I'm currently delving into a series of videos on game design and making.
Not because I intend to join the game-making community (though I'll never rule this out), but because I've been an avid gamer all my life, and I'm always interested in finding new angles and ways to make my lessons more interesting.
To get this out of the way, I think that the word "gamification" has become a grotesquely-overused buzzword that has lost its soul.
And, based on what I've witnessed so far, a lot of "game design" workshops run in local schools are just programming workshops with a gaming front cover.
The principles of making a game interesting, engaging, and fun seem secondary to producing some sort of rudimentary templated game on some standard platform.
Of course, one could argue that the time allocated is too short to produce a fully-fledged game, but then, why are there never board games, card games, or even sport-based games produced by the students in these workshops?
As huge an industry as video and mobile games is, not every game has to be digital.
I have no issue with teaching students programming and platform use, but if that's the goal of the programme, call a spade a spade and say that it's a programming workshop.
Game design and making is much more than just that.
Vanity Metrics Can Be Useful. If They Result in Serving Others.
We're all susceptible to some sort of vanity metric in our lives.
When I first started as an educator, I wanted to be liked.
I wanted to be that interesting teacher who's chill about things going off the rails, cool with my students being students, and savvy about the things they were interested in.
If I really think about it, I wanted to be the teacher I never had when I was a student - one I could relate to and see as less of an authority figure, more a person I could look up to.
And it wasn't that difficult. Most of my students weren't that much younger than me.
We were able to relate to fairly similar cultural icons and had similar life experiences.
I can't really tell if I succeeded in being liked, but I know that my efforts towards infusing relevant things into lessons and making my presentations as interesting as possible (because I, too, had some horrendously boring teachers) were not wasted.
Till today, I make these 2 things - relevance and interesting talking points - my top priorities in any of my programmes and lessons.
And I've received feedback, from past students (now friends), present students, and other educators, that they enjoy sitting in my sessions.
So perhaps it's not necessarily a bad thing to have a vanity metric if it results in serving others.
Online Science Programmes? Not For Me, Thanks.
A day of running 2 different science programmes online has fueled my non-enthusiasm towards them.
The inability to run actual physical activities for a science programme that is non-abstract is a real sticking point for me.
I get that schools are apprehensive about running full-scale programmes, and I appreciate the comparative simplicity of teaching life skills and even coding skills through a virtual format.
But physical sciences require physical activities to learn them properly.
Virtual labs are alright at a pinch, but there were so many incidents during the programmes when I was thinking,
"This would have been so much more impactful and enjoyable if we were doing the real thing".
Again, I understand the situation that we are in, but it's really not doing the students any favours.
The Benefits of Being Master Of Your Own Programme.
It's just one day before the enrichment programme runs, and an idea sparks in my head for an activity that, though straightforward, connects 3 of the modules that I'm teaching. That's pretty hard to come by!
Because I'm the one who wrote the programme, I can integrate it right away and see if it works as well as I think it will.
And because it's a simple activity that doesn't require a lot of additional materials and because I don't have to ask anyone to provide these materials or explain it, it's also much easier to implement.
As I've mentioned in an earlier post, I love testing new activities out.
I can't be sure this (or a modified form) will stay in the programme or in another that I've written, but, at the very least, I'll know that it's been tried out and I would have seen the response first-hand.
Very exciting! I love my work.