Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

Earlier this year we told you about InterroBang, a game of real-life missions that challenge students’ creativity and problem-solving skills. They’ve just launched their second edition, which runs until January 31, 2011.

If you’re not familiar with InterroBang, here’s a sample mission, worth 10 points, to give you an idea of what you’re in for:

“Have you ever wondered who delivers your mail, collects your trash, or waters your lawn? These jobs are a necessity to daily life but unfortunately, these important workers go unthanked. Take time to meet your mail carrier, sanitation worker, or other person who facilitates your life that you’ve never met before. Learn their name and something significant about their life. Take a picture with your new friend and write about your experience.”

To sign up and get your students playing InterroBang, simply visit their website, or read their About page.

InterroBang

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BY BILL FERRIS

A game called Karma Tycoon causes a little cognitive dissonance for me — accumulating good karma seems contrary to to the word tycoon, which I associate with greed. Nevertheless, there are worse qualities than having a competitive desire to make a difference in society.

I’ve never played games like Roller Coaster Tycoon, but I’ll assume Karma Tycoon is based on the same principles — you acquire good karma by building and maintaining homeless shelters, performing arts centers, and other facilities designed to make a positive impact in a community. You can apply for grants and loans to bankroll your philanthropy, and the more people you help, the better your karma score.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Let me start off by saying InterroBang is both ambitious and potentially time-consuming, but it’s also a really cool idea. In a nutshell, InterroBang is a game that sends you on real-life missions of discovery and learning. Now I use the term mission because that’s what they refer to it as, but these really cover a wide range of activities, from basic — go somewhere you’ve never been before and observe who goes there and try and deduce why — to complex — go to both a supermarket and a farmers’ market and compare produce varieties and countries of origin. The more complex the mission, the more points you receive. You prove your team completed the mission by uploading pictures, video, and other documentation of your activities.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

If you’re like me, you remember with fondness long nights with your friends, your trusty plastic icosahedron, pencils and paper, and junk food. I’m talking about Dungeons and Dragons of course, the game many of us geeks played when we were younger and had a lot more time on our hands. At one point blamed by pundits and media outlets as a bad influence on children, D&D is now making inroads in libraries and touting its value toward teaching children problem solving, teamwork, and mathematics and reading skills.

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BY MELISSA THIBAULT

Media specialists and information-literate teachers have been teaching students the Big6 Skills Model of Information Problem-Solving for years. By using this research approach, students can easily master the six-step process (just three steps for K-2!) and take responsibility for both the process and the product of their research. This is an important skill set for student school success, but can this help them even more in real life? Perhaps.

Students are faced with all sorts of tests, both in school and beyond, and these tests require not just mastery of the content, but also the process. It is not enough to learn the amendments to the Constitution and the associated landmark court cases; students must see how these historical events have relevance beyond the end-of-course test. Productive citizens need to be able to find and analyze information, organize and evaluate their ideas, and apply this process to their everyday lives. This is profoundly challenging in the media-rich world we live in today.

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BY BILL FERRIS

The scavenger hunt, the good twin of the wild-goose chase, can be a fun way to exercise students’ creativity and problem-solving skills. This video from Howcast shows you how to put together a scavenger hunt using modern tools like cell phones and multimedia. Using smart phones, the hunters in the video solve riddles via text message, snap pictures of interesting landmarks, and dial a secret number for the next clue by solving a math problem.

While I haven’t done this myself, it looks like a fun way to fuse technology and education. This idea is swollen with educational opportunities — incorporating study questions into the clues, challenging kids to find creative solutions, or promoting collaboration and teamwork — and you can adapt it for just about any subject.

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BY BILL FERRIS

How far would your students go to save a lost pet? Would they infiltrate a nefarious underground factory that turns cuddly animals into food? Would they disguise themselves as monsters to outsmart gremlins, golems and yetis? Would they still go through all this rigmarole if they knew it was a way to practice their math skills?

Lure of the Labyrinth is an mathematics game from Maryland Public Television designed for middle-school pre-algebra students. The protagonist, a kid who’s just had his beloved pet abducted by Bigfoot and taken to a subterranean food mill, has to solve a series of math-based puzzles to get him back. The puzzles focus on proportions, ratios, fractions, and variables.

