Save Silicon Valley

This is an ongoing attempt to gamify the year for Computing Year 9 students.  The idea is that students view their every effort in the subject as related to their final goal of making it in the field.

However, the idea is in its infancy and will hopefully mature with experience.

 

Introduction

At the start of the scholastic year, students were introduced to our scenario:

Then each student was given an avatar and asked to personalise it and this was eventually placed at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing in Level 1 of our game.

Eventually, students gain points and hence move to Levels 2, 3, 4 and  5 etc., earning a certificate of achievement at each level.

 

At the beginning of the scholastic year students were told how they could win or lose points according to the chart below.

 

During the Scholastic Year

During the scholastic year students are being awarded points as per the above chart.  This is helping create a sense of goal to our activities.

 

Critical Reflection

Students have taken to the idea: they are keen to see where they stand with points and remind me to give them points when they achieve something.  However, since this project is only the unifying background behind a more game-based approach to my teaching in general, I am not in a good enough position to know how much credit to give Save Silicon Valley when it comes to students’ overall positive attitude towards our lesson.

This project has definitely helped make household (read ‘Lab 5’) names of the personalities in our game and the history of Computing as an ongoing story that impacts humanity.

I hope to introduce more ‘game-like’ elements in my approach to this project in future implementations of it.  I hope to find the lesson-time to implement more game-like elements, like an element of chance related to students winning ‘Chance cards’ for good efforts.  This year I have been somewhat sidetracked by overwhelming hardware issues in my lab (and the fact that at one point the roof leaked so much that the noticeboard of Save Silicon Valley had to be disassembled).  Hence students have for instance not set up their own blog, something I had really hoped would help bring the Save Silicon Valley efforts to life.

In short this is an ongoing project in the very sense of the word…it’s ongoing and my plans for it are also ongoing.