Describe your chosen intervention. What is it? How is it used? What do you know about how effective it is?
My chosen intervention is to direct students using Civilization to learn from the content. The game is used as a springboard to learning more about how to build a sustainable society. It is effective as I have used portions of the game in a K-12 setting.
Identify weak points or opportunities for growth. What areas of this design are not working as well as they could?
The areas of design that are not as strong as they could be lay in the area of practice or acting out the results of building a Civilization. Therefore, what I propose is to use the Reacting to the Past series about the threshold of democracy as it arose in Greece.
Present your mods. Clearly describe and/or show what changes you would make.
Students will present their counter-factual history based on how they fared in Civilization as compared to the textbook and what actually happened. Finally, they will react to the past using the book about the threshold of democracy in Greece.
Explain your thinking. Provide evidence for why you expect these changes will improve outcomes. What learning theories are you basing them on? What related interventions have proven outcomes?
As used separately in my classrooms, components of Civilization, and debates about the beginnings of democracy in Greece have worked well. These related interventions have proven the outcomes I desired. Students were more interested in learning first-hand by understanding the game content, and then elsewhere students enjoyed participating in debates about the beginning of democracy in Greece. I based my expected results on important learning theories.
Since I have students write and present their own individual, counter-factual history, as compared to the actual historical events, and then role-play the threshold of democracy these procedures encourage active learning as noted in the readings. The students have to talk, listen, write, read, and of course reflect on their experience. Bonwell and Eison summarize activities that they include in active learning: visual learning, writing in class, problem solving, computer-based instruction, cooperative learning, debates, drama, role playing, simulations, games, and peer teaching. What I am proposing incorporates these techniques.
This is an important area since the simulations are biased towards the sciences and there are few historical re-creations. The 1066 game is an exception as well as of course an early simulation, the Oregon Trail.
References
Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. 1991 ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Reports. Bonwell, Charles C.; Eison, James A.
http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED336049
http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/0-9/1066/game/index.html
INTRODUCTION
In this assignment you’ll apply what you know about approaches to learning and relevant learning theories. Instead of jumping right in and designing your own educational technology (which you will do soon), you’ll get to practice by first modifying an existing one. This will serve as a stepping stone to help you look critically at the design of a learning experience and come up with ways to improve it.
WHAT TO DO
1. Choose an existing learning intervention
For this week, we’re defining a “learning intervention” as an activity which engages learners with some particular content area. We’ve left this pretty broad because we want to give you a lot of latitude as you do the next part of the assignment. So it could be an educational game, but it could also be a textbook, science lab, set of flash cards, etc. Even a driver’s manual or a learn-to-juggle video. Anything goes!
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