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After a fantastic first week, our ‘Myst’ work has continued with great success and incredibly high levels of motivation from the children. Here’s an outline of our work this week:

Day 6  - Travelling together with our wireless mouse and interactive whiteboard, we visited Voltaic, looking at the unusual structures and exploring the caverns. As we looked around, the children gave ‘running commentaries’, explaining what they could see / hear / touch / smell and describing how they were feeling on the way. This was a fascinating experience, and it was really interesting to listen to the children’s descriptions, which were really insightful. I’ve not tried anything like this before, but this is certainly an idea that I hope to try again… maybe asking children to commentate on places (using sites like Panoramas.dk or Gigapan.org) or films with the audio switched off. The children then enjoyed the flight in the airship and used some wonderful vocabulary to describe this part of the game. For their independent activity, they were asked to add a wide range of punctuation to an unpunctuated piece of text (which described the airship flight in Voltaic). However, this was cut short because of an unexpected visitor… something that happens occasionally in schools!

Day 7  - Today, we travelled to Amateria and had a brief look around. The children were intrigued by the theming of the area and noticed the change in weather too, giving the game a different atmosphere. Our main focus during this lesson was the ‘roller coaster’ ride around the island. The children loved this part of the game and watched the ride a number of times, thinking of words and phrases to describe the journey. They then wrote a paragraph (and in some cases, much more) to explain how they felt as they sat in the chair, were about to press the blue button, and were then taken around on the ride. Their descriptions were excellent, and this activity really helped them to express the movements and feelings in their writing. We recorded some of the children reading their work, using Garageband (adding sound effects from the game as a backing track), and these were added to our wiki. During the afternoon, the children also had an opportunity to create a new, hidden page on the wiki, trying out the different options and adding text / styles / images / audio / links on their pages (in preparation for next week’s work).

Day 8 - Today, the children were given a chance to edit and improve their descriptions of the roller coaster journey around Amateria. They were encouraged to think of ways of making each and every sentence even better, using (amongst other resources) our class collection of ‘Amateria’ vocabulary / phrases (created at the start of the lesson). A lack of time means that it is sometimes difficult to give children a chance to reread and improve their work, so this was a really useful exercise which certainly had a positive impact on the children’s writing.

Day 9 - Over the past 8 days, the children have had lots of experience describing new environments and exploring action / movement. In today’s lesson, I wanted the children to have a chance to write a story ending (in preparation for our work next week). So, we skipped to the end of the game, travelling to Narayan. After exploring for a while, we met Saavedro and discussed how we might get out of the situation we had found ourselves in:

• Saavedro has the book that we need,
• Although there is an airship outside, we are both trapped on Narayan because of the force field that surrounds the entire area,
• Saavedro doesn’t want to harm us (at the moment!). He had a chance to, but he walked away.

The children were challenged to write the ending of the game, thinking of a way of encouraging / forcing Saavedro to give up the book, allowing both us and him to return to our homes. Their ideas were really inventive and this was another valuable exercise, as the children already had the main framework of the story and simply had to think of an exciting way to bring these events to a close. In the afternoon, as a treat, we explored the Age that we had missed out (Edanna), looking at the unusual plants and creatures that inhabited the island.
 
Day 10 - As I mentioned in my previous post, I was hoping that the main outcome of our project was to collaborate on a class ‘Myst-style’ adventure game. When I first came up with the idea, I thought that this was something that we could do using Powerpoint, adding text / images / audio, and using action buttons to let the reader ‘move’ around the game. However, it soon because clear that a better way of trying this might be to use a wiki, as it allows the children to collaborate online simultaneously. Using a wiki would also be an easier way of publishing our work to a global audience. In today’s lesson, we planned our adventure, which I hope would follow the style of the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure‘ books I remember reading when I was young.

The image above shows the structure of our adventure. As a class, we will write a beginning for our story, with Saavedro stealing another book from Atrus, and then asking the reader to go and get it back for us. The reader will be able to make a choice, allowing them to travel to one of three places. When the choice was made, they would read a ‘mini’ adventure which will be written together by two children. I gave the children a simple structure for their part of the story, requiring them to produce:

• an introduction, describing the Age the reader has travelled to,
• a problem for the reader to encounter,
• a resolution, where the problem is fixed!

After the resolution, the reader will then be given another choice, taking them to a new part of the adventure and to some writing by different groups of children. Some groups (J–>O) will add a final ending to their story, giving the reader a clear (but not necessarily happy) ending!

The children planned their part of the adventure today using 2Connect (based on a simple template that I had prepared). Next week, we will spend our time drafting, editing and improving each section of the story. These three parts (along with digital copies of the children’s sketched / painted artwork) will then be added to the wiki with hyperlinks so that the reader can travel through the story, making the relevant choices along the way.

That’s my plan anyway… I’ll know by this time next week if it was successful!

Other thoughts:
 
The children’s enthusiasm for our work has continued to amaze me. After two weeks of Myst-related lessons, they are as keen as ever for Literacy to begin. This enthusiasm continues long after we have finished ‘playing’ that day’s part of the game, and they then go on to start any independent / group activities. They’ve even been asking me when our Myst display will be updated with new Ages and their suggestions for descriptions of each place.

If I’m honest, I’ve felt like we’ve dashed through the different environments this week. We could have spent a whole term using Myst for our Literacy work, looking at each place in great detail. However, there are many other units of Literacy that we have to cover, so there isn’t time. I wanted us to finish the game this week, allowing us to concentrate on making our own Myst adventure.

It will be interesting to see how things go next week…

Posted on November 14th, 2008 under school, video games, wikis • Tags: literacy, myst, tim rylands. • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback