and asked them about their journey.

How did your story begin?
In early 2013 myself and my co-founder Matteo Loglio decided to create a company with the intention of designing and producing products to help children and novices learn, play, and create with technology. This is how Primo as a company came to be. Myself, Filippo Yacob, and Matteo are both creatives and technologists and we know that in order to be creative and express oneself, technology is incredibly important.

PrimofoundersThe first product we worked on if the Cubetto Playset, a tangible interface designed to introduce programming logic to little children (3 to 7), without the need for literacy. The goal of the game is to drive a little robot called Cubetto back to his house. To accomplish the goal, children have to program the little robot using a limited set of physical instructions: forward, left, right and function. While the first three are rather intuitive, the last one calls a sub-routine, an extra line of instructions packed in a single command.

What was the development process and the rationale behind it?
Teaching programming to children is a widely debated topic. We are aware of a moderate number of solutions that try to accomplish this for children above the ages of 8. However, there aren’t many of these solutions suitable for younger children, and there aren’t any that work without a screen or without the need for literacy. We see an increasing number of Apps for tablets and computers that also work in combination with physical robots, but none of them are completely free from the pixel domain in the same way the Cubetto Play Set is.

Wood was chose as the main material, first of all because it’s natural; you get a warm feeling from it and it makes a nice sound. The second reason is cultural. Observations were conducted on games used in traditional kindergartens in Switzerland (where the product was originally designed) to discover that the games loved by children were all made out of wood.
Wooden toys are very durable and you can see marks and scratches on them, signs of their past usage from other children. It’s a material with memory. Wood was also chosen as a material because of the stark contrast it creates with technology. Inside of Cubetto there’s a circuit board, but we wanted to create a “magical” experience, hiding the complexity of the play set.
primo-mfr14-8The concept behind the Cubetto Playset is heavily inspired by the work
of Seymour Papert, a mathematician who co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Marvin Minsky, in the sixties (if you are interested in the subject, we encourage you to read Mindstorms, his most famous book). He was directing the team who invented LOGO, probably the most used and long lasting resource to teach programming to children. The goal of Seymour Papert was not just to teach code, but also to help children discover their own personal way of solving problems. Primo can be considered an extreme simplification of LOGO and the physical turtle. We limited the instructions, to their purest form, avoiding any kind of textual or numerical language.

At the beginning the robot was a toy car. A very complicated and time consuming shape to produce, as it’s a laser-cut shape glued together layer by layer, and subsequently sanded for over an hour.

The car had another major issue, it was very boy oriented. We wanted to avoid entering in discussions about ‘brain toy’ producers being criticised of only producing boy-oriented toys. We wanted to stay neutral, we didn’t want to create a toy specifically for boys or girls, and instead opted for a very neutral geometry, a box.
A name was given to the little box, along with a personality and a similey face, making it even more appealing for children. The robot is called Cubetto (little cube in Italian). The idea with Cubetto is also to create a basic module that can be expanded and customized easily in the future.

How can it be used with different aged children?
primo2Out of the box it’s a great tool for children aged 4 to 7, they play and program a robot using colourful blocks. It’s a game, and it’s fun, they don’t really think about what they are learning. They don’t need a screen, and they don’t even need languages because there is no literacy involved, something important when considering multicultural environments. We tested this assumptions with workshops across Europe, the Middle East, the USA… it works the same no matter where you go. There is no learning curve, even for teachers, which is important considering that teachers sometimes shy away from the right products due to their inaccessibility. It differs from a Beebot for example, because the “coding” experience with the Cubetto Playset itself is tangible, and there is a direct reference between what the robot is performing and the instructions they gave Cubetto.

It becomes interesting for 7 to 12 year olds though, because the robot has been designed to be assembled and taken apart without any screws, using plug and play electronics. The robot by himself is essentially a Robot that anyone can build and code in minutes. A school that isn’t interested in the early years experience can just get the robot. It comes as a kit with a shell, a chassis, wheels, motors and a PCB that serves as Cubetto’s brain. The PCB is open source, and everything is based on simple plug and play electronics.

