Jun
12
I ran across the below blog post and found it to be intriguing. I encourage you to read over it and even browse through the links. As you do, ask yourself what education would be like if this type of activity was the norm?
13 Yr. Old CEO of Innovative Educational Gaming Company
Anshul Samar is the CEO of Elementeo, a startup company seeking to combine fun and learning. This article provides an overview of the company’s goals, video of Anshul’s CEO speech, and a description of the company’s first game which teaches chemistry through a role-playing board game.
This is interesting to me on many different levels.
- Watching the video of Anshul’s CEO speech gives me the impression that this may have actually been a class project. Regardless, couldn’t a student activity like this be the jumping-off point for effectively integrating technology with teaching and learning?
- How many content areas/topics/objectives/skills would this kind of activity include? I’ve noticed 1) math, business and economics, 2) science/chemistry, 3) art and graphic design, 4) language arts, 5) perhaps copyright and patents, 6) ……???
- If this was a class project, do you think that the teacher could have ever imagined that this would be the result?
- Elementeo is seeking to put the fun back into learning. Has education taken the fun out of learning? It seems that these students think so. What does that tell those of us that are teachers?
- If this is not a class project and Anshul and his friends did this of their own initiative then perhaps we, as teachers, should reconsider what it is that we have our students doing. I suggest that a traditional lesson/unit on entrepreneurship would likely not teach students nearly as much about the world of business (and the other aforementioned content areas) as this activity likely did.
- While students weren’t necessarily playing games but rather developing games, this could be an example of effectively bringing gaming into the classroom and integrating it with the curriculum.
- Let’s begin to consider all the elements of effective teaching and learning (according to today’s research) that might possibly be identified in a class project like this. Such an activity might include 1) problem solving, 2) discovery learning, 3) legitimate peripheral participation and/or authentic/situated/contextual teaching and learning, 4) communities of practice, 5) collaboration, 6) project management (for those instructional designers among us), 7) ……???
I think this could be a rich discussion. Please, please chime in.
–From Clif’s Notes
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Wow, this is an impressive venture that these kids have begun. I loved it when he stated that the company’s goal is to make make a million dollars by the end of middle school…which will be next year. We’re going to have to keep up with this story and see if they make it.
I thought I was pretty good at integrating technology into my class before looking at this and the other examples here. Now I see that I have a lot of room for growth. I’m going to have to begin developing richer activities for the new school year.
In response to question number three, I don’t think that the teacher would have ever imagined this “class project” would have ended up this major. Being a teacher, how does any teacher think that a project given will have vast results? I teach at a Charter school in Memphis and last year’s African American History month’s project was to research information on a famous black person and his or her career. One seventh grade student couldn’t find a person that he was satisfied with, nor could he find any intriguing information. So, to make a long story short, he got in touch with someone from NASA who not only gave him a first-person interview, but called him on the phone to meet him. The seventh grader was so ecstatic about his once in a lifetime experience. I’m sure that his teacher never imagined that any of her students would have an experience like that come from her project.
Wow! I would be embarassed for this teacher to visit my classroom, if she did in fact create this project. What an incredible way to incorporate learning into the classroom. This project uses all of the various learning modalities (auditory, visual, kinesthetic) and reached both the left and right sides of the brain (original, structured, affective). However, I still can’t imagine that when the assignment was originally given that she would imagine it to be this big!
The cross curriculum content includes each of the ones you mentioned as well as marketing, business technology, and visual communications. In addition, the various math, English, and science objectives are numerous. One of the major things that I noticed is that higher order thinking skills and real world processes were embedded through-out this lesson without the students realizing it!
When teachers begin to think out-of-the-box, then more projects of this nature will start to appear such as in economics when students play the stock market. I hope that I can better incorporate technology into my teaching and my students learning!