An Education…

We just got back from an hour of IT with the two reception classes, lets say it’s very concentrated and a little hectic! We originally were just observing, but the computers decided to play up a bit so we ended up getting the kids all logged on and the rest of it.

The kids were using the snakes and ladders game available on the BBC education site, it was their first time using it so a little bit of help was needed getting going, but it soon became apparent not many of them actually understood how to play the game, and many had never played it as a board game, let alone online.

We picked up on a few things we picked up on with the snakes and ladders:

1 – Lack of instructions. There were next to none. It was assumed the kids knew how to play, the one we were with proved this theory wrong!

2 – The kids whose teacher took longer to run through how to play, like a demo, managed to play the game with more ease, although still struggled. It gave the kids a clearer idea of what to expect and how to play.

3 – There was no way of telling what it was they were doing wrong, they all panicked when the counter didn’t more to the space they thought it should, there were no instructions or hints as to what they should or need to do.

The second class had a go on another game called, find one more. Which is basically pairs. They all knew exactly what to do with this game. We asked why they were so good with it, and apparently they play this most days while waiting for dinner or home time. So its more a case of repetition than anything else. None of them seemed to respond as far as we could see to the flashing trim around the cards to indicate right or wrong, they just wanted to push on with the game.

When we observed the children it became apparent that some of the kids hadn’t used a mouse as much as some of the other children. Some were handling the task just fine, but others had very poor hand to eye co-ordination, they couldn’t relate that there wasn’t any space on the table for the mouse to move, when the mouse wasn’t at the end of the screen. Even when demonstrated that you could lift the mouse some were still confused.

Vanessa Cload one of he teachers got a little boy to show Simon “Tizzys toy box” and a little girl to show Suzanne “Izzys Island”. This gave us the chance to ask the kids themselves questions about what they were doing and describing how they knew what to do etc.

Simon – I then was given the opportunity to sit with a pupil, then he was demonstrating to me a shape game on the Tizzy’s Toybox software. The game was called jigsaw, the user had to click where the correct piece should go. The jigsaw obviously had an image to make it more user friendly from him but I asked if he was paying any attention to the pictures and he said “No, I’m looking at the sides. (of the shapes)” He clearly had spent time on the pc before, his hand to eye co-ordination was excellent and knew how to control the mouse.

Suzanne – I watched a little girl play with Izzys Island, she showed me a couple of the games she likes to play. One game was about patterns and deciding which came next. I was asking her different questions about what she was doing and why. The most interesting answer she gave when i asked her about the instructions at the bottom of the screen, did she know what they said, her answer was no. So she wasn’t paying any attention to the written instructions, but still knew what to do, i think this shows more her ingenuity than anything else.