Teaching Thinking Skills Through Game Authoring - Caspian Learning
Video games generally have a bad reputation as a way for children to spend their time – and therefore their use as a teaching aid within the classroom has been controversial. However, the engagement and enjoyment that games offer cannot be ignored, and their supervised use, to teach certain topics, has been gaining acceptance amongst the more tech literate of the teaching community – with many teachers recognising that children’s enthusiasm for online and new media can happily be channelled into learning. The availability of learning-based games with specialised content matched to the curriculum, and editable games that can be personalised by the teacher, make games an appealing and credible teaching tool. Chris Harte, e-learning co-ordinator at St. Robert of Newminster RC School in North East England, is one of many teachers who have trialled a game-authoring engine and found the results extremely worthwhile. Chris is an innovative and dynamic teacher, who won The National Teacher Training Agency Award for Outstanding New Teacher in 2004. Chris and his students have developed a game that deals with the stressful and often intimidating transition from primary to secondary school, explaining how to cope with bullying, and where to find help and advice if you or a friend is being bullied. Chris became involved with learning-based games after seeing the potential of applications from Caspian Learning in the City Learning Centre at St Robert’s. He was engaged with the idea of applying thinking skills in the context of video-gaming and wanted to see what pupils could do with it. A New Beginning Chris and his students used Thinking Worlds, a game-authoring engine from Caspian, to develop their game - A New Beginning. The flexibility of the engine allows teachers and students to create, edit, play and share their own 3D learning based games and share them with the online Thinking Worlds community. One of the major drawbacks of using conventional video games, and games designed specifically for the syllabus, in the classroom is that you can’t update or personalise the games’ content. Thinking Worlds overcomes this as the user can design their own games and tailor them to a specific class, group or individual. A New Beginning was the first title to be developed using the Thinking Worlds technology. The project’s aim was to investigate thinking skills through student development of a learning video game and involved 18 students between 14 and 16. The first stage in developing the game was to brainstorm with the pupils to devise the theme of the game. Bullying and the transition from Year 6 to Year 7 were identified as the topics that the children wanted the game to be centred around.
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