This week we had Tina O’Keefe zoom in to speak to our class about gamification and how she runs her high school technology class. Tina shared her screen to show us her google classroom and I’m not going to lie, at first glance I felt overwhelmed. There were many different icons for each class that she teaches. But once Tina started to go through them it started to make sense. Tina offers many different varieties of tech classes that her students can choose from. There are a lot of classes available such as coding, marketing, and graphic design. As a previously employed EA, I loved to see all the choice available to her students. I am very aware of the power of choice to students, and her google classroom was basically 1 giant choice board. This gives her students the power to learn about what interests them and in turn creates buy in from the students. Students choose a course and work at their own pace under the guidance of Tina. This eliminates her lecturing at the front of the room like is standard in most classrooms. It also gives the students who work quickly the freedom to complete 1 course and then start another on of interest. Tina takes on more of a support role with her students, guiding them through the courses and being there to answer questions that may pop up.
Tina’s classroom style is great for high school students and I could also seeing it work in middle school as well. Unfortunately, I cannot see this working in elementary school. Self paced work is hard enough for adult students, for children in elementary school I think this would be totally unachievable. Luckily, Tina gave us many resources for children of all ages to incorporate gamification into any classroom. One of the resources Tina shared is called Hour of Code. After spending sometime playing different coding games on Hour of Code, I found one that I think would work really well in a k-1 class, which is the grades I am most interested in teaching. The game I chose is called Rodocodo. This game is for children age 4-11. This is a block style coding game where you choose different arrows to move a cat from one point to another. In the beginning of the game the cat moves in a straight line, but soon directional arrows are introduced to turn the cat to either the right or the left. The game gets increasingly more difficult and engaging, with portholes and coins to pick up. One thing I really liked about this game is that you can keep on trying without losing. If you get the sequence wrong the cat will perform the action, making it obvious where you messed up. I believe this would be a challenging, yet fun way for primary students to start to develop their coding skills.
