Hello and welcome back to this European Schoolnet Academy course on games in schools. Hopefully
you have already completed module 1 and you found yourself here in module 2. Module 2
is about using games for Thematic Learning. You should have already completed the module
1 “Why use computer games?” and then there are 4 other modules in order to complete the
Academy course. Module 3 is around Learning Games. Module 4 is “What can we learn from
games?”. Module 5 is on Designing Games and module 6 “Why is it important to teach
about games?”. As I have already said, in this one we will look into how do we use games
to promote Thematic Learning. We are going to have a little bit of a chat about that
in a minute and explore actually what we mean by those terms, and then I am going to take
you through a couple of examples that I have seen recently being deployed in schools. In
the last unit in this module, I will be sharing some further resources and examples with you.
And just like all of the other units and modules, there will be some little tasks to complete
as you go along. Some of them you might choose to do for your interest, and the tasks at
the end of the unit we ask you to do, because it involves some collaborative work with your
colleagues that were also taking part in this European Schoolnet Academy course. So let’s
make a start, shall we? This is “Using Games for Thematic Learning?”. Sometimes we call
this contextual hubs, and I will explain a little bit about that in a minute. I guess
the first thing to say is do not get too bogged down down by technology. Hopefully, as a teacher,
you are already familiar with the concepts of Project Based Learning or Thematic Learning.
This is where we do a project over a period of time but it is real and relevant for the
child. Sometimes we describe it as real-life projects. Sometimes these projects have got
a theme. Perhaps we use the Olympic Games as a context for learning. The idea behind
contextual hubs is that we take this a little bit further. It is fundamentally a computer
games project: it is a project and it is also thematic, but the game is the thing that provides
the theme. Maybe I could illustrate it with an example. Let’s take a game from the Microsoft
Kinect: Kinect Adventures! It ships with all of the consoles. You could play the Kinect
Adventures! game and really enjoy it, but if you are thinking about how you might use
it in a more creative way, as a school teacher, you could also use it for Thematic Learning,
and you could also use it as a context for learning. If you are familiar with the game,
you all know that one of the many games in it is called 20,000 Leaks. You have to try
and fix by moving yourself around. Some people might say: “That’s got nothing to do with
education, apart from actually the physical activity that is involved”. But of course
for a creative teacher, you might say: “we’ll start off by playing 20,000 Leaks and we will
use that as a context for teaching about seas and oceans”. For example, children could
research the world life under water. They could research the science behind buoyancy
or the science behind how ships float. They might even go online and they might even follow
some ships around the world using GPS tracking systems. The only thing that is really holding
us back is our imagination. Of course some other children in the class, they might prefer
the other mini game called Space Pop. Again it hasn’t got much to do with education
or maybe not unless you are a creative thinker and you think yourself well actually “I
could use this as a context for teaching about space”. Perhaps children could research
the planets. Perhaps I could use a virtual telescope. Perhaps I could imagine that I
have landed on a planet and I have to do some creative writing about what it would be like
here, what would it feel like, what would it smell like. Again the only thing that is
holding us back is our imagination. I did a resource a couple of years ago a bit more
on using Kinect Adventures! and thinking about how it could be linked to other parts of the
curriculum. One of the things that you might do after you finished watching this video
is to go and explore the course, just to get some ideas of the types of things that have
been done using very simple games. In a nutshell, what am I saying? We are saying that Thematic
Learning and Project Based Learning is no real difference to using games as a context
for learning here, this whole idea of a Contextual Hub. The only difference that I would say
is that game play is an important part of the theme and an important part of the project.
It is not something that is done as a bolt-on at the end of the week, or in golden time
as a reward activity. Game play has to be fundamental to everything that you are doing
around this kind of thematic project based approach. The whole idea of Contextual Hubs
is that we do involve game play but we are using things as a theme. One of the problems
with educational games is that lots of educational games are pretty bad and I will come back
to that in a minute. So what we are trying to do here is we are trying to think about
how might we be able to use commercially available off-the-shelf games which are highly engaging
because they have got multimillion-pound budgets, and how might we be able to combine that,
the engagement of the game, how do we combine that with the engagement and the drive and
professionalism of the classroom teachers, to create these individual and powerful learning
environments. So we have to start thinking a little bit differently. We have to start
thinking as we walk around the shops as we go on to Amazon, how might we use some of
these games to develop thematic learning projects, contextual hub projects within our classroom.
Luckily for us, this is a new concept and there are a lot of examples all around Europe
where people have been doing this already, and what you can see now on the screen are
some of the titles that I have seen being used. These range from games for the Nintendo
DS or 3DS, for Wii, for the PlayStation games, Xbox games, and also increasingly other little
games, narrative-driven games that we sometimes see on tablet computers such as an iPad or
an Android tablet. We are going to be exploring how some of these games work. In the next
unit, I am going to be talking about Wall-E, and how I have seen that successfully deployed,
and then we are going to have a think about Mario & Sonic at the Olympics. We haven’t
really got to worry about whether it is a winter Olympics or a summer Olympics, the
idea is how do we take the context of the game, create this contextual hub, and do a
really long project and thematic learning project on the use of this game. So if you
just think about, before you go on for the next module is this: have a think about some
computer games that you have played, bearing in mind what I said about Kinect Adventures!
and think about how you might be able to use different aspects of that game to springboard
it into your classroom or parts of your curriculum. You also might want to explore that Kinect
Adventures! resource I was telling about. I will put a link to it on the online resource
which accompanies this video. See you next time!