Last evening Margaret gave a talk at the 8th Global Virtual Meeting for Gifted Education, organized by Roya Klinger of the Bavarian Centre for gifted and talented children. There was a great attendance as can be seen in the images below and we’re delighted at how well received it was –

“Today, our guest speaker was Margaret [Keane] of http://giftedkids.ie/ talking about MissionV, an amazing programme that has piloted well and is set to grow. MissionV brings together the strands of gifted education, e-learning, and game-based learning in very creative ways – so creative that it can be full of surprises. While students were very successfully moving through the expected steps of historical 3D reconstruction on the ground, it took staff a wee while to notice that they were exceeding expectations with a second group of constructions high in the virtual atmosphere!”

 

 

The interesting thing about delivering a presentation in Second Life for MissionV is that its very much a case of ‘eating our own dogfood’. The Virtual World is our platform of choice but like any other technology its only a tool. Many of the attendees at last night’s event are Second Life newbies and yet they soon forgot about the novelty and quickly settled into the talk, while absolutely enjoying the unique advantages afforded by the 3D space – primarily a real sense of presence.

We’re very much looking forward to the next session on June 25th with Prof. Dr. Ernst Hany.

If you’d like your school to be one of the 20 who join the MissionV virtual world project starting September 2011 then please apply now. MissionV is supported by the NCTE.

The upcoming Computing and Animation Adventure Camp at Tipperary Institute looks absolutely brilliant – Game Design and Development workshops, a visit to Microsoft’s Game Studios, Animation workshops and much more.

#IRLday is an initiative to get Ireland trending on Twitter during President Obama’s visit next week. The idea is to use the international attention to generate further interest and promote tourism.

David Quaid is taking it a step further by “asking our virtual and global audience to log in to the SecondLife sim of Dublin, http://secondlife.com/destination/dublin, and if possible, DCU will screen it live”

Sounds like a bit of fun so count is in!

The following notice is reprinted from the CESI (Computers in Education Society of Ireland) mailing list –

Hi CESI,

Just a reminder that (cesi list contributor) Clare Mcinerney of Lero ( www.scratch.ie) and myself [Stephen Howell] with the IT Tallaght Computing Dept. are once again hosting Scratch Day Ireland: http://day.scratch.mit.edu/event/353

Scratch is a fantastic free tool for teaching and learning the samsung galaxy s8 review logic behind programming. It is suitable from 5th/6th class primary and secondary school students.

You can download Scratch from http://scratch.mit.edu

Scratch Day is an international event held simultaneously in 120 locations worldwide.

*Where: In the Computing Dept. Labs in IT Tallaght, Belgard Road, Tallaght,
Dublin 24*

*When: Saturday 21st May, 11am – 1pm*

*Cost: Free*

We will also be hosting the finals of the all-Ireland Scratch Programming Competition.

This is an excellent chance for students, parents and teachers to come along and see what is possible with Scratch.

We will have:

– Hands-on Scratch demonstrations
– Finals of annual Scratch Ireland Programming Competition http://scratch.ie/
– Program Scratch using the XBox 360 Kinect controller! http://vimeo.com/18562642

We hope you can make it.

Sadly, I can’t be there myself this year, but for more information, please email bfeeney@ittdublin.ie or Clare.McInerney@lero.ie

Last Saturday we attended the ICT in Education conference in Tipperary Institute, Thurles. We were there to talk about ‘Game-based Learning in Virtual Worlds‘ and to meet with pioneering educators.

The day got off to a wonderful start with Christian Payne speaking on ‘Mobile Story Making’, ostensibly, but really regaling us with tales of life lived to the full. Entertaining, affecting, inspiring.

ICT in Education 2011 : Christian Payne : Mobile Story Making from StudioSix @ Tipperary Institute on Vimeo.

A few soundbites we took particular note of were –

• Knowing is not doing. Only doing is doing
• Location is the bridge between online & offline
• Don’t write words, write stories

Next up was Ciaran McCormack on ‘Preparing our teachers for the Storytellers of tomorrow’. He told us when teenagers were asked to comment on schools 50% said it was boring while 42% said it was tiring.  These results show that there is a real lack of engagement on behalf of students and that we as educators have to find new ways to engage, inspire and excite students about their learning. (Or as the Game Based Learning theorist  James Paul Gee says give them an emotional connection to learning!) And then he nailed the whole point of storytelling – “It’s not about the production, it’s about the process”.

