Our assignment was to find
and select an educational game for use inside a classroom. Our class was
randomly assigned into different groups. Luckily for me, the two others in my
group were Elementary and Early Childhood majors. It made selecting a game much
easier since we all deal with children within similar age groups.
While searching for an online game, we all came to
a consensus on what game we will be using. We decided to choose a math game and
the game we decided upon was Brain
Racer. We chose Brain Racer because it challenged the students to solve
mathematical problems as fast as they could in order to win the game. On a blog
by Ashley Wainwright on securedgenetworks.com, she states that, "Technology is
everywhere, entwined in almost every part of our lives. It affects how we shop,
socialize, connect, play, and most importantly learn." We chose this game
because if we were to implement this into our lesson in the future, it would
allow the students to have fun while learning how to solve math problems.
Based on our standards after choosing the game, we had to
grade the game using a rubric. Before starting, we looked at the examples
provided on Moodle on how to start up on our rubric. We tried to follow the
examples but it was difficult for us as we did not know what to include in the
rubric. We tried adding things in and removing them until we finally decided
what we wanted to grade the game on. According to Utah Education Network, "A
rubric defines in writing what is expected of the student to get a particular
grade on an assignment." In our case, a rubric in writing defined what is
expected of our game in terms of potential use in the classroom. Is it
educational enough and safe for use in the classroom or not?
During this project we used a couple of
communication tools. We used WhatsApp and email. We created a group chat so
communicating would be easy for us as we all have different schedules and we
could not meet up during the day due to class or work. For presenting, we were
going to use Powerpoint, but we were prohibited from doing so, so we chose Prezi
instead. Prezi is a free online presentation tool, but we had problems using
it. We resorted to using Keynote instead. Keynote is a presentation tool
developed by Apple and the convenient thing about it was we could use our
phones as a remote to control the presentation.
This assignment introduced me to tools I have never
used before. I myself am not an Apple person as I had only recently started
using an iPhone. It is very useful how things such as Keynote exist as an
alternative to Powerpoint and it is very convenient as it is accessible on my
mobile device as well. In the future I recommend using Brain Racer as a way to
help kids develop their mathematical problem solving abilities. It is fun and
challenging game and I myself had a bit of trouble solving some problems. It
really challenges you to think, learn, and have fun all at the same time.
References:
http://www.securedgenetworks.com/blog/10-Reasons-Today-s-Students-NEED-Technology-in-the-Classroom
http://www.uen.org/rubric/know.shtml
