Weekly Reflection 9 – Gamification and Indigenous Pedagogy in the Classroom

Tina O’Keefe zoomed into our educational technology class this past week, and discussed some aspects of gamification within the classroom. Following this, we played around with a website called ‘Hour of Code’. We were also able to discuss the implication of Indigenous pedagogy in the classroom, which was based around the question of “how do we embed authentically and with care?”. Through this blog, I will discuss both of these topics and what they mean to me, as well as how I think they could be useful in a future classroom and school.

Gamification

I think the idea of gamification within a classroom can be super beneficial in today’s society, technology type games are rising in homes, which means it is in turn rising in classrooms. I loved being able to understand the difference between gamification and gamified learning experiences. Here is what the article, Gamification and Game Based Learning, explains it: “In short, gamification applies game elements or a game framework to existing learning activities; game-based learning designs learning activities that are intrinsically game-like” (https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/teaching-resources/teaching-tips/educational-technologies/all/gamification-and-game-based-learning). Tina O’Keefe, who teaches high school, was able to show us how her google classrooms are set up, which were super interesting to see. She allows her students to essentially go through the class as they please, and all the classes are very accessible and include topics from all different forms of robotics to film. She also discussed and displayed some other resources she uses in her class, like google read and write, which I had never heard of before! Tina also explained about the increase of code in classrooms, and how she teaches it in her classes. She gave us some resources to use when teaching code and typing, like Nitro Type, Scratch, and Microbits.

I think both game-based learning and gamification can be used within certain contexts to create a more accessible and desired learning experience for students in all different grades. I also adored being able to learn about Minecraft within a class setting, since I used to play it as a kid with my siblings all the time! It allows for virtual trips, creation of their town or school, and so much more! I would the idea of allowing students to explore and design in a context like Minecraft in a way that encourages student engagement and also aligns very well with the new BC curriculum!

Hour of Code

We got some time to play around with the website called Hour of Code, and see how it would work for students in learning basic coding. I’ve linked the website here: https://hourofcode.com/ca/learn. We were asked to choose a game which we think would target a certain grade category we are interested in. I decided to look for something around grade 3 or 4. I found a game called ‘Code Club’, and I decided to discuss it here as I think it was engaging and could be super beneficial in classrooms. It essentially has you create a character (by coding), then your character goes through different areas to collect badges after doing different coding tasks for your character, like designing a shirt or making a movie using your character. The instructions are super clear, and the type of coding is simple enough, but also pushes the idea of the base of how coding works.

Here’s what the ‘worlds’ in the game look like, take notice of how it uses scratch and python!

And here’s an example of what the coding side of things look like (including my little avatar I created)!

Overall, I think would be a great way to introduce some core concepts of coding, like what happens to ordered codes, and how each codes works off of each other, with still being fun and easy to understand. I think a grade three class would love this idea and way of learning! The website also links teacher notes to each game, which is also very beneficial.

Indigenous Pedagogy

Teaching and understanding of Indigenous knowledge was also brought up to further our understanding of how we can authentically teach it to our students. We were given the article, The Five R’s, which discusses how online learning can be a form of Indigenous learning. The article, https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Five-R%E2%80%99s-for-Indigenizing-Online-Learning%3A-A-of-Tessaro-Restoule/c8a720b0be9d4384cd41151e32fe9246ae022304, is a great source to understand how we can implement these ideas into our classroom and it’s online learning. I was interested in reading about all of the ‘R’s’ stating and how they come into play within Indigenous Pedagogy, but I resonated with ‘Relevance’. I know how relevant Indigenous knowledge and studies are to our society and school, but I was curious to hear about how the article would discuss online learning in this. It mentioned that Indigenous studies must ‘go beyond books’ (137). It discussed how utilizing an online format (with hands on activities and other forms that touched on the oral traditions of the Indigenous peoples) is important to create a space that is relevant to everyday use of the principles, instead of just books and theory. Overall, the article had a great way of informing the idea of how online education shouldn’t be far from Indigenous Pedagogy, and how it can be implemented.