Manta Ray by Kawa0310
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The game has been perfect for our work in class as it is so open ended. There is no specific path or “levels” that need to be completed in a certain order. Once you are through the brief tutorial, which covers some of the basic controls, you are free to explore the ocean depths.

These open ended, sand box style simulations provide great learning opportunities for classes.

The currency of progress comes in the form of fish of course, or indeed any marine life you encounter. During our first week we organised a set of 5 activities in our literacy lessons that were rotated (a carousel) throughout the week. These included a teacher led (guided) reading session, some online research on the species we had already found and a group playing the game to explore it for themselves. It is important to allow children time to play it independently or in a small group.

I provided a simple factfile template (differentiated for a couple of levels) that gives the children some structure to their research and has proven useful for them to collate notes from the game. Here is a little video of some of the gameplay you would experience in Endless Ocean.

Each species that is found is recorded in the game’s Marine Encyclopedia (See 2:05 in the film above) which is proving a useful record. I also have lots of fish shaped card and written the names of what we find for display in the classroom. Children can then choose something from the display to go away and research without being tied to the game. I think it is useful to display your progress of discovery in this way. Taking the game out of the console into your room continues the engagement.

When you find a fish in the game you have to interact with it to learn something about it. In the film you will see each species has 3 facts to discover. The longer you interact with the fish and the more frequently you discover them, the more facts are revealed.

The children have been very engaged with the topic so far – we were using the Wii in our first literacy lesson in Year 5. A pretty interesting start to the year for them, not what they were expecting perhaps.

Gigantus and Sphyrnie by
BrittneyBush
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Many of the children have discovered fish during their time playing the game – you may have seen from our class Tweets of our dives we have been excited to find, amongst others, the Japanese Bullhead Shark, a Red Stingray and the Leopard Whipray. The children take great ownership of these discoveries. After I remarked on a certain type of fish I had not seen before, a boy proudly turned to me and stated, “I found that yesterday!”

Their engagement goes beyond the discovery. It continues onto trying to find out about the species in more detail. I think they make a connection between their simulated experience in the game and the desire to find out more. They want to find out more as they have invested something. With a trip to an aquarium planned for later in the term we will hopefully close this loop of experience with real life examples.

The experience of using the game so far shows me that a rich, games based simulation adds an ingredient that is hard to replicate in any other way.

I said in my last post I wanted an edge to our learning that provided moments of shared discovery and we have had many of those. For example, as a group has found a species like the Scalloped Hammerhead or the first sighting of a dolphin we have all downed tools and just enjoyed that moment.

In one shared dive with the whole class we swam away from the coral reef (which we have been learning about too) and in the murky depths I could see a large grey and white tail swishing away from us. We began to realise what it could be and I had to swim to catch up with it…suddenly we were surrounded by a group of Indo Pacific Sailfish. We thought it was a shark. It was a lovely moment of discovery we shared as a class and one that captures what is possible with these games.

You can probably see that these moments offer some excellent opportunities for narrative or recount writing which we have been exploring in the last few days. There be a story in them murky depths…

I love to use games in the classroom to support and inspire learning – at their best they are richly engaging and hugely motivating. This year we repeated much of the successful ways of introducing the game slowly; hooking the children into the narrative well before we switched on any computers.  Myst 3 has such a rich narrative and back story this is not difficult to achieve.

One of the major differences in our class work this year was that I decided to take the more conventional route of working on descriptive writing. Last year we completed some great transactional text in the form of game guides. This year I began a simple task of improving on some simple sentences shared in a Google Doc for my students. The kids made such a good start to this that I invested the rest of our time on expanding on what we began.

Here is an example of one of my student’s work in Google Docs – you can see that I added a table of key vocabulary from the Myst narrative.

The smiley face and marking is something I added as the child progressed with their work. I used Insert>Comment in Google Docs for this (Shortcut: Control+M) These comments are useful in three ways:

1. Coloured to stand out and be distinct from the rest of the child’s work.
2. Timestamped automatically so that commenting and marking can be kept a track of.
3. Named automatically so that a comment belongs to a particular user.

Have a look at my Marking work in Google Docs blog post for more ideas about common assessment of work in this way.

The second comment as I am sure you have realised is from the student who has responded in kind and let me know the changes she has made since my comments. Additionally she refers to some peer assessment that the class did in pairs to help review and improve their writing.

