Week 3

Week 3: Technology Design Process and Online Games Development

The focus of the first half of today's workshop was on technology design briefs. We were given the brief as follows: "Design a frog that jumps using.... cardboard card, picture of a frog, rubber band, sticky tape, glue-stick, scissors."

Myself an my partner made sure to follow the 4 steps of design; Investigate, Design, Produce, Analyse/Evaluate as this is how we would expect our future students to complete the activity.

At first we investigated possible ways to complete the design brief by experimenting with ways to use the cardboard and the rubber band to make the frog jump. I personally struggled with this section, and the ambiguity of the task. I was convinced that there must have been 'one right answer' and was desperate to find out what it was. This resulted in myself and my partner persevering with an idea that was not the most successful. Once we came up with a workable method we then designed how we were going to create the jumping frog. After briefly designing the frog we produced the design using the materials. Once we had trialled our design we then evaluated our design - i.e. judging if we achieved our original goal.

During the evaluation process we came to the conclusion that our design was not actually very good, and I was very reluctant to demonstrate the design to the rest of the class, especially once I had seen the quality of everyone else's attempts.

Based upon my experience completing this task I can understand how some students may struggle with a technology design process task such as this. Too often in Primary Schools students are exposed to projects/tasks/worksheets where there is 'one right answer', and this is in direct contrast to a task such as this where there are many right answers and many ways to achieve these. I can imagine that this could cause anxiety and uncertainty in some students (as it did in me), but in a good way as it encourages students to take their thinking out of their comfort zone, experience some sense of failure and realise that being good at something does not mean you have to be a perfectionist all of the time.

Overall I think that this task (including the accompanying paperwork) is fantastic for the classroom. It encourages lateral and higher order thinking and incorporates skills from many different curriculum areas - e.g. science, literacy, numeracy. It assists the students to develop a sense of responsibility for learning, which is a necessary change of pace for students as they are all too often simply required to regurgitate information provided to them by the teacher.

The second half of the workshop was focused on the creation of Online Games using quia.com.

The thing that struck me most about creating the games was just how easy and user-friendly it was. Within 5 minutes I had created a multiple choice quiz about cites of the world and had created word jumbles based on lunchtime foods.


The benefits of a teacher creating their own online quizzes was highlighted to me when reviewing this week's technology lecture "The Protection of Students Online" and through further independent reading of www.cybersmart.gov.au/schools. These highlighted to me just how careful teachers need to be when students are accessing the internet to ensure they do not accidentally (or purposefully!) stumble upon inappropriate material in cyberspace. The risk of this can be minimised via the implementation of an 'acceptable use kit' www.education.vic.gov.au/management/elaerning suppotservices/www/formsttemps.htm. However a simple way of managing of students access to the internet is via the use of websites like QUIA. Here teachers can be more trustful of the content of the website and the pop-ups, advertisements etc that are likely to present themselves on the page, and therefore avoid any internet misuse issues.


In the middle to upper primary years I can imagine that these quizzes/activities would be more useful in a different way. I think that students would gain much more from the learning and be much more motivated if they were to research a topic and then create the quiz for their friends/family/teacher to complete. Therefore (like with the design briefs) students are encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning, which is incredibly empowering and leads to better learning outcomes.