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After an extremely successful set of lessons using Myst III (Exile) to support our Literacy work in November, my children have been asking me to use the next game in the series in class. I was keen to take advantage of their enthusiasm, and decided to investigate Myst IV (Revelation) to see how it could be used in the run up to our SATs tests at the end of term. Having spoken to others on Twitter, I know that some teachers are using games in the Myst series after they have ‘got SATS out of the way’. However, I wanted to see if we could actually use games of this type to review a range of Literacy concepts before the tests.

So, I bought the next game and spent many hours over the Easter break playing through it (using this fantastic walkthrough) and thinking of ways of using it effectively in the classroom. We started our new Myst unit this week, and the results have been just as impressive. I’m not going to go through our practical classroom arrangements, or the reasons for using games like this, as this information was covered in the previous blog posts (see the week one, week two and week three posts). However, I know that the activity ideas that I posted last time were useful to many people, so I thought that I would describe how we’re using Myst this time around.

Day One

After a six month break from Myst, I first wanted to give the children a chance to think about the characters we met and the places we travelled to in the last game. So, to review this information, we planned and made our own adverts to promote the game to others. This was also a good way of reviewing the children’s knowledge of persuasive writing which we have also discussed a number of times in class this year.

As a starting point, I downloaded a number of existing game trailers from www.gametrailers.com (e.g. Burnout Bikes, Monsters vs Aliens, Lego Batman, Lego Indiana Jones) and saved these on our school’s network. The children watched them on their laptops and recorded the persuasive language that appeared in them. They also started to think of ways that they could use these ideas in their own Myst III trailer.

Day Two

After collecting useful persuasive language yesterday, the next task was to write scripts for a voiceover for their own game trailer. The video for the trailer came from a number of Animoto videos which I had created (using screenshots from the game). One of these is shown here:

The children used the images in the video to give a clear structure to their trailer, writing persuasive phrases which matched the action as it appeared (‘meet intriguing characters’, ‘explore incredible landscapes’, ‘you won’t believe your eyes as you open the door to adventure’ etc.). We then imported the Animoto video into Garageband, added music from the Myst III soundtrack (which I had bought on eBay last year) and then recorded the children’s scripts as the voiceover.

The result was an impressive set of game trailers with animated screenshots from the game, authentic music and some of the most persuasive phrases I’ve ever heard!

Day Three

After reviewing what happened in Myst III, it was time to start Myst IV! We watched the introduction video which appears at the start of the game to get some ideas about what might happen during this game. The children then spent the main part of the lesson exploring predictions about the events that could take place in the next part of the series. I told them that Myst IV took place about ten years after the events of Myst III, so they knew that Atrus’ baby would have grown up and would be around the same age as them. This created lots of discussion. Although I’d already played the game myself, I tried not to give any secrets away, so it was really interesting to hear the children’s thoughts about the development of the characters. They seemed particularly interested in Saavedro (the ‘bad guy’ in the last game) and weren’t sure if he would be happy now that he had returned to his family, or if he might come back and cause more trouble!

Day Four

Time to begin the adventure… The class were extremely excited to be able to press the ‘New Game’ button finally! Some of them seemed a little surprised to meet Yeesha (the baby from Myst III) so soon and then go off on a gondola flight towards Tomahna.

The children then wrote a recount of their flight, in the form of a postcard home to a friend. One of the new features in this game is the photo option which lets you capture and store images from the game. The children were given a piece of card with our captured photograph already printed on the front. On the back, they were able to describe how they met Yeesha, the ride in the gondola and the arrival at Tomahna, again using some fascinating descriptions along the way.

We also used the conversation with Yeesha to review direct / reported speech.

Day Five

In the last lesson of the week, we began exploring Atrus’ observatory. As we entered the building, individual children gave running commentaries to describe the things they saw and heard, the smells they might encounter, and the emotions they were going through as they walked through the building. We then met Atrus, tried (but failed) to complete his sound puzzle and watched in surprise as some of the machinery blew up!

This exploration took a while as the children’s commentaries were very detailed. They also made notes in their own Myst notebooks as they looked around, occasionally writing sentences / phrases / similes to describe different parts of the environment at particular ‘pause’ points.

Finally, we went down the elevator and stepped on the wooden walkway which overlooked the buildings in Tomahna. The children noticed how different this part of Tomahna was to the view at the start of Myst III.

They then went on to edit / improve text that I had previously prepared. These were differentiated and gave the children a structure for their writing. They were asked to add more powerful vocabulary (including adjectives and adverbs as appropriate) and a wider range of punctuation to make the writing much more interesting.

Again, their descriptions were extremely good, with some particularly well chosen words. It never fails to amaze me how the game helps to bring out some incredible ideas and vocabulary… one child noticed that one of the windows in the observatory looked like a cobweb. I completely failed to notice this, but it was a perfect description!

On a slightly separate note, I was asked on Twitter recently… “Which Myst is better for teaching with?”

Having played through Myst III and IV completely, I found Myst III much easier to play. The puzzles in Myst IV seem much more fiddly and a little frustrating sometimes. Even using the walkthrough, I had to replay many of the puzzles a number of times in order to complete them successfully.

I’m also glad that I used Myst III with the children first as it was relatively easy to grasp the storyline. The plot for Myst IV relies a little upon knowledge of Atrus’ sons and the terrible things that that they did in Myst I and II. Having said that, the children are really interested in these characters and are keen to find out their background history. I found this page which has some fascinating information about the Myst series, up to the start of Myst IV. It might help to know this information if you are going to talk about the characters to the children, although I know that some people just use the amazing environments as starting points for classroom work, ignoring the people in it completely.

One of the positive features of Myst IV is that the landscapes are much more detailed. There are lots more subtle effects when looking out over the incredible environments. Birds fly around you, clouds float above your head and cast shadows on the ground, trees and plants rustle in the breeze and other special effects really bring to life the locations that you are transported to.

There are also some wonderful creatures in this game, which I’m really excited to share with the children. They were really captivated by the ’squee’ in Myst III, so I’m planning to use the various animals that appear across the Ages in Myst IV during later lessons.

After just a week, it is great to be using Myst again in the classroom. The children are extremely excited about our lessons (as they were last time), and the work they are producing is of a very high standard. Have you explored Myst yet?