Change of Plan
We did mini presentations this week about our journey making the projects materialize. Prior to the presentations I decided that the PowerPoint version of our game was too glitchy with too much delay between the different gifs playing, and to transfer the game onto a different platform – Unity. This was a good decision in the sense that the interactions and user interface could be designed to be much more intuitive.
Progress video:
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Halfway our presentation my laptop battery decided to suddenly die and it took us some time to get back on track. Below is the deck we prepared for the presentation:
Main Takeaways
- Maturity is not bound by age
- Giving tasks/engaging the students in the making process kept them focused
- Contribution translates to ownership
- Idea generation by the students was really great. More work needed on materializing the ideas.
- Interestingly, the students alternated taking control of execution: Jeet -> Kamali -> Pearl -> Iba -> Ailish etc etc.
- Group dynamics was interesting to observe – friends can bounce ideas off each other and there is healthy competition between them, but at times being with your friends can also be distracting.
Food for Thought: Piagetian Learning
In one of the readings, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert, he talks about a specific type of learning called Piagetian learning. Piagetian learning is described as learning without curriculum, or learning that happens without deliberate teaching. The student is driven by their own curiosity to explore, play and create and through this experience they learn new things about the world, and their surroundings. In several ways I felt that the Trash Trivia experience was like the Piagetian learning described here. There was of course the general scaffolding put in place, but the students were completely free to materialise any project idea they come up with as long as they are enthusiastic about it and remain engaged. Trash Trivia morphed and progressed as the children made new discoveries: like how the questions need to be as fun as they are educational otherwise it gets boring, or that we cannot spend more than X number of minutes on one question otherwise everyone gets less engaged in the game and so on. There are many benefits to such an organic process; in my opinion the most important one is that the children learn to make decisions, and become independent learners. It’s a way of building resilience, an especially important factor given the uncertainty of our times.
But how do we balance giving direction and structure with giving freedom to explore and be creative, the kind of balance that ensures quality learning and quality project outputs?
Trash Trivia, and Ed Tech & Design Thinking in general, has been a great opportunity for me to start to tackle this question.