Mario and Sonic Olympics school visit..

Last week, we were told that we would have pupils from a near-by school coming in to be a part of games-based learning session with us.
We started to brainstorm ideas of what we would use and we were provided with wii's, nintendo ds and many games to try out. We began to try out some of the games and landed on Mario and Sonic Olympics- we thought this would be very relevant with the 2012 Olympics coming up..


Today, (16/02/2012) we had a class of 26 pupils from a primary school in Dundee come and visit us to be part of our chosen games-based context.


Our group chose to do our context as Mario and Sonic Olympics  and we used the Wii game as a stimulus for the children. We decided to use the Digi-blu cameras so children could make an animation of the race, all depending on how the race went in the game. We made a race track, audience and also Plasticine models for the children to use in their animation. If I was doing this with my whole class, I would give the the children the challenge of making their own Plasticine models and using them in the animation, but because of time constraints, one of our group made them for the children. The children would also make their own race track and audience and such like for their animation if this was a project with the whole class for a long period of time.

display

olympic rings

track and models

The day went great! Most of the children were motivated and enthusiastic about the activity.  It was hard to make the children focus on the Digi-blu activity at first, because of the game being there and being an exciting part of the session, however, we managed to remind the children the game was there as a stimulus and the main activity was working with the Digi-blu cameras. We did this by sharing the learning intentions and success criteria with the children which is such an integral part of the learning and teaching process. 
The children were extremely impressed with their finished animation and their feedback showed the majority of them found the activity challenging and fun and would like to see more games based learning opportunities in their classroom, so I believe our games-based learning context was a success!


Today showed me how much games -based learning is important and how much it can act as a stimulus for so many learning and teaching experiences and I will definitely be using these ideas in the future..