Adventure Author

Making Games in Schools update: Cohort 1, Cohort 2

We had a fantastic two and a half days' training with Cohort 1 colleagues back in September, exploring the software and the principles of the project but also discovering the delights of sucking tea through chocolate biscuit straws, so we now know how to improve the content for Cohort 2!! We then set everyone loose to plan and execute their projects back in school, and preparations for this have been going well (see Tony's blog on progress at St Aloysius, top left, including possible cake-baking ventures by English teacher Ryan, all in a cross-curricular cause, of course). Everyone now seems poised to work with their pupils from the second half of the term onwards and in many cases schools have wooed other departments such as geograpy, MFL and business studies, forming teaching partnerships in the true spirit of A Curriculum for Excellence. We also have four fine Heriot-Watt PhD students to support schools with technical matters, which is a great bonus for the project. As the classroom-based work unfolds in the coming weeks we will give you news of progress - and each school will be linking a blog to this site, so you can hear from the horses' mouths just how it's all going!

And now my thoughts are turning to Cohort 2, whose training begins in December. We have already had much interest and it looks as though we might already be full, but do please submit an application in case we have a last-minute casualty (as happened in September) or if you want to be considered for Cohorts 3 or 4: http://judyrobertson.typepad.com/adventure_author/2009/05/mgis-4-deadlines-for-applications-20092010.html. We can offer on-the-ground support if you are reasonably accessible from Heriot-Watt (about a 50 mile radius), but if you have the technical back-up in school and feel you could cope on a remote support basis, do talk to us to see what might be possible.

First Cohort of gamemakers for September

Schools from Edinburgh, Falkirk, Glasgow, Moray and West Lothian are joining us for the first round of Making Games in Schools, kicking off with a residential course at Heriot-Watt University from 2-4 September. We'll be encouraging them to blog their experiences and are very much looking forward to seeing what they do with the NWN2 and Adventure Author software in their classrooms. Watch this space for further news of their exploits!

Deadline today for first MGiS cohort

Applications are steadily flowing in for the Making Games in Schools project, some for cohort one, some for cohort two, and we are delighted to be in a position to say that the first round of training will definitely be going ahead, such is the level of interest as the last few applications make their way through the ether. Judy and I will be looking through all the applications in detail early next week and will let everyone know our final decisions as soon as we can. It's very encouraging to see so much enthusiasm, and we do appreciate some schools being flexible about which cohort they join.

I must add that it's been fantastic to see how good the bids are - we tentatively asked for at least two classes and two teachers to be involved, but in most cases far, far more than that will be brought on board, and over a longer period that we had dared hope, with all sorts of plans for cross-curricular projects and wider staff training, too - thank you, brave pioneers all!

More news soon of the final group for cohort one . . .

MGiS: 4 deadlines for applications 2009-2010

If you are thinking about applying for the Making Games in Schools project, the dates below show how we are planning to time the four cohorts over the coming year. Each will begin with 2.5 days' training at Heriot Watt University for successful applicants and projects will then run in schools during the ensuing weeks.

Applications should reach us by the following dates:

Cohort 1

Closing date: Friday 12 June 2009

Training 2-4 Sept 2009
Project to run during Sept/Oct

Cohort 2

Closing date: Friday 30 October 2009

Training 9-11 Dec 2009
Project to run during Jan/Feb 2010

Cohort 3

Closing date: Friday 29 January 2010

Training in early/mid March 2010 (TBA)
Project to run during April/May

Cohort 4

Closing date: Friday 19 March 2010

Training late April (TBA)
Project to run during May/June

 

For more information, download the MGiS information sheet and application form:

Download MGiS Information for Schools 2009-2010 May 09

Download MGiS Application FormFinal with dates

 

Well done to Sharon!

The Adventure Author team congratulates Sharon Duncan, who just became a Charter Teacher! Sharon worked with us in November last year when a p7 class from her school did an Adventure Author project. Well done, and good luck in future projects, Sharon.

Information for people who attended Educators' Day

A big hello to those who attended Educators' Day at the NILE conference. I hope you enjoyed it. Here are some resources to get you started if you're thinking about following up on the projects you heard about.

If you're new to A Curriculum for Excellence, look here: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/curriculumforexcellence/

Academic Speakers

Andrew Burn

Judy Robertson

Mel Gibson

Inside Stories info

You can buy it from: www.narrativejourney.org .

