[Yr7-10it] re : projects or games?

[Costello, Rob R]

What of LineRider - game or project ? 

As experienced, looks like pure game, but written as project by a
student 

"This is a project i did for illustration class.
Its not a game, its a toy. What i mean is there are no goals to achive
and there is no score."  
http://fsk.deviantart.com/art/Line-Rider-beta-40255643


And the site it comes form is full of art experiments 
http://fsk.deviantart.com/

how would you classify an equation visualiser being added in?
 ( http://www.thinkingcurriculum.com/thoughts/ ) 

One student said, in year 8 impulsive manner, when he first saw it, it
"spoilt the game" 

I said to students that the person who originally made LineRider was
good at maths and I was trying to help them see that 

How do you know that? asked one girl (seemed suspicious that maths was
generally useless and I was making this up)

We opened up the flash files and we looked at some of the functions in
LineRider- functions for calculating length of line segments etc - not
far off what they're (meant to be) doing at yr 8

re, the appeal of Art / programming - I'd like to decompile these 
http://www.levitated.net/gravityIndex.html  and show where the maths is 

the issues I see here are access and cross disciplinary approaches - not
much  point doing this if we can't spend the time playing and
experimenting - could teach a whole course this way I think 

meanwhile school maths seems a formulaic, excessively abstract thing;
how did we get to the point where its not mixed with science or
technology or ICT - (ie this sort of ICT) approach? 

Not saying Flash is the way - actionscript syntax might be a bit of an
obstacle - but maybe ..... I think it needs something that allows
program to can be language as well as concrete symbol/icon - 

can Scratch do language? 

Cheers 
Rob 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------

I have to agree with you Bill. This year I am going to guide students
towards projects with a broader perspective, ala "create something that
will
make the world a better place to live in".

Last week I have some year 10 IT girls that are exploring the
construction
of a creative dance type solution using Scratch. (Starting from the
handy
worksheet that  you so kindly shared on this list! Thankyou :-)  Whilst
some
didn't like their work, perhaps because it lacked the gaming elements
that
others were building. A couple of us spotted the more creative, art
installation that these girls were trying to program.

Regards Roland

On 18/02/2008, Bill Kerr <billkerr at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think it's better that we ask our students to create projects rather
> than games
>
> This represents a trade off between motivation (games are more
motivating
> for some) and a curriculum based more on educational principles
>
> more ...
> http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2008/02/projects-or-games.html
>
> --
> Bill Kerr
>


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