Questionaut-An Incredible Secondary Educational Game

“Online educational game” is our first group project. This is my first time to explore online games from the educational perspective. In this project, I was exposed to different things. The first I learnt from this project is that there are a lot of good educational online games. Before, I was a person that says “NO” to all kinds of games. In my opinion, games are only waste of time. But this project totally changed my view to the educational online games. It is true that not all games are good and educational. That is the reason that as a teacher, we have to carefully evaluate the game before we introduced to our students. The game rubric is a perfect tool that would help a teacher to assess games. Therefore, of the NETS*T Standards listed in the NETS for Teachers website, I felt Standard 2A greatly applied to this assignment: "design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity ."("NETS for Teachers," 2008).

In this assignment, our first decision is to decide how to create a good and suitable game rubric. Before we started to create a rubric, I asked myself what is rubric. A rubric is an assessment tool that describes student’s work (Andrade, 1997). In our case, the rubrics is to score the game from its layout and design, navigation, objectives, rules, goals, feedback, interaction and subject. In the each criterion, we started to brainstorm the descriptions of criteria from unsatisfactory, average to excellent. We want these descriptions to be as concise as possible. We have to make sure that these descriptions explain what makes a good game and a bad game. I think this is the most challenging part of creating the rubric. After two classes, we had a complete version of game rubric. I copied it into the Word document and used a template to make it look nice.

Our second decision is to choose a good educational game. As a secondary education major, I was trying to find something that most of middle and high school students can play with. Thanks for Celes’s video “25 INCREDIBLE Online Educational Game Sites”. After reviewing her video and tried several games, I found Questionaut is really the most incredible game for middle and high school students. Questionaut is an educational game made by Amanita design, a company that has designed several games for BBC’s Bitesized games. The game itself tells a magical journey of helping friend to find his hat. In this game, there are eight stages testing student’s knowledge of English, math and science. The layout of the game is really attractive and colorful. The background music is also nice. In each stage, student is exposed to different learning subjects. Therefore, it is a good game for a secondary teacher to use as a group activity. I think I would like to use this game in a review lesson. I would like to show students that math could be also really fun to play with.

Questionaut provides a detailed feedback to wrong answers, and also to correct answers. That is the reason that I think it would be a great game playing with when we have a review lesson. Unfortunately, this game doesn’t have specific and detailed directions. Students need to guess about what to do next. Therefore, it needs a teacher to guide and walkthrough with them, and provides necessary instructions and help. I would use this game as a group activity, and count as an extra credit toward students’ grade.

In this group project, I enjoyed exploring the different educational online games that can be used in the secondary education classroom. I look forward to introduce this game to my students in my future classroom.

References

NETS for Teachers. (2008). Retrieved October 10, 2011, from http://www.iste.org/standards/nets-for-teachers/nets-for-teachers-2008.aspx

Andrade, Heidi Goodrich. (1997). Understanding Rubrics. Retrieved from

http://learnweb.harvard.edu/alps/thinking/docs/rubricar.htm