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I thought I was hot stuff when I bought my Hyundai Accent and its 32-miles-per-gallon fuel economy. Fuel Our Future Now envisions a world that scoffs at that level of efficiency. The U.S. Department of Energy, Discovery Education and the folks behind the automotive X Prize — designed to foster the development of cars that exceed 100 miles per gallon — have developed this site to get teachers and students thinking about alternative energy and fuel efficiency.

FOFN has videos, lesson plans, games and activities geared toward kids in grades K-12. The elementary area focuses on what gets cars moving. Middle schoolers will find information about alternative fuels and energy efficiency, and high-school kids can put their knowledge to work by creating a plan to improve transportation in their area. Since FOFN is part of Discovery Education, you can watch videos like a Mythbusters clip about how electric cars aren’t as slow as people think. The teachers section will give you lesson plans and ideas on how driving behavior affects fuel efficiency, the effectiveness of mass transit, and many more resources designed to get students thinking of ways to reduce both fuel consumption and greenhouse gases.

You and your students can find a lot of good info at FOFN. Maybe it will inspire your students to design a fuel-saving engine themselves someday that will put the Prius, or at least my Hyundai Accent, to shame. -BILL FERRIS

Fuel Our Future Now

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A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it’s seldom the most fun. Fantastic Contraption, an online problem-solving game, proves this concept by forcing you to go over, under and through several obstacles on your way to your goal.

The premise is simple. You get five simple tools, each of which has different properties — you have wheels that spin in different directions, two different types of axles to turn the wheels, plus the force of gravity. You then have to use these tools to try to bridge gaps, climb over (or knock down) walls, and occasionally catapult a pink dot into the goal area. Build your machines with care — if your contraption is front-heavy, count on it pitching forward if it runs into debris in your path.

Fantastic Contraption is a fun way for students to work on their problem-solving skills, as well as learn to adapt to new challenges. It’s also really fun to figure out how to advance to the goal. In the case of Fantastic Contraption, getting there is all the fun. -BILL FERRIS

Fantastic Contraption

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Everybody’s got problems. Me, my cats keep clawing through my front porch screen. I thought I’d solved the problem when I replaced the screen, but the cats just did it again. Clearly, I hadn’t articulated the problem clearly enough — I had to find a way to keep them from clawing their way out. Or perhaps my error was in buying cats in the first place. Hmm…

The most important step to solving a problem is to figure out exactly what that problem is. As such, Luciano Passuello at Litemind presents 10 ways to properly define a problem, based on an idea courtesy of Albert Einstein: “Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.”

As teachers, you’re tasked with showing students to solve all sorts of problems, be they mathematical, situational, ethical, or even “other.” For example, simply rephrasing a problem may have great results. Passuello states,

“When a Toyota executive asked employees to brainstorm ‘ways to increase their productivity,’ all he got back were blank stares. When he rephrased his request as ‘ways to make their jobs easier,’ he could barely keep up with the amount of suggestions.”

As for me, I’ve taken this problem-defining advice to heart and figured out how to solve my porch screen situation. I realized the the real problem was that I assumed I could control my cats, when in fact, they are in charge (just ask them). Now I’m leaving the hole in the screen alone. Yep, I’m a regular Einstein. -BILL FERRIS

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I know I’m not the only person to have pulled this trick, which is to use a non-Gmail account for Google applications. I am still wedded to my Yahoo! Mail account for email, and I’ve used that email for some of of my accounts on Google, especially the ones that were acquired by Google after I started an account there (like YouTube).  On the other hand, I also have a GMail address (which generally collects dust, and spam from disuse) on my account as well. With so many online identities to keep track of, how do I get this all together so Google knows who I am in all Google applications?

It’s simple, really. Go to the My Account page, then click on “Edit” next to your name on the right. You can then specify Google to associate whatever email address you like with your account.

This tip comes by way of Mark Wagner at EdTechLife. -ALICE MERCER

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Tired of teaching from the text book? Having a hard time fitting environmental science instruction into the school day? Well EcoKids can change all of that!

