Adventure Author

Book on creativity and education

[Here is a book you might be interested by a Canadian colleague and friend of the Adventure Author team]

NEW from Cambridge Scholars Press

Engaging Imagination and Developing Creativity in Education

Edited by Kieran Egan and Krystina Madej

14 essays from authors around the world that explore imaginative understanding and how to teach children "to think creatively, to be innovative, enterprising, and capable" in today's challenging world.  Topics include first "theories of development, imagination, and creativity" followed by discussions of new approaches to broader educational issues such as responsible citizenship, gender, and special needs education, to curriculum subjects such as literacy, science, and mathematics, and to important educational environments such as the museum.

URL to Cambridge Scholars Press

http://www.c-s-p.org//Flyers/Engaging-Imaginations-and-Developing-Creativity1-4438-1763-5.htm

Also available at Amazon.com.

 

From the Back Cover

Engaging Imagination and Developing Creativity in Education
Editors: Kieran Egan and Krystina Madej

Imagination is the Source of Creativity and Invention!  This series of essays has been collected expressly to bring readers new ideas about imagination and creativity in education that will both stimulate discussion and debate and also contribute practical ideas for how to infuse our daily classrooms with imaginative activities. In a world that values creative innovation, it is distressing that our schools are dominated by an educational paradigm that pays too little attention to engaging the imagination and emotions of students in the curriculum and the worlds challenges that the curriculum is designed to prepare students to meet. The ability of children to think creatively, to be innovative, enterprising, and capable, depends greatly on providing a rich imagination-based educational environment. It is only when we consider the imagination a vital component of our lives and one of the great workhorses of learning that we recognize the importance of adding the imaginative to the study of the affective, cognitive, and physical modes of our development. Doing so fills a gap that has led to incomplete accounts of childrens development, their subsequent learning needs, and indeed, how to fulfill these needs in educational environments.

This discussion, about the importance of imagination and creativity in education, has been taken up by researchers and educators around the world. It is represented here by writings from authors from Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Italy, Israel, Japan, and Romania. In the first part of this book these authors explore and discuss theories of development, imagination, and creativity. In the second part they extend these theories to broader social issues such as responsible citizenship, gender, and special needs education, to new approaches to curriculum subjects such as literacy, science, and mathematics, and to the educational environment of the museum.

Kieran Egan in a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. He is currently Director of the IERG. His interests include trying to sketch a somewhat new educational scheme based in part of Vygotskian ideas, and also working out ways to help students and teachers find the regular subjects of the curriculum more imaginatively engaging. He graduated from London University with a B.A. in History, and from Cornell University with a Ph.D. in Education.

Krystina Madej is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University. She was recently a Postdoctoral Fellow with IERG. Her research is concerned with how narrative is mediated by different technologies and creates meaning for us, in particular in digital narrative and video games. She returned to academia after a successful career in communications and design. She holds a BFA from Concordia University, a MAPW from Kennesaw State University, and a PhD in Digital Narrative from Simon Fraser University.

Comments on the last Making Games in Schools training workshop from EPSRC mentor

Making Games in Schools Workshop, 17^th – 19^th March 2010 By Ray Mathias

As mentor * for MGiS I see my role as a critical friend (and occasional adviser) to the project.  As well as seeking to support the success of MGiS, I am also interested in the lessons that we can learn from it, which might inform similar projects in the future.  So I come to the project with several questions, from ‘how does the Adventure Author software work?’ to ‘how effectively can a making games approach be integrated into classroom teaching?’ to ‘how far could we extend this approach across disciplines/the curriculum?’  It is self-evident that if learning to use the software is not a barrier to using it, and the games it produces are good quality, then it will engage some students.  However, will engagement lead to deeper learning and will the range of students who engage with game-making be wide or narrow?

Judy and Catherin’s suggestion that I join one of the MGiS teacher workshops seemed a good opportunity to experience the project at first hand and maybe answer some of these questions.

The workshop was extremely well organised and created a professional atmosphere in which the teachers felt they were ‘valued’ and being offered a high quality training experience.  The course was well structured and the content was very comprehensive.  I especially liked the way that the course was embedded in the broader context of professional development, learning theory etc., but without detracting from the core tasks of understanding how to use the software in the classroom.

A particularly valuable activity was meeting a teacher (and 19 of her students) who had been part of the first training cohort.  The students and teacher were convincing advocates for the MGiS model.  It was clear that the approach had done much to enthuse and engage them.  Generally, the students reported that MGiS had changed their approach to story-telling and this was supported by the teacher who reported that students had been motivated to write much more, and more creatively, in essays.  The only real criticism seemed to be that some students would prefer a more modern game environment.  The teacher had ‘no buts’ about the MGiS approach.

Participating in the workshop allowed me to understand how the software works and to appreciate the flexibility and power of the MGiS model when engaging students.  The participating teachers were very impressed with the course and the potential of the project.  MGiS is clearly an excellent opportunity for cross-curricular working in schools.

The ‘hidden questions’ in the project (does a games making approach increase student’s logical and computational thinking skills) will only be answered once the in-school phase of the project is completed and all the feedback and evaluation is completed.  If MGiS delivers evidence that game making has a positive effect across disciplines (benefitting both literacy and computing skills) this will support the argument for more gaming (and more cross-curricular working) in schools.

*MGiS is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council as part of their Public Engagement programme.  Each project funded under this programme is allocated a mentor to support and advise the project team.

Best practice in computing teaching award

Do you know an inspiring computing teacher? Would you like to see them get recognition for their work?