One of our favourite workshops of the day was, without a doubt, Stephen’s Howell’s Scratch tutorial – the funniest thing was looking around the room and seeing all of these teachers with big childlike grins on their faces making their “sprite” do cartwheels.  Scratch is just a fantastic introduction to programming for kids. Then Stephen showed his amazing hack for the kinect – real time digital puppeteering – just fantastic.  Here are some useful links that Stephen mentioned as part of his presentation:

National Scratch Competition: http://www.scratch.ie/

Transition Year Scratch Workbook: http://www.scratch.ie/students

Scratch & Kinect (Stephen’s blog)

Scratch and Kinect from Stephen Howell on Vimeo.

We’ve attended the ICT in Education conference in Tipperary Institute for the last 3 years and hugely look forward to returning to the Thurles venue on Saturday May 14th. This year we’ll be talking about Game-based Learning in Virtual Worlds and what we’re doing at MissionV to bring those ideas to 20 schools in Ireland this year.

Year after year this is one of the very best conferences we go to. And with the line-up of speakers it looks like this year is going to be no exception.

Vanessa Camilleri is Assistant Lecturer at University of Malta and Distance Tutor at STC Malta. On her staff page she explains –

“My primary area of research lies mostly in the use of Virtual Worlds (WWs) and Social Networking (SN) for Education. There have been many discussions about pedagogical frameworks, interaction processes, use of technology for teaching and learning, but I would like to bring all of these together under one single virtual world and explore ways and means of measuring the effectiveness in the teaching/learning paradigm so as to come up with a model for best practice guidelines in the design of VWs for Education.”

Also an active Twitter user Vanessa has recently started a LinkedIn group for gaming in education called gameED. Join us there!

On Thursday 19th May 2011 Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) is hosting the Irish Symposium on Game-Based Learning.

“Game-Based Learning (GBL) is a fascinating medium which has the potential to increase both motivation and learning on the part of the learners. GBL has captured the interest of researchers, and some educators have already started to embrace this technology. Although there is a solid body of evidence on the educational effectiveness of GBL, it still needs to gain more recognition amongst Irish teachers, lecturers, and policy-makers.”

Dr. Patrick Felicia, researcher at the Department of Computer Science in WIT appears to be one of the main organizers and it just so happens that I’ve been recently poring over his wonderful booklet (PDF) Digital Games in Schools: A Handbook for Teachers. The following is just one of many powerful insights I could extract from it –

“Digital games can have an emotional impact onplayers, increasing their self-esteem (provided the proper monitoring is applied) and enabling them to engage in social activities. Playing can have a calming effect on participants who, as in other entertaining activities (e.g. watching films), feel a wide range of emotions, but in a safe andcontrolled environment. Emotions experienced during play can vary through joy, empathy, anger, frustration or triumph. This succession of emotions tends to keep the players immersed.

Furthermore, studies have shown that emotions can help thememorization process, especially if the emotional content or tone of the material to be learnedmatches the emotions of the learner. Because they induce different emotions in the players, digital games might help them to remember facts more vividly and so assist the cognitive process. “

Needless to say we’ve already registered to attend the Game-Based Learning symposium and are thoroughly looking forward to it.

Minecraft is the indie video game phenomenon which has earned over €23 million in sales and now has more than 5.5 million users worldwide. The game is focused on creativity and building, allowing players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D world.

Joel Levin is a computer teacher at a private school in New York City. His blog – The Minecraft Teacher – chronicles his foray into using Minecraft in the classroom. And has earned him minor celebrity status in teaching circles.

In one interview Joel revealed – “l chose Minecraft specifically because it’s so open-ended. The game presents you with a huge open world and you can do any of a dozen iphone 8 rumors different preset activities. Or you can go off and create your own content. That alone gives me a ton of freedom to invent content for the kids to engage in. I don’t let them just play the game however they want. They must follow a path I lay out for them, which allows me to carry out lesson plans.”

In the video below Joel demonstrates a Tutorial World walkthrough which gives a great idea of the educational scope available in a Minecraft world –