Nintendo DS Games - Educational Value?

After playing three different games on the Nintendo DS, each for a short period of time, I looked into what I felt was the educational value of two of these.

 
Word Academy

This game, I felt, would be good to allow the children to practice their spelling. It could be used as additional task for early finishers, for example. One feature of Word Academy I used was filling in the missing letter to complete the word. With this, I found that a lot of the letters I wrote were not recognised by the DS. For example, letter 'U' was often recognised to be a 'V'.
One feature in particular that I found would benefit children in schools was a game testing their ability to match words to their correct definition. This can support language development.
CfE links:

I can spell the most commonly-used words, using my knowledge of letter patterns and spelling rules and use resources to help me spell tricky or unfamiliar words. LIT 1-21a

I can spell most of the words I need to communicate, using spelling rules, specialist vocabulary, self-correction techniques and a range of resources. LIT 2-21a

Hotel Dusk - Room 215

When I first picked up this game, it struck me as a game which children would find very engaging.

When I started playing the game, however, it became clear that there was a lot of reading involved: the game is constantly telling a story in which the player is required to listen to/read carefully and take clues from to solve a mystery. After around 10 minutes, I began to lose interest as there was not much active involvement. Despite this I did continue with the game for approximately another 15 minutes. There were opportunties to move the character around and explore the surroundings, however, the time-consuming story continues throughout the game and I felt that children would not have the patience for this.

Week Seven - Crazy Talk

This week Collette introduced us to a prgramme called Crazy Talk.
This is a programme which allows you to use either a picture of your choice or one of the pictures already on the programme and create your own animation. The programme allows you to record add voice to your character or photo, use an automated text-to-voice function, use the different functions to allow the mouth of your character to move when talking and chose a mood for your character (which will change the facial expressions).

To begin with, I found the programme quite difficult to make sense of as there were so many different controls to make your character do dfferent things. However, Collette pointed us in the right direction and we were able to watch some different Youtube videos giving step-by-step guides of what to do.

The following videos can help with the basic face fitting and creating a script:






First of all, to practice we made an animation which we could use on our Wikispace regarding the importance of exercise in staying healthy.
We choose the athlete, Kelly Holmes, and she tells us a bit about herself and the importance of exercise. As you can see, her mouth is moving when she speaks:




We then created an animation which links to a Curriculum for Excellence experience and outcome.

As I listen or watch, I can make notes, organise these under suitable headings and use these to understand ideas and information and create new texts, using my own words as appropriate.  LIT 2-05

The following animation created by Mandy and I, features the pirate, Blackbeard.
It is an example of how Crazy Talk could be used in the primary classroom: as part of a language task, the children are being given instructions from Blackbeard.

With our video, the class teacher would have to pause it as the correct points, for example, when certain questions are asked before the piece of text is read to the children. The children have been learning about verbs and adjectives and their task is to listen to the piece of text and using their worksheet, identify the verbs and adjectives and put them under the correct headings in the table.

As an additonal task, the children would then use come up with words with a similar meaning to those in their table (using a thesaurus if necessary).

The video below is simply an example of the kind of thing which could be used with a class. We have used the automated voice, however, if we were creating this to use with a class, we would have recorded our own speech.




In my opinion, using a programme such as Crazy Talk could bring benefits to your classroom - it can add that little bit of excitement needed in a lesson to keep the children motivated. Using a tool like this would be much more effective than you as the teacher simply reading out a piece of text. It should, however, be used selectively as not only is it very time consuming but it is important to get the balance right regarding just how much technology you use in the classroom to replace you as the teacher.

I am still in two minds about allowing the children to use this programme as it can be very confusing and time consuimg.

Week Six - Games Based Learning

This week we were introduced to some of the different games which can be played using technology in the classroom. There are a variety of different games for the Nintendo Wii which can be used in the classroom - for example, Just Dance, Wii Fit, Big Brain Academy and many more.

However, in this session we focused in particular on Guitar Hero for the Wii. To begin with, we worked in a group and were left to our own devices to try and set up the Wii without any help. If I were to use this is in my classroom I would definitely need to practice setting it up on my own...
We then took it in turns to play against each other (starting on the easiest level!)

When we had all taken a turn and were used to exactly what is required of Guitar Hero, we started to look at how this could be used in a context in the primary classroom. We looked into the different curricular areas and as a group we came up with some ideas which would cover the curricular areas. Here are just some of the ideas we came up with for the upper years stage. Next to them I have added in colour-coded keys of how they would link to a Curriculum for Excellence. The outcomes and experiences can be found using the link in the reference section.

Language

• The children could could write their own review of a gig. LIT 2-29a, ENG 2-30a.
• They could also write a script for their own radio interview in pairs, record this and edit it using Windows Movie Maker. This would of course also involve some ICT. I have seen an upper years class making their own radio broadcasts before and they too used WMM and this worked really well. LIT 2-09a, LIT 2-26a, TCH 2-03a.

Art

• The children could design their own band T-shirts to sell. EXA 2-03a

Maths

• Depending on what the children were doing in maths at the time, the band T-shirts could be used. For example, buying and selling (money), percentages of the profit, etc. or shape and symmetry of the design on the Tshirt.

Music

• Again depending on the level of ability, the children could work in different groups to experiment with some different instruments which may be added into a Guitar Hero song. Some children may even be willing to sing. EXA 2-17a

ICT

• As well as the radio interview mentioned above, the children could film their own video to go along with a certain band song. Dance Ejay could also be used to create a backing track. TCH 2-04b.

Dance

• As a class, they could create a dance to go with one of the songs. The boys would be more likely to take part in a whole class activity like this rather than if they were split into groups and had to perform to each other at the end. EXA 2-08a.

Groupings and how the children would be organised would depend on your class and how well they are able to work together.

Prensky (2006, page 4) stated the following:

“Today’s kids want to be engaged, and their games not only engage them, but teach them valuable lessons in the process – lessons we want them to learn. Video and computer games, in fact, are an important way that our kids are learning to prepare themselves for their twenty-first century lives to come.”

I believe games are a fantastic way of engaging and motivating children and they can learn lots from using a particular game in a context. New technology in increasing rapidly and I think it's really important for teachers to keep up with this as it's going to play a large part in our lives in the future - games based learning is a great way of keeping up with new technology.

There are some disadvantages of games based learning: the games themselves may distract the children from the actual learning and it can sometimes be difficult if the school, for example, only has one Wii and the children need to work in groups for certain activities.

However, in my opinion, if the learning has been well planned and there are good organisational skills involved, it can work well and can be very beneficial to the children.

References

Scottish Government (2009) Curriculum for Excellence. Available: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/Images/all_experiences_outcomes_tcm4-539562.pdf [accessed 05/03/2011]

Prensky, M. (2006) Don't Bother Me Mom  - I'm Learning! United States: Paragon House