Alongside this work we helped the Year 2 children with their Myst unit – similar in our approach to last year but with different outcomes. The Year 2 teachers wanted their children to create some poetry based around their seaside curriculum unit. The Year 5s acted as Myst guides and helped the younger children explore the island in more detail, develop vocabulary and language collections and ideas for their seaside poems. Once these poems were completed we supported them in some simple Photostory work as a performance of the poems.

It has once again proven to be a hugely successful and engaging unit both within the remit of our own writing and in the process of supporting the younger children to engage with the game as well.

One idea I mentioned a few posts ago was that of using Wii Golf for addition, here are some more lucid thoughts and experiences of using it in the classroom.

Wii Golf Subtraction

We had 20 minutes at the end of the day so as whole class we talked about using Wii Golf to help with some subtraction work. The children have been doing the chunking division method (!) which requires them to use all four operations so more subtraction work was going to be valuable.

Pic: Look at Mii golf!

I started up a quick round of golf and took a shot. I was expecting to get some information about how far the ball had gone and then subtract this from the total yardage for the hole.

Hole Length – Shot length = Distance remaining

However when you have taken a shot in Wii Golf it displays how much further you have to go. There is no information about how far you have hit the ball. Consequently we had to change our sum and I asked the children about how we could work out the shot length – it was a good teaching point. The children at this point had their own small whiteboards to do work on. Our agreed sum for Wii Golf would be:

Hole Length – Distance remaining = Shot length

Soon the children were busy on their boards and were immediately totally engaged with the task. That comes as no surprise to me – about 95% of the class have a Wii at home, this is what they enjoy being engaged with. The shots will always be 3 digits or less and in that way are perfectly differentiated for my year group.

Wii Baseball Addition

Whilst the children were having a break time my teaching colleague Rick and I had a little play on Wii Baseball and soon more ideas for supporting maths were being batted (sorry) around. If you go to the Practice in Wii Sports and then Baseball you get the chance to hit 10 pitches – on screen you receive information about how far you have hit the ball in metres, perfect for generating addition sums.

Pic: Nintendo Wii Baseball

As a class I showed them what I wanted to do, hitting the ball and recording the length of the shot and then we worked on the addition to come up with the total metres. I asked children to come up and take 10 shots and we all then recorded as they went on our boards. If they didn’t hit the ball we just recorded the metres they did make. I soon discovered a baseball demon who hit about 6 home runs and 10 excellent shots. I asked the class to split the 10 numbers into two groups and then do 2 sums. Again the highest number was 187 metres, which is pretty good for a ten year old by the way, so the addition sums were ideally pitched to the Year 5 age group.

An added bonus was that after you have hit the ten shots the total length of the home runs are added up and displayed on the following screen. So if the children who were batting hit home runs we had to do a second calculation for home run length. i muted the projector display until we had done the calculation, modelled the work and then revealed the answer. 

As a whole class I was able to see on their whiteboard the work they had done and picked up quickly on errors with their method or setting out. However this could easily be done as a small group activity during a lesson. 

The children in that 20 minutes were happy, engaged, focused, on task and doing 3 digit subtraction and addition practice. It is important that we begin to realise the potential of these gaming platforms to support learning. I look forward to exploring more Nintendo Wii ideas soon.

I am delighted to get our Nintendo Wii installed and setup in our classroom. To get the audio working I used a small jack for the connections and ran it from the Wii into the PC’s Line In and then out again to speakers. We have one for each of the Year 5 and 6 classrooms. Not only will it obviously be lots of fun, I am hoping to make the most of the games to support learning. We have the Sports game and also Big Brain Academy which looks good. Soon I will take a closer look at BBA and see what more it has to offer in terms of classroom use, so look out for that soon.

Here is one sketchy idea already: Addition and Subtraction using Wii Golf (part of the Sports game) Use as a maths starter, an engaging way to generate whole class sums or even a small group activity – children take a shot, we subtract from the total yardage for that hole. Written addition of the yards for different shots. Total yards of shots around a short course. The yardage will only ever be into three digits for a single shot – unless I get a go and it will be less! Perfect 2 and 3 digit addition and subtraction for the age group of our class.

So much more to explore!

Next week we will be getting the children creating their Mii avatars and I will try to find a way to export those images for use elsewhere. I wish that back when I was ten my classroom was this much fun.