Technoteaching

I have a second year class studying Information Systems at Intermediate 2. We are currently working on the Using Information unit, and to be honest it can be pretty dry. Over the past week and a bit the class have been learning about the 4 functions of an organisational information system (i.e. Gathering data, storing information, processing information and outputting information). I decided to see if there was a way of introducing games based learning into the topic in order to make it more engaging for the pupils. As the Australian Open (tennis) was just about to begin, it seemed appropriate that we used Wii Sports Tennis. I also wanted to try and bring an interdisciplinary approach to the project, and as a result it linked into numeracy, literacy and PE. The following is a brief summary of the project:

Research homework

Before we began the Wii Tennis Challenge, I set the class a homework task to find out who were the current top 5 tennis players in the world (male and female) and also how the world ranking system worked.

Day 1 – Australian Open

We began by talking about the Australian Open tennis, and the different ways in which information might be used in an event like this. I introduced the class to my plan for the Wii Tennis Challenge, by showing a short presentation (below):

The rest of period was set aside for the Wii Australian Open, a Wii Sports Tennis knockout tournament which was won by Andrew who wrote about the experience on the class blog. Each player was awarded points based on which round of the tournament they reached. Tournament points would be used later in the project to help the class calculate the wii tennis rankings.

As well as taking part in the tournament, each match had a Wii Tennis Official whose job it was to log the score, the number of serves for each player and the number of aces served by each player.

Day 2 – Wimbledon

The format was pretty similar to day 1. This time, the tournament ranking points were double those which had been awarded at the Australian Open. Euan, who was runner-up at Wimbledon described the day on our class blog.

Day 3 – Numeracy / Information Systems

We started the lesson by emailing all of the stats to the Wii Challenge Sports Desk. Each player took responsibility for emailing the stats of the games which they had logged (score, total serves, aces)

The third day of the challenge took us away from the Wii to look at numeracy. For each player we looked at their total number of aces, and their total number of serves. From here pupils were able to use percentages to calculate the percentage ace rate for each player.

We discussed whether there might be a better way of storing the information in the Wii Challenge Sports Desk inbox, and decided that a spreadsheet would be the most appropriate. As a class we took the information from the different emails and added it to a spreadsheet.  This exercise illustrated the first 2 functions of an organisational information system: gathering data, and storing information.

Having calculated the percentage ace rate for each player in their jotters, the class were now able to check their answers  by creating a formula in the spreadsheet.

Day 4 – Databases

We will be covering the databases unit of Information Systems later this year, and so the Wii Tennis Challenge offered an ideal opportunity to introduce the class to a simple database design using FileMaker Pro.  Pupils built their own database using the fields: Forename, Surname, Date of Birth, Percentage Ace Rate, Wii Tennis Rating and Image.

In order to get a suitable image, each pupil designed their own Simpsons avatar using the tool on The Simpsons Movie website. They then shared their avatar with the rest of the class using Edmodo.

Day 5 – More Information Systems

After finishing their database, the class had to sort the data in order of Percentage Ace Rate and overall Wii Tennis Rating. They also printed out the latter table. This exemplified the final 2 functions of an organisational information system: Processing information, and outputting information.

Day 6 & 7 – Literacy

The final two days of the Wii Tennis Challenge required each pupil to research and write an informative essay about a tennis player of their choice. Pupils began by choosing their player and the completing a table identifying what they already know, what they needed to find out and ultimately what they discovered.   Gemma has summarised this on our class blog.

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