EcoKids is a Canadian interactive website created to engage students in environmental activities. This site is full of resources for teachers such as lesson plans, printable resources, and helpful links. It even has specifically designed lessons for ESL (English as a Second Language) students using the different environmental themes. Teachers can access information on Wildlife, Climate Change, Energy, The North, Waste, Land Use, and Earth Day to initiate any environmental or science lesson, or provided a great follow up to an end-of-unit study. This site even has a Fact of the Day that teachers can use to initiate classroom discussions or writing activities about the environment. Looking for an environmental project for your classroom or school? You can visit different links on the site that show different types of environmental projects students and schools are involved in for ideas.

Students can access the site and engage in games to practice what they have learned in the different areas of Wildlife, Climate Change, Energy, the North Pole, and Land Use. The games integrate the environmental themes with reading, math, science, problem solving, and social studies. Students can work on their writing skills by responding to questions posted periodically on the site, or commenting on the blog. -MONIQUE ST.LOUIS

EcoKids

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You may have heard your students talking about questing or getting their epic mounts or selling bars of gold on the auction house. If you have, you’re probably dealing with a World of Warcraft player.

As a long-standing gamer and a doctoral student interested in virtual worlds and games and their potential use for teaching, I was thrilled to learn that a recent issue of Science magazine called for participation in a unique conference – one that would take place within the massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft (WoW). For three days in May, participants in the Convergence of the Real and the Virtual conference created characters and joined players from around the world to participate in scholarly discussions about the game while hanging out in a virtual world.

The conference was comprised of three sessions: one about the possibilities for research within the game, one about the relationship between the game and the “real world,” and one about the future of such virtual worlds.

I was particularly drawn to the second session because it featured both Constance Steinkuehler who researches the potential for learning and literacy in games, and Julian Dibbell, who researches cultural and sociological aspects of games. These scholars are two of my most favorite within this community. This particular session shed some light on the learning potential in games.

Steinkuehler believes there’s serious learning and knowledge creation that occurs as a result of playing WoW. For instance one conference participant related a story about how his son wanted to find a specific pet within the game (yes, players can have virtual pets in the game) and spent several hours researching how to find and obtain such a pet. This example uniquely illustrates the development of critical thinking, research skills, and strategic planning – indispensable skills in high school, college and beyond. Other threads of discussion in this session included the notions of:

1. How real is a friend in WoW?
2. Are the relationships that are formed in-game meaningful?
3. Is the social space of the game completely different from real life, or does it simply mimic real life?
4. Can leadership be learned in WoW?
5. Can skills developed within the game world transfer to the real world?

If you are interested in learning more about the potential for learning in games, I recommend you start with Steinkuehler’s work. After all, 10 million people play WoW; and some of them might be your students! -LAURA CHRISTOPHERSON

Johnny Lee, a YouTube personality and “human-computer interaction researcher” is changing the way we use existing technology through simple modifications, and he’s sharing it with everyone. This amazing demo proves that using something as inexpensive and highly obtainable as the Wii Remote, he can create an interactive whiteboard. Lee explains that while the whiteboard isn’t exactly the quality of it’s $3000 likeness, you’ll still get “80% there for about 1% of the cost.” He notes that teachers are able to access this technology for use in their classrooms, and many already are.

Lee makes no qualms about making this sort of technology available for anyone who wants it. He’s put the software on his website, and at the time of this demo, it had been downloaded half a million times. View the demo for the full extent of what other uses Lee is finding for the technology, and visit his website if you want to learn more. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Johnny Lee’s $40 Interactive Whiteboard

Johnny Lee Computer-Human Interaction Researcher

I love Rube Goldberg devices. Why scratch your back when you can spend hours rigging up a complex system of levers, pulleys and aquaphobic dwarfs to scratch it for you? That’s why the folks behind  Mechanical Madness are my kind of people.

Like the previously reviewed Launchball, Mechanical Madness lets you harness various machines to transport a sphere from a starting point to a goal. These devices aren’t nearly as sophisticated as those in Launchball, but should still provide a fun challenge for elementary students. One thing Mechanical Madness lacks is levels – only the Easy and Medium levels were working when I tried it. However, even these are good introductions to problem solving for young students.

Mechanical Madness, like Mouse Trap, illustrates that sometimes an efficient solution isn’t as exciting as a complex one. Using complex machinery to transport a baseball from one side of your screen to another may not be practical, but it sure is fun. -BILL FERRIS

Mechanical Madness

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