A Lightweight Co-Construction Activity for Teaching 21st Century Skills at Primary Schools

Employing learning processes that promote 21st Century skills is now a requirement in Finnish schools and elsewhere. Participatory design/co-design activities have shown to foster design thinking and computational thinking skills in primary school level participants, but a lightweight applicable model of such an activity is yet to be presented. We develop a lightweight hybrid co-construction method based on software development via two exploratory case studies in a Finnish primary school. For the purpose of evaluating objectively the motivating effects of our activity, we elaborate upon four concerning dimensions that arise from previous studies. In our resulting activity, an adult programmer is partnered with a group of children to, in this case, construct math games together. The children felt empowered and motivated by working with us in this way, however, further study is required on the effects this kind of an activity has in comparison to alternative teaching methods

Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

Employing learning processes that promote 21st Century skills is now a requirement in Finnish schools and elsewhere. Participatory design/co-design activities have shown to foster design thinking and computational thinking skills in primary school level participants, but a lightweight applicable model of such an activity is yet to be presented. We develop a lightweight hybrid co-construction method based on software development via two exploratory case studies in a Finnish primary school. For the purpose of evaluating objectively the motivating effects of our activity, we elaborate upon four concerning dimensions that arise from previous studies. In our resulting activity, an adult programmer is partnered with a group of children to, in this case, construct math games together. The children felt empowered and motivated by working with us in this way, however, further study is required on the effects this kind of an activity has in comparison to alternative teaching methods.</p

Exploring the Importance of “Making” in an Educational Game Design

Part 2: Short papersInternational audienceEducational games have been employed in many settings as a means to engage young students. Different genres and applications of games have been used to improve learning experience. The design or making of games in learning activities has been linked to teaching of new skills. Within this paper we explore and discuss the differences of involving young students into the game design and development process compared to just playing an educational game. In particular, we designed an educational math-game and an activity that involves children in playing or modifying the game, and we performed a between groups experiment with sixty students of the second grade of middle school (12 to 13 years old). Students formed three equivalent groups of twenty. The first group played the game, the second engaged with re-designing and modifying the game and the third (control) group solved the same exercises (with the educational game) on paper. The results showed that the making group exhibits certain attitudinal benefits. Hence, our findings suggest that learning through games should include more than just playing a well-designed game, it should also consider the involvement of students with various “making” affordances