This is the launch of an exciting new award for excellence in computing teaching, aimed at Scottish Computing and Information Systems teachers. The award is sponsored by Adventi and Rewire and will be presented at the conference for computing educators at Heriot-Watt University on June 11th. The special prize is an opportunity for the teacher and his/her class to learn how to develop iPhone applications - training courses and Apple hardware will be provided.

 

Applications are via a 5 minute video explaining about the teachers' work and can be submitted at the website http://www.communitycounts.com/forum/?id=ComputingBP .

For futher details, Download CompetitiondraftV3.0.

How to assess computational thinking?

[cross posted from CACM blog and own blog]

You have probably come across some viewpoint articles about computational thinking in CACM in recent years (Guzdial, 2008, Wing, 2006). Computational thinking is the seductive notion that ways of solving problems like a computer scientist should be taught to kids early on, like reading, writing and ‘rithmetic.  What’s not to like about that idea? No doubt every discipline is fond of its methods and approaches and feels everyone in the general population who know about them.

It’s a potentially useful idea for my current project Making Games in Schools, which is training teachers to work with game making software in their classes. The idea is that kids learn important computing concepts while making their games, and so that participation in the project should make learners more positive to CS and improve their understanding of such concepts. But how do you measure this? At the start of the project, I thought: “Great. I’ll just borrow from the material which is amassing in the CS Education community about computational thinking and use it as a pre/post test measurement.” It turns out that the community isn’t quite at that stage yet. It seems we’re still discussing what the concept of computational thinking might include in detail, and therefore haven’t got as far as defining an assessment (if I’m wrong about this, I would be delighted if you would let me know!) I did have to find some way of measuring the kids’ knowledge of CS concepts, so here’s what I did.

Our colleagues at Sussex University (http://www.flipproject.org.uk/) have been working on a sister project to ours, and started thinking about how computational thinking and a visual programming language for game making might be related (Howland et al., 2009). Keiron Nicholson had the brain wave that perhaps you could assess some aspects of understanding of CS concepts by asking children to play a specially prepared game and then answer questions about it. Their team developed a pilot game which could be used as a design tool to find out how children expressed programming constructs in natural language. In our project, we needed a test which could be administered to hundreds of children and easily marked, so we developed another version of this game and matching multiple choice questions. We now have a pre and post test of matching difficulty (I hope!) and have piloted it for a couple of iterations with children and teachers. The test is aimed at 11-12 year olds.

Based on the curriculum guidelines in Scotland, and what I have read about computational thinking, the test covers:

• Identifying rules describing complete sequences of actions in the right order
• Identifying conditions and consequences (IF and ELSE)
• Simple operators such as AND, OR and NOT
• Tracking variable state: reasoning about what events previously in the game have led to the current outcome
• Abstraction/ categorisation (see below)

 

Below is a screen shot from an example encounter.

The player meets The Guardian of the Well, who asks her to investigate why some of her animals are being poisoned when they drink from the well. A sequence of creatures are seen to come and drink at the well, and either choke and die or continue to gambol around happily. The chickens and imps die, whereas the spiders and the pigs survive.  A feature of the creature’s morphology determines its fate which you can see from watching the video (I am not giving away the answer here!).  A number of questions relate to this encounter, an example of which is below.

Essentially, they are intended to assess whether the viewer can identify rules which govern the behaviour of members of different classes and then extrapolate from these rules. It could be taken as a measure of ability to identify inheritance relationships, and to abstract away from the concrete to the more general.

After pilot testing, we decided to create a video of the game for the class to view rather than getting individual kids to play the game for themselves. There are a number of reasons for this, but mostly it is because you can’t guarantee that the kids will play the game in the fashion intended and this means that everyone could have a different experience on which to base their test answers. For example, if a kid skipped a conversation or took a wrong turning, it could affect their score unfairly.  We also found that the test was far too easy (average score 75%!) so I spent a contorted weekend trying to think of the most devious distracters I could which would match with different sorts of misconceptions. Our latest panel of teachers reckon that their classes should find the current version challenging.

There are of course limitations to this approach. Are we really measuring computational thinking? This is such a broad concept that it is almost impossible to say. It is measuring some aspects of it which are easiest to define. Does it rely too heavily on English language skills such as reading comprehension? Perhaps, but we hope that enabling the learners to view a visual representation of the encounters should cut reliance on reading. Further, their teachers will read the questions out loud and answer vocabulary queries for the class. Is the multiple choice style of the questions appropriate? It could measure learners’ abilities to identify rules but not their ability to produce them. The problem is, of course, that learners at the beginning of their computing careers have no representation system for expressing rules apart from natural language, and in the Sussex group’s pilot project they found it tremendously hard. They are not used to using ordinary language to express concepts concisely and comprehensively but they have no alternative formalism at this stage.

You can see videos of the games and the question here and here.

If you are interested in this area, please do take a look and let me know what you think. I expect another couple of iterations will be required to get it right so expert opinions and very valuable. If you can think of more questions or encounters (particularly harder ones) I would be very grateful. My head is spinning from trying to think of them!

 

 

 

GUZDIAL, M. 2008. Education<br />Paving the way for computational thinking. Commun. ACM, 51, 25-27.

HOWLAND, K., GOOD, J. & NICHOLSON, K. 2009. Language-based support for computational thinking. Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC). IEEE Computer Society.

WING, J. M. 2006. Computational thinking. Commun. ACM, 49, 33-35.