Video Gaming Unit
This is a unit of work I have recently undertaken with my Year 6/7 Class. We made video games to support our studies of historical time periods. So I have pretty much added the unit as the students viewed it - to show how one teacher used the concept of gaming to enhance the classroom curriculum. Hoefully it will give you your own ideas so you can adapt it to your own classroom.What it is not is a how-to-use Game Maker skills tutorial - there are plenty of resources online (see links below) available to you for that. I have enthusiastically used Game Maker for years in education, with Year 3s upwards. But it wasn't until I stumbled across Scott MacCrum's Year 8 Gaming Course that I learned how to integrate it fully into the curriculum and give it some academic rigour. Scott is a teacher at Rosetta HS in Tasmania who graciously allowed me to rip him off in developing my own course for Primary Years students - though he prefers alternatives to Game Maker such as FPS Creator, Platform Studio and Raycasting Game Maker software which you might like to investigate - so a HUGE credit goes to him and you should check out his site.
Kids really respond to Game Maker's open-ended, non-linear approach and girls in particular really seem to enjoy it, which plays against commonly held sterotypes of the computer gamer. Best of all, the teacher does not need to be an expert - I do thoroughly recommend doing at least one or two of the basic tutorials, but what invariably happens is that a handful of kids will run with it and share their skills with the rest of the class. I've learned so much from my students and am constantly amazed at what they come up with. It really is one of those applications that promotes logical and higher-order thinking skills without kids actually noticing.
|
