We have just completed the Mario Kart Challenge with all of our Maths S1 and S2 pupils. Having borrowed a brand new Wii, 4 controllers and Mario Kart from the Consolarium at LT Scotland, we decided to build it into our Maths curriculum whilst also taking part in the national Mario Kart Challenge.

We decided to use Mario Kart Wii as a means of collecting data which could then be used to teach mean, median, mode and range. The activity was split over two lessons, and was structured as follows:

Lesson 1

Learning Intention

• to use Mario Kart Wii to collect data for statistical analysis

Success Criteria:

• I will be able to log the results from Mario Kart in a table

At the start of the lesson, we discussed the idea of logging the race results of 4 characters across 5 or 6 races (the number of races depending on the size of the class). Pupils voted on which characters we would be following, and drew up a table to log results e.g.

Pupils took it in turns to come out in groups of 4 and race against each other. Each pupil would race as one of the characters the class had chosen. Wii games work particularly well when linked to a decent projector or in our case, an IWB. In this way the whole class can easily watch what’s going on get behind those taking part in each race.

Mario Kart Wii awards points for the position in which players finish (1st = 15 pts, 2nd  = 12pts, 3rd = 10pts etc) and the class logged the points scored by the 4 characters in their table.

Once all pupils in the class have taken part in a 4 player race and the results had been logged, we moved onto individual time trials. The winner of each race got the opportunity to set a fastest time over 3 laps. We followed the Consolarium Mario Kart rules: Character = Mario, Track = Mario Circuit, Kart = Standard Kart. The top ten times have been posted around the department, and sent to Consolarium as entries in the competition.

The time trials were really just for fun, but there is plenty of scope for logging lap times and using them in time calculations.

We found that we could get through all of the above with classes of up to 24 pupils within a one hour period.

Lesson 2:

Learning Intention

• to learn about the mean, median, mode and range

Success Criteria

• I will know what is meant by the terms mean, median, mode and range
• I will be able use the data collected from the Mario Kart challenge to calculate the mean, the median, the mode and the range

This second lesson could be delivered in any appropriate way to teach the concept of mean, median and mode.

2 people like this post.

Unlike

gbl, mario kart, mathematics, Maths, mean, median, mode, range, statistics, wii

Monday heralds the start of our new academic year, and for the first time in a decade I will be starting a new year with new certificate classes.

Like

Unlike

animoto, class blog, Edmodo, prezi, Web 2.0, wiki, Xtranormal

When I started this blog on my return to teaching, I wrote about my disappointment at the PC Passport course which I inherited. I won’t revise the content of PC Passport here other than to point out that any course which has its learners copy 2 meaningless paragraphs from the support materials into Notepad and then gets them to quit Notepad without saving anything is a course which does not exactly fit the Curriculum for Excellence model.

So, ditching PC Passport in favour of something more engaging has been one of my priorities.

For next session I decided to offer those senior pupils who do not wish to study a Computing National Qualification  a choice of SQA National Progression Awards – Social Software at Int 1 and Internet Technology at Int 2. The take up has been pretty good, with 40 pupils across 2 columns. There are 3 units in each award, with the common factor across both courses being units titled Weblogs and Social Software.

To me it makes sense to start the course with a look at blogging, introducing students to the art and then letting them use their blog to record learning as they progress through the course. I like the idea that learners are encouraged to read and review other blogs as part of the course – as this is the only way to get ideas about what makes a good blog and what does not. And of course peer assessment is built in by encouraging students to read and comment on the blogs of fellow students.

The blogging unit will be structured as follows:

1. Introduction to blogging
2. The history of blogging
3. Who blogs and why?
4. Reading blogs
5. Commenting on blogs
6. What makes a good blog?
7. Planning your blog
8. Creating your blog
9. Customising your blog
10. Is anyone reading? – blog statistics
11. Reviewing peer blogs
12. Blog subscriptions

I will link to some of the blogs on here once they start to take shape after summer. I will also record my experience of the Social Software unit at some point.

