Tutorial 8a
Monday 20th of April, 2020
Today’s tutorial is about a topic that I have never thought I would encounter in university. Gaming. James had invited guest Rebecca Ly into our tutorial to give us more information about this topic.
This topic is one of the most intriguing topic for me personally because I love gaming. I’ve been an avid gamer throughout my life and I’ve played almost every genre of games, FPS, Sandbox, MMORPG, DOTA, Real-time strategy, etc etc etc. So this lecture was absolutely incredible information for me to gather and question, how can I implement my favorite hobby into a classroom?
Firstly, Rebecca introduced us to a game called Bemuse. It is a mania rhythm game that gets players to press keyboard keys according to the visual and the beat of the chosen song. There are many, many different rhythm game modes. I’ve played a separate rhythm game called Osu! that has Mania mode, Taiko Mode and a custom ‘Catch the Beat’ mode. These games are incredibly good for building rhythmic awareness and *could* theoretically help players to increase their accuracy of beats.
When you think about the word gaming and education, they are widely accepted as two concepts that should never be together. Why? Because gaming has always been seen as a ‘disturbance’ to studying. This concept has never changed throughout the years and has stayed like this ever since.
Is this a good thing? Maybe, because playing games definitely hinders the ability to study because of procrastination. But teenagers love playing games, especially computer games, so why can’t we rethink our ideology and try to connect education and gaming?
I can already see you saying: “but there are already educational games!1!!1!!11!” Yes, but my point isn’t about the games themselves, its more about the concept of gaming.
What is a game? A game is a structured form of progression that usually has a winning condition and a losing condition. However, this progression is only considered a game when the content of a game is fun and engaging. Now, why can’t we conceptually change the idea of education into gaming? Because you really only have one life in the current school structure. One life. Meaning that every single step must be taken cautiously, every exam must be taken with huge amounts of preparation. Having multiple lives would be a start to making schooling much less stressful, but it could also loosen the achievement of HSC.
Really, if you think about it, life is an MMORPG. You are ‘farming’ and gaining experience in a properly set zone with missions and quests to achieve and accomplish.
I kinda went on a tangent and wrote a big wall of text.
My summary point is that: if games are so engaging and fun while school is boring and yucky, then should we create a system that focuses on the concept of: School is a game? If we get students to acknowledge this concept, or enhance the school structure, would it be a positive or a negative impact to education?
Maybe, in the future, learning and gaming could be intertwined and be understood as the same topic. Or maybe in the future, gaming would just be completely separated from education and is always seen as a villain and a hindrance.
I sure hope it’s the first idea…Hopefully with dark mode.
Tutorial 8b
Wednesday 22th of April, 2020
Today’s discussion is about the Maker Movement! Thanks to guest lecturer Phil Nanlohy!
The Maker Movement is all about create music through rubbish and junk. I really like this concept because it promotes recycling in our wasteful world.
The concept really gets you thinking about all of the material that you could have used to create music. Students in a classroom could also benefit from this by having a cross-curriculum event through recycling (geography) and music!
Although back 10 years ago, recycling was not as harsh and promoted, we have all already received many different warnings about global warming and ice-caps melting. Getting students the idea of recycling old material and create uses for these materials is an incredible ideology to give to students. In the future, if we do not find possible solutions to our current problems, carbon footprints will definitely be more promoted and enforced.
Furthermore, this could also introduce collaboration as an idea!
Collaboration is definitely one of the most important life skills to be learning in a school environment. Everyone will need to collaborate at basically every point in their life so it is absolutely important to implement collaboration as much as possible in classrooms.
…
I just wish that the poster was in available in dark mode :<
Michael's Blog 