Children use scratch and Blockly to program the robot, and can just plug in a new sensor to change the behaviour of the robot, and even craft new creations and inventions. For 12+ year olds, people can simply purchase the Cubetto Board, which is a great prototyping platform for electronics, programmable with Arduino.

Activity ideas? 
The out of the box experience for both the Playset and the Robot is quite intuitive. It’s based on free play, which is what we encourage. Show children how it works once, and let them go!

One thing we do is a cardboard robot workshop, where we get children walking around a grid dressed as Cubetto the Robot, while handing each other instruction blocks. This helps even super young children come to grips with Playset, and it’s also great fun.

Which computer science concepts can be taught using primo?
The Playset focuses on the queue of instructions. They can design, predict and write programs using the blocks. They can also easily debug by changing a block in the sequence. It’s simple and powerful. They can also learn recursions and negation using two special blocks we created. With the Robot by itself, there is basic robotics and physics.

Can schools use it as part of the curriculum?
Some schools already do, and we freely publish lesson plans that guide educators through the core concept mentioned above. It’s all available from our website:
http://primo.io

by Nicola Schofield

So, I passed a building site for Crossrail in London and I started puzzling about tower cranes. I looked around me in London and there are SO many cranes – often building huge skyscrapers. How did they even get the cranes into place on the building sites?

This is a tower crane and here are the questions I have about tower cranes in particular:

What’s their purpose?
Where are they used?
Why don’t they fall over?
How much weight can they lift?
What couldn’t we do without them?
How do they work? (takes you to a web site which may contain unsuitable links, be warned – “Think before you click”)
How do they get on site?
Who controls them? where from?
How were tall building built before cranes? What are the alternatives? What’s the benefit of a crane?
What other types of cranes are there? Next time you are out & about, why not look out for different types of cranes and take some photos for this blog?
Which birds/ animals look or move like a crane? Why? How do they get food?
PS If you are interested in Crossrail and how they made the tunnels under London you can watch the BBC documentaries here – it’s fascinating!

Can you:

Draw a crane
Design a crane
Make a crane in Lego/ Meccano/ wood etc
Test your crane & modify/ stabilise it
How much weight can your crane lift?
In school, we will be using Phil Bagge’s Human Crane activities to start thinking like a computer-controlled crane! We will develop practical algorithms and look for patterns that can be turned into procedures and repeat instructions. We will then develop these ideas using a Logo program.

Can you program a tower crane or a grab machine game? You could just write an algorithm or you could have a go in Scratch 2.0 eg http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/2520260/
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/100080

image source:www.krhicranes.com/

by Ben Eilenberg

Generalist Teacher/Robotics Coordinator at Silverton Primary School.

Microsoft Innovative Educator

One of the big questions being asked these days appears to be, ‘how can we integrate programing into the curriculum? It is also an important question as the National Curriculum, in Australia is slowly introduced. One of the key requirements is having students learn to write computer programing.

As a grade 1-2 teacher, I believe that it is important to introduce students to simple programing at an early age and make it fun and educational. Within the classroom, I first introduced the students to ‘Kudo’. (A game making platform created by Microsoft). The aim was to get students engaged in using a fun interactive platform, which linked in to game consoles that they already use, such as Xbox.

robotics robotics1

Initially it is important to not just have the students’ sit in front of the computer and create a program but actually be introduced to a process and encouraged to take risks and understand how to problem solve. The grade 1-2 students got in to small groups and played some games that other people had created in Kudo. In my opinion, it is important to have the students reflect upon what was good or bad, what type of game it was and how did you win or finish the game. As a class, the students also discuss what other styles and types of games they have played that they enjoyed. From there, they then think about what type of game that they want to create, the audience that they would create it for, how the game would be played and how the game will be finished.

As a group, they then go away and plan their game. This involves answering the previous questions and creating a storyboard of their game. Once they have planned, then they create their game in ‘Kudo’. At the end of each session, students have to reflect upon 3 areas, how did they work as a team, what challenges did they face, what did they work on and what do they still need to work on?

They then use this at the start of each session to remember what they needed to work on and tackled any challenges that they have faced, using problem solving skills.