Our new timetable begins on Monday and this Common Craft video will be a great way to get the course off and running…

Like

Unlike

blogging, commoncraft, internet technology, PC Passport, social software, sqa, weblogs

I have been really keen to find a game development environment which allows learners to express their creativity without necessarily getting bogged down with the technical side.

I think that Adventure Maker does just that. And it is free!

We used Adventure Maker as part of a recent S1 inter-disciplinary project involving English, Drama, Music and ICT. Pupils spent 3 weeks working on a piece of creative writing in English, before moving on to a three hour session in the discipline of their choice. Those pupils who opted in to ICT were taught how to use Adventure Maker to produce a point and click adventure game based on their English story.  The focus, and the key to a successful point and click adventure is to develop (1) a rich and engaging storyline and (2) a series of challenging puzzles.

The Adventure Maker interface is really simple to use – we identified the following five steps to building a point and click adventure game.

1.  Import scenes
As we were not publishing the final projects, we allowed pupils to search for and download images from the web. It’s one click to import an image into Adventure Maker

2.  Create a navigation hot spot
The main tool within Aventure Maker is the hotspot. A hotspot allows the game designer to create virtually any interactivity they need. Creating a navigation hotspot is simply a case of dragging over an area, choosing the pointers which will be displayed when the mouse is rolled over the hotspot, and then selecting the scene to navigate to.

3.  Text hotspots
Text hotspots are the key to using this medium for digital storytelling. They provide a mechanism to give the player a clue or an important piece of the story.

4. Items
Items can be picked up by the player and added to their inventory for later use.

5.  Using an item
The game designer can set up hotspots which will be activated when an item from the inventory is dropped onto them. For example, a key can be dragged from the inventory onto a door in order to unlock it.

Note: I have linked to PDF pupil help sheets at the foot of this blog post.

And that’s pretty much all there is to using Adventure Maker.  There is additional functionality, like the ability to set variables, and an optional scripting unit can be purchased for $69. I plan to look at this at some point next term.

Once each pupil had completed their point and click adventure game, it was an obvious choice to have them peer assess by playing a game produced by one of their classmates.

Pupils ended the project with an hour playing the fantastic Samorost 2 – a perfect example of  how challenging and engaging a point and click adventure game can be.

Like

Unlike

adventure maker, game design, gaming, point and click adventure

I have been looking for Maths resources which can be used to tie lessons in with the World Cup. I stumbled across a number of free online games produced by Sumdog, one of which is Penalty Shootout.

The concept is simple and effective. To take a penalty, the player is given a question and the four possible answers are shown in 4 corners of the goal. Get the question correct and it’s a goal. Get it wrong and the keeper pulls of a save or the ball rebounds off the woodwork. There is also a time limit of 5 seconds in which to answer the question – take too long and the penalty goes harmlessly wide. Control then switches to player 2 (human or computer opponent). The game follows the traditional penalty shootout rules of 5 penalties for each team and then sudden-death if there is still a tie.

There is also the option for a two-player mode where pupils can compete directly against each other. This worked really well when I tried it with a class.

There are a choice of ten difficulty levels so the game is suitable from early primary right through to early secondary. I ran it with an S3 Access Maths class and it was certainly challenging enough (and very engaging) for them.

3 people like this post.

Unlike

Maths, numeracy, penalty, sumdog, world cup

Prior to my return to teaching in October 2009, I spent 9 years at Learning Curve Education developing a range of resources designed to support learning and teaching. One of the resources which I was involved in producing will be officially launched next week.

I plan to post other films from the Successful Learners series on this blog from time to time. For a free online trial of all of the Successful Learners films, email contact@learningcurve.info.

Like

Unlike

No tags

Our S1 pupils are currently making their choices for S2/3. In Computing next year we will be offering a bi-level Intermediate 1 / Intermediate 2 Computing course.

I thought the best way to introduce pupils to the subject would be to put together a short movie  highlighting some of the interesting projects we wil be doing over the 2 years.

1 person likes this post.

Unlike

choice, computing, course, int 1 computing, int 2 computing, Video, YouTube

Since my return to teaching 6 months ago, I have been surprised at how little things have really changed  from an ICT perspective. However, one major resource which hadn’t even been invented when I was teaching the first time around is YouTube.

