According to Wikipedia, gamification is “the use of techniques, elements and dynamics from games and leisure activities in non-recreational contexts in order to boost motivation and reinforce behaviour to solve a problem or achieve a goal.”
All of us who spend time around children, whether as parents or tutors, know how much they enjoy play. A few years ago educators began to use elements from games such as rules, rewards and competition in education. The goal was both to improve academic outcomes and to encourage certain behaviours. That, in essence, is gamification.
What is Class Dojo?
Class Dojo is a free application that works both on the web and on mobile devices across platforms, helping us implement a gamification strategy.
The idea behind Class Dojo is to help monitor students’ progress in the areas we want to improve.
How does it work?
Class Dojo is structured on several levels:
- School
- Class
- Group
- Student
It also includes several user roles:
- Head teacher
- Teacher
- Student
- Parent
This structure allows a lot of flexibility while keeping everything organised and under control. A student can belong to a group, that group belongs to a class and that class belongs to a school. The head teacher can see how classes are doing, teachers can manage their classes and parents can follow their children’s progress.
To achieve the gamification goals we mentioned at the beginning, we need to define the behaviours we want to reward and those we want to discourage. For example, in a specific class we might reward:
- Group work
- Creativity
- Kindness toward classmates
- Taking care of school materials
And the attitudes we want to avoid could be:
- Swearing
- Talking in class
- Hitting classmates
- Running in the corridors
Each class can define different goals.
We can assign a positive or negative value to each of these attitudes and behaviours. Those scores can be shared with students so that, almost like a game, they can see their progress and become more aware of what they are doing well or badly.
In short, it is about using everything children find engaging in games to improve their attitudes, behaviour and abilities.
What can Class Dojo be used for?
Beyond rewarding or penalising attitudes, Class Dojo also allows you to:
- Track student attendance.
- Use a timer to manage certain activities.
- Create a class diary to note the milestones a teacher considers important in the day-to-day life of the class.
- Create a student portfolio to record progress, even allowing the student to write in it so they become part of the process.
- Maintain direct communication with parents, sharing scores and the student diary so they have a clearer view of progress, or informing them of any incidents directly.
Ultimately, Class Dojo is a teaching aid that each head teacher, teacher, student or parent can personalise and adapt to their own understanding of education.
If you want to know a little more about the tool, here are some useful links:
Robotics is fashionable. It is very rare to live on this planet and not have heard about it, whether through courses, workshops or as an after-school activity for children. It appears in town halls, schools, summer camps and even birthday parties, but is it really that interesting? And, while we are at it, does it actually help children in any way?
Considering what we do at Garaje Imagina, you probably think the right answer is: YES. But to your surprise, the answer I am going to give is: IT DEPENDS.
But as Jack the Ripper said, let us go step by step.
What is educational robotics?
It is a set of educational tools that combine traditional construction systems such as Lego or Meccano with added sensors and electric motors. In many cases those pieces can also be connected to a computer so that their movements and reactions can be programmed with simple tools such as Scratch.
Now that we know what it is, we should ask ourselves how to use it for the benefit of our students. There is a definition in Wikipedia of educational robotics that I agree with quite strongly:
It is the activity of conceiving, creating and putting into operation, for pedagogical purposes, technological objects that are faithful and meaningful scaled reproductions of robotic processes and tools used daily, especially in industry.
Martial Vivet
In other words: the purpose of educational robotics would be to make use of students’ desire to interact with a robot in order to foster cognitive processes.
The most powerful pedagogical tool offered by educational robotics is the way it takes children’s desire to play by building machines and uses it to help them learn other subjects such as physics, mathematics or programming, all of which are needed to reach the final goal: making the robot work properly. It is about using play and gamification to help students learn concepts that might otherwise feel much harder.
When designing the challenges we propose to students while they build a robot, we need to think about the knowledge they need in order to complete the build and make it work. So more than asking “What do we teach?” the real key is “How do we teach it?” and here the methodology we choose is fundamental. It is not teaching robotics itself, but what we manage to teach through robotics, that turns this practice into a pedagogical tool.
There are also three other important factors that can be worked on when children work with robots:
- Group work: encouraging interaction in small teams that support communication and collaborative work.
- Documenting and explaining the work: once a project is finished, the group should be able to explain the work publicly.
- Overcoming frustration: failure is educational. If a group is not able to complete the task, they should try to understand what went wrong and learn from that failure.
What options are there?
There are several kits and technologies on the market that can be used for teaching educational robotics:
- Bee-Bot: a programmable little “beast” that moves around a surface in simple games. It is suitable for nursery children and the first years of primary school.
- Lego WeDo: a Lego kit with added sensors and motors that can also be programmed using Scratch.
- MakeBlock: open-source robotics, combining Meccano-style parts, Arduino and Scratch to build everything from simple projects to complex robots.
- Microduino: one of the easiest ways to get started with Arduino.
Educational robotics can become a great pedagogical tool as long as we know how to use it to strengthen our students’ learning.
