chapter 7

This weeks topic on gaming and the classroom came at the perfect time. On Monday, I observed Gulf Middle school. I went to four different classes, and was surprised to see there were no paper and pencils on any of the desks. -Remember, I am older-  There were however chromebooks. I took notes on my technology based observations, because I have not seen gaming in the classroom before. I must say, that after my observations, there is no doubt there is a place for gaming in the classrooms. 

I sat in on a 6th Grade World History class.  As I was taking out my notes, the class fell completely silent, as I looked up, they were all in their chromebooks. I took the opportunity to talk to the teacher about what the class working on, and if in her experience, she thinks gaming was helping her students better grasp concepts. 

She told me her class was playing Fling the Teacher. It is a free game, available for download. I tried to download the game to create a sample game for a demonstration, however, the site will not allow me to download. My IT guy (teenage son) told me it is not his computer, but the website itself. He told me to wait a day or two and go back, but it was still down. 

I was able to find a Youtube video that shows someone playing the game. It is a multiple choice game, and with each correct answer, the player gets another piece of the catapult to fling the teacher avatar across the screen. An incorrect answer would cost the student all of their catapult pieces, making them start the game over again. 

Courtesy mamta narula on Youtube

The teacher did explain that since she starting allowing her students to play educational games in the classroom, she has seen an improvement on overall test scores. The class was completely quiet, with the exception of a few kids whispering "yessss" to themselves when they were able to fling their teacher, they were all engaged with the activity, and I got to watch one student play, and the questions were all pertinent to Ancient Rome, and they would all be quizzed on the topic later. The teacher said it was always hard to teach Ancient History to sixth graders, because they didn't have the attention span to sit and become engaged with a topic they were not interested with.

The Fling the teacher site also generates reports for users, explaining what questions are incorrect, averages for the class and individual averages. While they are not used as grades, the concept mapping is helpful in letting the teacher know what is working and not working.

The Language Arts class I observed also used the chromebooks and Quizlet. The teacher explained that all vocabulary words are learned through quizlet live daily. Every other day she is able to quiz students and teach them more vocabulary words each week. She said overall retention is much better than it was before she started using quizlet, and her students are learning more because the quicker way they are retaining knowledge. 

Here is the quizlet live game I created as an example. The game is played by the class signing in, then quizlet generated random teams. Teams must work together to get the correct answers to stay in the game, and the first team to answer all the questions both quickly and accurately win. The site is not allowing me to embed the game, but will let me share the link.