We are now in day 2 of our Nintendo DS week. It’s been an interesting experiment in the classroom and the context has certainly enthused the children. I embarked on this project after having been inspired by the work of others such as @olliebray, @dawnhallybone and @jamesashton from twitter and Consolarium. The aim of the project was to provide a context for learning throughout the week, using Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympics as the basis of our work. Some of the work has been done on the DSs and some has been done using more traditional methods in the context of the game we were playing.
So what have we been doing so far? We have used pictochat very successfully – 4 tables and 4 chat rooms seemed to work well for starters (so far!). In fact, pictochat has been one of the highlights as there has been far more interaction between the pupils than when they are using the more usual whiteboards. They have been able to see other people’s answers as they are being written, which has provoked some discussion and not a little competition between the children! It has worked just as well in maths (6 times tables because we were going to be looking at time; converting units of time) and in literacy (who can make this sentence really interesting by adding adjectives, powerful verbs, re-arranging, using commas to add extra information?) What made it different to our usual whiteboards was that the children could see what everyone else was writing. The whole experience became more public and the questioning I used probably changed a bit, too – I placed more emphasis on asking the children to evaluate each other’s work with questions such as, “Who can tell me what they thought was a really good sentence in their chatroom and why?” Though it’s probably not so much that the questions were hugely different, but the children were keener to get involved in each other’s work through this medium than when similar activities have been done with the more usual whiteboards they are used to. It’s hard to tell if this is because of the novelty factor, because the nature of the DSs promotes that interaction with others or because this is a method of communication with others that the children are used to. Pictochat was also used during whole class teaching, when the children were developing their written strategies for subtraction. It enabled some experimentation with strategies, discussion between groups and by the end it was getting competitive, with the class split into 2 chatrooms. I think by the end of 2 mornings of making the most of Pictochat, we’d used the tool to its max and needed a bit of variety (or perhaps that was just my own impression!)
The game came into its own when we were looking at the concept of time. Converting between units of time and understanding time in a real context were skills I was hoping would be developed by using the game. Because of the fantastic gold medal win at the weekend, we used the skeleton bob as the basis of our work. We had enough games and DSs to split into different groups to play the game and record the times achieved, ready to discuss what they meant and how to convert between units. First (and only) technical hitch!! Even with groups scattered around the school, we were getting interference between the DSs when the children went on multiplayer and needed to stagger the playing of the game so that everyone could have a turn. Once the times were collected, we then looked at how we could use our 6 times table knowledge to help us convert the minutes and seconds into seconds. The discussion about how the times were written actually developed, as the game shows the time to the nearest thousandth second. We ended up re-visiting the link between fractions and decimals to understand what the numbers meant. I was very surprised by the pupil (a mathematically able child) who suggested that to convert the time into seconds, all we needed to do was remove the dots!! Obviously a little more time needed on time!
Literacy took an interesting turn – we have been looking at stories with issues and dilemmas and this week is the one where we produce a piece of writing using the skills we have learnt earlier in the unit. I am sure you can understand that after having been sent home with instructions to follow the Olympics as part of their homework project, the sad events leading up to the Olympics led to an interesting discussion.
Then we returned to the context of the Mario and Sonic game to develop our descriptions of character and setting. I set up the visualiser to show the screens on my DS and gave the children strict instructions to look out for parts of the event they would like to include as I played the game. This gave an opportunity for them to look at the setting of the game again but to concentrate on all the other features such as the trees, advertising hoardings, tunnels rather than on what their character was doing. A chance to look around. And then we came up with some interesting descriptions that could be used later in the week in our writing. We took some time in the afternoon to look at the planning for our story, then the next day did some shared writing to produce an opening paragraph, before the children went and wrote their own opening.
We’ve even managed to link with science and DT, as we have started to design an alarm to protect the Olympic gold medals from thieves. It’s the context that’s important for the learning. Roll on tomorrow – more consolidation of time and subtraction, followed by a build up and climax for our stories, making switches for our alarms and building our circuits.
