Our Brains are Wired for Games and Play: How Can Learning be More Playful?

Written by Mark Barnett, VP of Education at BSD Education.

If you have ever spent any time teaching in a school, you will observe that throughout the day children will find or invent new ways to play with just about anything whether it’s tossing paper airplanes down the hall or engaging in sports games during recess.

This seems only natural because children are inclined to be curious, imaginative, and engage in playful discovery. 

Traditional education systems seem to stifle playfulness and instead encourage obedience and order, the opposite of play. I can recall many moments in my own childhood where I was asked to turn over the trinkets and toys that I usually brought to school in my pocket and played with during lessons.

Jane McGonigal, a game designer and researcher in the field of game-based learning says in her TED Talk that “when we’re playing a game, that we’re actually happier working hard than we are relaxing, or hanging out.”

It turns out that playing games and engaging in other forms of play are deeply stimulating and intuitive activities that require cognitive thinking and problem solving, the very things that education strives to achieve. 

Toy manufacturer LEGO has known about the power of play for many years and has even conducted research to thoroughly understand the nature of play. When they published a framework for educators called the Pedagogy of Play, their research indicated that when children are engaged in play, they are building cognitive, emotional, social, physical, and creative skills.

Research has repeatedly shown that “play experiences are not merely fun – play also has a critical and crucial role in learning and in preparing children for challenges in childhood and throughout adulthood.” If play helps to develop the exact same skills that education intends, then why do we shun play in school and in classrooms? 

Instead of shunning play in education altogether, perhaps there are ways in which we can leverage play in classrooms as a way to keep children engaged while learning. Depending on your readiness to play and lead play, there are several entry points, such as gamifying behavior management with tools like Class Dojo or if you are ready for a costume change and a magic wand, step into the world of Live Action Role Playing.

We all understand that education can’t be fun and games all of the time, but there certainly is room for improvement. 

Today, there are dozens of educational games, apps, and learning environments that are designed to provide a playful experience for learning to take place. One of the biggest players currently in this space is Minecraft, which operates an education version of their famous game environment. Educator Dan Bloom has used Minecraft to teach biology, where students used Minecraft to recreate models of cells.

This is just one of the many examples of how educators are harnessing the power of play through what is called game-based learning. 

At BSD Education, like LEGO, we know that children are inherently tuned for play, which is why our curriculum is project-focused and is centered around creating and making digital artifacts such as web pages, games, and interactive elements.

By engaging in the process of making something like a webpage or video game, our students are experiencing the same characteristics of play that are described in the Pedagogy of Play: iteration, meaningful contexts, joyful experiences, and social interactions.

Our Education team at BSD Education relies on the unique potential of play to be a catalyst for learning, which is why we start developing our curriculum with play in mind. 

If you are interested in learning more, please contact me on Twitter at @BarkMarnett.

 

About Mark:

Mark is passionate about project-based learning and teaching students to create with technology. With 14 years of experience in STEAM and maker education, he has consulted with teachers and administrators all over the world to setup and design impactful learning experiences with makerspaces and related education themes. 

He speaks internationally about equity and access to STEAM and maker education, most notably at the Stanford FabLearn Conference, MIT Libre Learn Lab, SXSWedu, EARCOS in Bangkok, UNESCO in India, and at 21st Century Learning in Hong Kong. Mark spends his free time traveling and learning with his family while working on a PhD in Computer Engineering to study how students construct and relate to new knowledge.

Understanding Personalized Education in Schools

Written by Eva Yeung, Director of Education at BSD Education.

Personalized learning is widely debated among educators. While I am not writing this as an expert in this area, I want to use this opportunity to begin a dialogue with readers about personalized learning – what are your thoughts, experiences, practices, hopes?

In recent years, a great deal of attention and investment has gone into pushing initiatives and software by Silicon Valley in utilizing technology to enable personalized learning. This has been met with varying degrees of criticism (for more on this, you can check out this Education Week article by Benjamin Herold.) In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic propelling the shift to online learning, the suggestion that it’s a “good time” to try-out tech-driven personalized learning is reemerging. Even so, the start of the academic year has been met with varying degrees of success. Schools and communities that have a robust digital learning culture and infrastructure are thriving while underserved communities with the lack of access to devices and connectivity are suffering greatly, thus the learning gap is becoming (scarily) increasingly wider. 

The definition and approach to personalized learning vary from educator to educator and from organization to organization – it really depends on your pedagogical viewpoint.  In practice, we can be talking about the introduction of a platform/software that guides students through different learning journeys built on an algorithm, or to some schools, a loose pedagogical framework in whole-school curriculum redesigns. 

According to Herold, we can summarize this model as follows:

  • Personalized learning can be tailored to students’ strengths, weaknesses, and areas of interest
  • Pace and instruction are used to design for each individual
  • Technology is greatly leveraged to track and measure student learning and develop “learner profiles”
  • Educational tech tools are used to develop a student”s “learner profile” to help customize educational content

 

Too often, nowadays, we try to find a tech solution to all that we do and often begin to lose focus on what is most important. Personalized learning is not about technology. Let us not forget the power and importance of teacher-student relationships and our role as teachers in inspiring and being beacons to our learners. The human element in our learning environments, be it in-person or virtual is more important than ever in these uncertain times. 