After the students complete their games, they invite other groups to play them and reflect upon what they liked and what could be improved. This gives the students a chance to go back and improve upon their games before releasing it to the rest of the school community.robotics4

Throughout this whole process, other parts of the curriculum are linked in to the process. Within literacy, students read articles and books on computers, programing and technology. In the area of the humanities, students research the history of computers, how it has changed over time and what affects it has had upon society.

By starting this process within lower levels of the school, their programing and problem solving skills can become more complex and detailed as the students move through the school. From using Kudo, students can move on to writing their own code using program such as Python, following the same process. The process also helps the teachers to assess the students on their understanding of programing, teamwork, writing and computer skills within the classroom.

by Marcin Siekanski

The history of humanity is a consequence of education and the ability to teach and learn. Almost all inventions have had to follow the hard road to being accepted by societies or cultures. The ability to read or write hundreds of years ago, had magician stigmatas and problems with social affirmation. In our recent history we see the same problems with medical inventions, electricity, photography, the beginning of movies … and finally computer games. Every young generation has their own way of learning and exploring. Technological and scientific progress is moving very fast. Almost every country has a problem of “education lagging behind the cognitive abilities” of the young generation. Games could improve the education process and also make it more attractive. The biggest and most important world resource isn’t oil, gas or uranium but the youngest representatives of our society. The old-fashioned way of teaching is making education dull and unattractive. It does not fit with their needs, whilst computer games, on the contrary are an ideal fit. I’ve been thinking for many years about how to best use games to improve the learning process. Finally a year ago I created a small group of students aged 14-18. I’ve improved lessons using various games. I’m teacher of history and history and society, so the game bias has been targeted towards the humanities horizon. For Example: The history of Europe and World

  • Ancient times- Rome Total War, Europa Universalis Rome, Ceasar, Mount and Blade…
  • Medieval times- Rome Total War BW, Crusader Kings, Sims medieval, Mount and Blade…
  • Modern times- Europa Universalis, Empire Total War, Victoria, Mount and Blade, Hearts of Iron, Capitalism…

I’ve highlighted only a few of the computer games. I’ve used many more but these are simple biased towards history and writing about the whole project / intiative would have been very long and elaborate. After entering into the world of game education, my new role started, nevertheless the teacher position isn’t disappearing at all, on the contrary, it is evolving to a higher level and it’s going to become much more conscious. Because of a lack of scenarios to match to lessons, I’ve saved many of them. I’ve copied them to every computer so that students know what to do and had the same materials to use. Books were used to describe events, names and various concepts founded in the game. I’ve changed the tasks to be undertaken from those that were old and dull, often made by people, who had sometimes never seen school, particularly since the fall of the iron curtain to new tasks. For example:

  • Take a screenshot when you see a gothic castle, an Arabic castle and describe them…
  • Try to win the battle of Waterloo as Napoleon.
  • Find the names of medieval clothes in your book and make a screenshot of everyone mentioned in the task.
  • Write about various scenarios and why you’ve chosen these options?

Of course there were many more tasks. A number of positive conclusions exceeded my expectations. These abilities/skills were vastly improved:

  • Creativity
  • Ability to self- education and seeking for answer
  • Ability to communicate both orally and also in “written word”
  • Students found an attraction in books to find solutions to ”quests” in a game
  • There was a higher tendency to explore internet for wisdom than for “time-killing” sites
  • Imagination

And much more… the game market is like a gold mine. I’ve been researching it for many years. For open-minded educators it could be a great tool to teach with. For games corporations, it could also be an invaluable source of money. Profits taken from connecting educational systems with game producers would be beneficial for both sides. The simplicity of this “task” is lying between the group of open-minded educators and game producers. If we could connect these groups and create a communication link, GBL could create real fundamental advances. Throughout my years of research, I’ve found basics to biology, geography, social sciences… for almost every subject found in every curriculum. I’ve put below screenshots of various games. Try to imagine that every screen is a portion of names, conclusion. Every second is huge step in a process of learning and remembering, but there is of course the teacher’s part which is always the most important. games 2 games1