TRANSLATOR WEEK 6

Hi everyone! Welcome to our blog again!

I’m María and this week I play the role of translator. This are the 5 concepts I considered more important from that week. 

Gamed Based Learning (GBL): is a type of  active learning experience within a game framework. Learning games have both a game goal (what players must to do to win) and a learning goal (what players are to learn through playing the game)

Gamification: is the process of adding game elements or mechanics to a learning experience. As Karl Kapp said “gamification is an emergent approach to instruction which facilitates learning and encourages motivation through the use of game elements, mechanics and game-based thinking”. 

Set design. Refers to how we arrange the physical or virtual learning environment and any artifacts, tools and resources we introduce to support learning. All of these things physically situate learning activity.  For our ICTower we used resources as one dice, a jenga of 6 different colors, Canva to design our rules… This resources will be included in our final e-portfolio. The things that change since we started to design until now are: 

•  We were going to work on standard 5.2 of the third cycle "establish simple connections between different elements of the natural, social and cultural environment showing understanding of the relationships that are based". We ended up working on the third cycle, but with standard 2.4 "Propose possible answers to the questions posed, through the analysis and interpretation of the information and the results obtained, assessing the coherence of the possible solutions and comparing them with the predictions made. "

•  We made a color spinner, but in the end we used a dice.
•  The person who was going to start the game would be random. We decided that the person who, when rolling the numerical dice, obtained the highest number, would start.
• The person who failed the question would take out the jenga piece corresponding to its number and color. The person who gets the question right takes out the jenga piece corresponding to its number and color and also keeps the token. The person with the most chips wins.
•  Unlimited time to answer the question. One minute to answer the question.

Epistemic design: Learning is also epistemically situated. Epistemic desing involves proposing tasks. How are they playing? What are the players doing? They have to answer questions related to english culture, natural science, geography, social science, natural enviroment and spanish culture following rules. The level of Bloom´s Taxonomy that we choosed for it was remember because for answering properly the questions they need to know the content previously worked. 

Social design: is how we propose how people work together. We decided that in each group have to be a minimum of 2 and maximum of 6. Our game was an individually game.

The game is a very useful tool for our students to learn. Through it, children learn to forge links with others, and to share, negotiate and resolve conflicts, in addition to contributing to their ability to assert themselves.

However, it has drawbacks. An example of this could be the generation of excessive competition between them, as well as the difficulty of achieving a balance between play and training. In addition, from our point of view, what at the beginning would start with motivation may, in excess, end up boring the students.

It was a bit difficult for us to design a pop-up activity, as we wanted it to be as complete as possible. We all agree that learning by playing is very beneficial, but there are certain contents that could be taught more effectively using other methods.