Now whenever I start to develop a new lesson or course materials, I always start by checking out YouTube. It can often be the case that YouTube clips are boring, geeky, amateur or simply inappropriate for the age group I am teaching. However, there is always the occasional short and engaging 5 minute video which gets across exactly everything I want to teach, using video imagery that I could never create by myself. And because I embed any useful videos into our work-in-progress departmental wiki, pupils can revisit them when they are studying from home.

I have just started teaching The Internet unit as part of the Information Systems course. I think that the following 6 videos articulate some of the key elements of learning far better than I can.

The History of The Internet (clip 1)
This stylish animation gets across all of the key developments in relation to how The Internet started.

The History of The Internet (clip 2)
Where the previous video was sleek and stylish, this more amateur clip is fast-paced, frenetic and in places funny. I found that the 2 clips complement each other well.

Tim Berners-Lee biography
Andrew Marr delivers a short summary of the contribution Tim Berners-Lee made to the world wide web.  Taken from the BBC series A History of Modern Britain.

The World Wide Web in Plain English
I think CommonCraft videos are fantastic. Simple and effective animations which get straight to the point. This clip, which explains how the web works, is a superb teaching resource.

The State of the Internet
This is a really neat collection of internet / web /social networking / email stats and facts, delivered in a similar way to the shift happens videos. Strictly speaking, this is not a YouTube clip, it’s a Vimeo clip.

The Future Internet
Another stylish animation which raises the question of where the Internet is going, and what might the term Web 3.0 actually mean.

There are undoubtedly many other YouTube clips out there which will further support the teaching of The Internet topic. If you want to recommend any thenplease let me know…

Like

Unlike

internet, Video, YouTube

Photoshop celebrated its 20th birthday this week. It’s fair to say that Photoshop is one of a handful of applications which have defined the way we use computers in the past couple of decades. It’s probably the number one image editing tool for most graphic artists. And it is a great tool, only it’s not free. I’m not sure of the current academic site licence price, but I know it’s not cheap.

That’s where pixlr comes in. Pixlr is a free online image editor which supports layers, and has the basic tools which one would expect in any image editing package. Admittedly it does not have some of the more heavywight functionality which Photoshop offers, but then when in most cases pupils don’t need that anyway. My Int 2 Information Systems needed to do some image editing as part of their coursework, and pixlr had more than enough functionality to support their needs.

I particularly like the fact that you don’t need to register an account to use pixlr and also that pupils can upload an image from disk, edit it and then save the file back to disk as either JPG, PNG, BMP or the proprietary PXD format which retains any layers within the image.

Like

Unlike

image-editing, photoshop, pixlr, resources, tools, Web 2.0

It’s often the case that pupils searching the web are happy to assume that first page which Google returns is the most relevant to their search criteria. Of course this is often not the case, but they will still tend to copy and paste information even if they do not understand its meaning.

Whilst it’s important that we educate pupils to use appropriate search techniques, there are also some new online resources which have been designed to find materials that are more appropriate to young people. I have previously blogged on this site about Simple English Wikipedia which is a subset of Wikipedia aimed at those with less capable language skills.

The latest search engine to be launched is Twurdy (the name is a concatenation of the words “two wordy”). The principle behind Twurdy is simple – the algorithm reads each page that it finds in relation to its Google powered search and then pages are displayed on a scale from “Easier to read” to “Harder to read”. Colour coding is used against each result to make it easier for the searcher to quickly identify those websites which they will, in theory, find easier to read and understand.

Does it work? It seems to, with a couple of provisos:

Firstly, it doesn’t take page layout into account meaning that pages littered with ads which are in my opinion are hard to read are still included in the “easier to read” category

Secondly, it doesn’t consider inappropriate language, meaning that a young learner may go to a link which is coded as easy to read even if the content is inappropriate

Thirdly, the colour scheme, a kind of 1970’s bathroom peach is horrendous. But then it is only at the beta release stage…

Like

Unlike

internet search, search, twurdy