Adventure Author info

Download AANilePresentation.ppt

Getting started with Adventure Author

Andrew's game

Tessa's class blog

Publications

Learning about 21st century storytelling

I am awash with recent academic reading about children's writing in a visual age, and realising that we know way too little about how our children are making their stories when they set to with all the power of the NWN toolset and the Adventure Author plug-ins at their finger tips. As teachers, we are going to have to bone up on changing views of literacy if we are to keep pace with our children; we are going to have to find out as much as we can about the interplay between word and image as children increasingly create narratives using both, with both modes carrying valid and often sophisticated meaning. We can't fall back on the old prejudice of placing less value on the pictures, giving the words higher status - there is a a symbiotic relationship going on that we need to understand and need to be able to talk about. In developing our research through the Adventure Author project, we are ahead of the game, but there is still much to be done to really understand how stories are made (and interpreted) in this multimodal way.

The world told versus the world shown
Gunther Kress, Professor of English Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, says of multimodal messages, "There is a consequence for notions of meaning: if the message is realised, 'spread across', several modes, we need to know on what basis that spreading happens, what principles are at work . . . Making meaning in writing and making meaning in reading both have to be newly thought about." He asks some searching questions to which, as a profession, we don't yet know the answers: "Can image do things that writing cannot do? Or what is it that writing can do that image cannot? . . . And so the really large question is, what is distinctive about the resource of writing [for making meaning]?" Kress also says, "I think we need to be wary of being fooled by the seeming stability of the word [notably the book]."

Kress is clearly a pioneer in the field of "visual literacy" - and there is a pressing need to update our thinking, our teaching and our children's curriculum - but much of his work is based on static images, and he admits that the surface has barely been scratched in terms of moving image and the animated, interactive experience of the video computer game. Enter the Adventure Author research team . . .

IT4U

On Wednesday, we set out to encourage kids midway through high school to consider studying computing once they graduated. The fully-booked IT4U program at Edinburgh University "[featured] Edinburgh, Heriot Watt and Napier Universities [joining] forces with local employers to encourage today's school pupils to become tomorrow's computing professionals."

We took two classes of students at standard grade level round the basics of building their own computer game with Neverwinter Nights 2/Adventure Author. Each class only had 2 hours each, and kids had to pair up to work on a laptop, but nevertheless they zipped through the material, with most kids managing to design an area, write a few conversations and test their games. Quite a few kids expressed interest in picking up Neverwinter Nights 2 for themselves, intrigued by the possibilities of the toolset. Sadly the second session was marred by spots of bad behaviour, but on the whole the sessions were enthusiastically received, by students and teachers alike.

Bye bye Campie!

Keiron and I were lucky enough to get invitations to the Campie World Builder end of project presentations. The children were reading from their stories, showing off props they had made and showing their parents their games. There was also a runes competition, and some reading of the Hobbit. I wish I could go to school every day.

It was great to hear the stories - we were so impressed by the vocabulary and descriptive writing. Philip Pullman better watch out! I am looking forward to playing their games when I have more time, but the snippets I saw looked intriguing.

Here are some of the comments from parents about the Adventure Author project:

• Sounds fabulous. Wish I could have been part of it
• Very imaginative! It seems to have captured everyone's imagination. It must be amazing for the children to create their own games; it relates well to their interests. Quite a leveller, too.
• Morgan was very enthusiastic about the project. THe children's imagination really seemed to develop well and they all enjoyed it as well as learning from it.
• The project certainly seems to have captured the children's imagination and allowed them to express themselves in many different ways.
• Very impressive. The children have worked very hard and let their creative juices flow.
• Brilliant - great way of teaching the kids and making it enjoyable. Very impressed.
• Very good for the kids to get involved - enjoyed the stories.

Well, goodbye to Campie and good luck to all the world builders when they go to secondary school. Now poor Miss Collins can recover from the project, and I can start to analyse the data we collected in class. I shall be as happy as Smaug on a pile of gold.

Testing, testing . . .

Monday was testing day at Campie PS - peer-testing of the children's games, and a chance for us to road test the third strand of the Adventure Author software we've been developing, as well as some poor souls trying to complete National Tests in the midst of it all! The children were anxious (some felt their games still needed work), but excited, too - they were really looking forward to seeing each other's games, and to getting feedback on their own.