Paul Emerich France, author of Reclaiming Personalized Learning: A Pedagogy for Restoring Equity and Humanity in Our Classrooms (2019) debunks five common myths about personalized learning and a great comparison between a “humanized” versus “dehumanized” approach to personalized learning. I find these two resources particularly helpful to refer to when I find myself needing to refocus my pedagogical approach when creating and improving our programs at BSD Education. 

From Paul Emerich France, Reclaiming Personalised Learning (Corwin Press, 2019)
From Paul Emerich France, Reclaiming Personalized Learning (2019); Barbara Bray, Rethinking Learning (2019).

It is easy for us to say just use some software to guide our learners through their learning journey, but France’s resources remind us to dive deeper and consider wider perspectives and circumstances when we plan our curriculum because too often, students just simply need to know that you are there for them and to inspire them – something no algorithm can replace.

What are your strategies when it comes to personalizing education in your classrooms and schools? What are your struggles? How can we better humanize your journey in bringing digital skills learning into your classrooms?

You can reach me at ey@bsd.education at any time to continue the dialogue I want to hear from you!

About Eva:

Eva found her calling in Education when she left her job at a Canadian women’s magazine in 2012 to join the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme to teach English at an agricultural high school in rural Japan. Blending her passion in Media Studies and Education, she later returned to Hong Kong to pursue a Master of Education at the University of Hong Kong followed by a PGCE with the University of Sunderland. As the Director of Education at BSD, Eva works closely with team members across the business to provide engaging opportunities for students to learn through authentic curricular experiences to prepare them to be future-ready.

 

Three key elements to facilitate successful Maker Learning (or any educational intervention)

In past issues, we have written about makerspaces and maker learning, and about why we feel that it can be an important part of the curriculum. After helping many schools around the world to develop and facilitate makerspaces, our Vice President of Education and makerspace expert, Mark Barnett shares his 3 key elements for successful maker learning.

After starting my own makerspace in 2013, a mobile makerspace in 2015 and helping dozens of schools all over the world design, use and teach in makerspaces, I have learned quite a bit about what works, what doesn’t and why. With a growing interest in maker learning, schools have made great strides in adding makerspaces to their schools and curriculum. Some of these schools have done a remarkable job and others have been left wondering what the hype is all about.

The way that I see it, is that maker learning is just one of many education interventions that a school can elect to facilitate. Other education interventions include social-emotional learning, project-based learning, or even curricular products for math and literature. To implement any of these strategies or interventions successfully, there are usually 3 main factors that contribute to the success or failure of implementation. Each of these factors requires thorough commitment, and even if only one area lacks in commitment, the whole intervention is likely to fail. 


Here are the 3 key elements of commitment required for maker learning (or any educational intervention):

  1. Commitment to the tool or technology
  2. Commitment to the pedagogy that supports the use of the tool or technology
  3. Institutional commitment to the success of the tools, technology and pedagogy


Commitment to the tool or technology

For the case of maker learning, this means that the school must commit to tools, technologies and materials that support maker learning. Commitment in this element looks like:

  • Acquiring the tools and technologies needed in a makerspace
  • Providing the proper use and training of the tools and technologies
  • Ongoing support and maintenance of the tools and technologies
  • Continued training and development of staff using the tools and technologies


Commitment to the pedagogy

Most educational interventions have an accompanying pedagogy that is best suited to support the intervention and maker learning certainly has its own pedagogy that includes tinkering, play, design thinking and constructionism. Commitment to the pedagogy looks like:

  • Providing training, support and professional development to teachers
  • Creating work-groups or cohorts of teachers who can spread the pedagogy and help pass along knowledge and training to other staff
  • Sending staff to conferences to attend and present shared knowledge on best practices and strategies
  • Provide access to educational research in the field of the pedagogy to stay current with the evolving understandings and to learn from others


Institutional Commitment

This final element is the most important one and from my experience, the one element that makes or breaks the success of a maker learning program (or any intervention)

  • Creating a core team of champions who are charged with the success of implementation and are accountable for success
  • A strong team of leadership who truly believes that the intervention has merit and is dedicated to the hard work required to see the success
  • Financial commitment to all of the above mentioned points 

 

It really is a simple formula to follow and it is easy to implement once you have thought through each key element. Typically when I work with new schools, we discuss all 3 key elements before deciding to do any work together to make sure that the school is prepared to commit to all 3 areas before any work is done.

Use these 3 keys to help guide you on the successful implementation of any educational intervention, and if you would like more information or have specific questions about maker learning and makerspaces, please feel free to reach out to me on twitter or email.

Teaching Primary Students Versus Teenagers

Written by Rachel Brujis, BSD Education

Technology activities should always focus on having three things:

  1.     Competency – you learn something new about technology and the world
  2.     Context – the activity is relevant and interesting, not a worksheet
  3.     Collaboration – it connects you to your peers or the world around you

These are our underlying principles – and we apply them whether we are working with Year 3 students or Year 3 teachers.  However what are the additional key steps that we take to tailor our activities so we can engage an 8 year old and an 18 year old?

