Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 5 seconds

Designing Playful Learning for Kids – assignment idea

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 5 seconds

(I hit publish too soon before I even wrote anything here, so I’m sorry if you got a blank copy of this blogpost in your email or something!)

I’m just going to write down some assignment ideas I have for this semester…

  1. Design a playful bot (playful learning vs educational games). This is inspired by some of the bots (for social justice mainly) that were developed during Digital Pedagogy Lab UMW – I realized students could probably use something simple like IFTTT and connect their blog to Slack or Twitter or such and it could be just an activity for one day or something…
  2. This assignment idea is to get students to create something useful regarding edu games in Egypt, and they have a choice between:
    1. “Egyptian parents guide to playful learning  for kids age x”: in pairs who have access to kids the same age, they interview parents about good playful learning their kids enjoy, and they observe the kids. The assignment is to create a blogpost or video (without kids in them) to answer two questions about at least 4 different game: why is it fun? What are kids learning? They can’t take photos or video of the kids, but they should describe how they engaged with the game. No more than one digital game in all this.
    2. “Babysitter’s Guide to Egyptian X year olds”. Imagine you had to babysit a kid that age (x) for 5 hours. What would you do ? Describe the scenario (you need to interview some parents, caregivers, or teacher and actually try or watch these things with one or two kids). The scenario need not involve toys you buy, but can include regular items at home. No going to a club/park or TV or electronic games except one hour and you have to specify which shows/games and why each of your activities promote learning in a fun way.
    3. Explore AUC’s science fun Lab and develop a one-day camp for kids using some of the activities there. I might remove this option and instead make a visit to the Fun Lab just a regular whole-class thing and have someone from there describe it to them and have different students explore different parts and reflect on them. Probably better

For the above games, students pair up based on overlap in interest in:

  • Age group they have access to (e.g. nieces, nephews, friend who teaches KG or school)
  • Whether they are most interested in working on science, toys or fun at home

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