Interaction

Young children thrive with hands on, sensory experiences.  At early ages we start with hands on activities – many of which are offline – to build their computational thinking.  Rather than worksheets we encourage them to 3D print objects, enhance their shoes with technology or build circuits with their hands.  

Many of these projects continue work for older students but we extend them to create useful and genuinely functional everyday objects, full fashion shows or entire robots with advanced skills.

Risk-Taking

Teenagers love to take risks.  This is how they learn – by trying something new, learning to accept feedback, and focusing this to improve or take an even bolder step.  Rather than trying to limit risks, we encourage teenagers to take more risks. To try something harder. To build a project that is more daring.  To share their ideas about how to change the world with more people. We create a safe space for teenagers to take risks and dare to do something greater as result.

Autonomy

Young students love to have support from their teachers.  They want to be engaged directly and are often happy to learn something new from their peers or an adult.  Teenagers prefer a bit more autonomy – to be challenged, make mistakes themselves and learn from it. As students age, in BSD’s online platform, we use machine learning to provide real time feedback in a safe way.

How do you adapt your lessons for different ages? Let us know!

Learning through Play with Lego Mindstorms

Written by Xyra Sace of BSD Education


In a recent article we released in Issue #7, we talked about the advantages of extracurricular activities like Technology Camps on student learning; how it helps students develop to become well rounded young adults and the real world skills students acquire in camps such as Game Development.

Looking for Technology Camps for kids younger than 8 can be a challenge. Many organizations are trying to provide options for this age group because they see it as a business opportunity. However, there are a number of child developmental considerations when choosing programmes for younger children that should be taken into account. For example, children as young as 5 for will likely have difficulties in using a mouse, typing, remembering where the letters on the keyboards are, understanding the syntax of coding languages and let’s not forget the much shorter attention spans.

For young kids, we would recommend keeping the phrase “Learning through playing” front of mind. It has been long understood, through practical experience as well as academic work by e.g. Lev Vygotsky and Maria Montessori, that learning through play is a critical element for young children to develop key skills in language, emotion, creativity and social interaction, it pulls together the logical and creative areas of the brain.

In practical terms, we have found that introducing Technology with Lego Mindstorms to young kids is more effective than making them code early on. Even in children as young as 6 years old, we have found Robotics with Lego effective to expose them to both the principles and ideas of coding, like logic, and elements of engineering through robotics. The small parts in Lego Mindstorms challenge younger students developing motor skills and coordination.

Here’s some of the key benefits of Lego Mindstorms and what kids learn and build in a Lego Mindstorms Camp:

1.) Boosts empathy and awareness
In our camps, we ensure to kickstart it with a few intriguing questions: “What type of problems do you face in daily life?” “Are there more people who are facing the same problem?” and “What can we do to solve it?”. Prompting these questions helps young learners begin to consider their environment. This helps them think about the problems they would like robots to solve, these can be as simple as “retrieving an item across the room without having to leave a seat”.

2.) Nurtures Imagination and Creativity
When entering the brainstorming process you’ll get a room full of energy and 100 possible answers, this is the time to introduce feasibility. For example, If you need to retrieve an item from across the room, “what will you need?” You will likely need something with wheels on it to move and arms to pick it up. “Do you have these resources available?”.

3.) Introduces engineering
Lego Mindstorms encourages kids to build with more variety like gears and levers. It promotes engineering where students can take the various plastic pieces to construct robots, buggies, or devices, while ensuring they can physically “move” or “operate” together to successfully and repeatedly perform a task e.g. making sure none of the pieces fall when the robot moves from a spot to another. Some people opine that the best way to stimulate the maximum creativity in robotics is to first take away the option of using the wheels!

4.) Emphasizes teamwork
Building a robot is not easy for kids to finish alone. We encourage them to go in groups to accomplish robots together, even to seek help where they can observe adults nearby or in their class. We help them identify their strengths, as well as start to think about ideas like delegation and having a team leader. One kid can be in charge of putting the pieces together, while another can be in charge of coding the robot.

5.) Teaches programming concepts
When building a robot, it is important kids are aware that computers don’t and can’t think for themselves. All technology is based on code, no matter how complex it is. Lego Mindstorms runs on a visual programming environment, which is intuitive for kids because they simply need to imagine what their robot will do, and drag-and-drop plain language blocks into correct sequences using logic. There are on screen technologies to do this like Scratch, however they lack the physical interaction and immersive multi-sensory experience that kids get in creating and using a robot.

6.) Camps are a great opportunity to Improve presentation and public speaking skills
At the end of any technology camp, we find it’s a critical capstone event for kids to be able to present their product. Presenting a solution is just as important as making a solution! It is the culminating part of reflection on their experience, reinforcement of their learning and demonstrating important soft skills and pride in their work.


Here we have used Robotics as our example. However, the benefits of play based learning will be quite consistent in any camp that is science or technology based. You can be certain that your children will have a lot of fun and be highly engaged to light the spark to learn even more in the future.

If you’re interested in bringing our Technology Camps or After School Programs into your schools, let us know here or request a demo.