Guardians of the National Game Day
The first week of November. Finally back in Finland. The last leg of tour outside Finland behind us it was time to focus on Finnish schools and libraries. While both Santeri and Mikael were feeling the battle-stress by then, there was no time to rest!
First week of workshops was hosted by the wonderful library of Tapiola in Espoo. The library already promotes the joy of discovery and tries to spark curiosity in their customers. For example, they are early adopters of 3D-printing and teaching programming. It is no surprise then that all our Tour-games received a warm welcome. Mikael hosted three ComputerCraftEdu-workshops and a Kerbal-workshop and latter half of the week saw Santeri with the whole set: Gamestar Mechanic, KerbalEdu and ComputerCraftEdu.
(picture from: https://www.facebook.com/tapiolankirjasto)
The workshop space and computers were limited, so we were working in pairs. This familiar “restriction” can either be taken as a boon or a bane. We choose the former. Instead of complaining about the lack of hardware, you can turn the situation into a learning possibility. You can pair experts with novices and make them share their expertise, make them talk. Many times the difference between playing at home and playing at school is the sense of companionship you get from playing with your friends. You might get the same feeling at home but many times the company you keep in multiplayer games is anonymous and the focus is on the tension between the players. We are trying to set a different tone when playing in class and starting of by helping a friend goes a long way. Another option is to match the student by skill: learning the game together can be helpful and having two pairs of eyes and hands can lower the threshold tremendously. Visa versa, having someone who plays as much as you do can open up new perspectives to the game.
TeacherGaming was the guardian of the National Gameday in Finland this year. Again, this sent us around the country once more to host workshops. Many of the locations were in the southern part of Finland but we also made sure our northern compatriots were not left out. For them, we hosted a webinar to get them up to speed so they would be able to run their own workshops as well.
We also partnered with IlonaIT and Metaverstas to offer a MinecraftEdu webinar for Finnish teachers. A great show to watch if you know any Finnish :)
The workshops themselves were aimed to promote gaming as a cultural phenomenon and to expand the meanings we attach to games. Maybe we can highlight different sides of gaming; in addition to being interactive and great fun, they offer a broad range of experiences in addition to being entertaining. We met hundreds of students and tens of teachers during the week and passed on the game challenge to them: the idea was to challenge someone they know to experience games in a new way. Maybe sit your parents down to play with you, explore a new genre (Mikael is really afraid of horror games!) or try different media (many of us are boardgame geeks, too).
In the meanwhile Santeri was running around Helsinki doing CPD (professional development) for local teachers. Our model is rather robust. We take only a few keen teacher per session and train them in their own computer suite in the morning and then invite their classes to take part in the training in the afternoon. This way we ensure that the teacher get past the first few thresholds. Free free to try it at your school!
We have noticed that while mass lectures can ‘convert’ people in larger quantities, pinpoint in-depth sessions for teachers that really want to get going are better for the overall penetration and for creating small pockets of expertise around the country. This way teachers can more easily share the knowledge. It’s a fact that our small company can’t run training for the whole world, so we need to focus on creating high concentration of skill where ever we go that can be spread locally.
One special training we ran.. actually it was a workshop for the executive board of education department of Helsinki. For those of you who don’t know, Helsinki is our nation’s capital and the biggest city in the country. We had a group of kids from a local school Siltamäki playing with the board. Every board member had their own student tutor helping them with the controls and with the turtle robots. By the time we moved from learning Minecraft to learn how to program some turtles, the board members took a step back and just wow’ed at students coding a whole bunch of bridge building, house building, mining and other turtles.
It was probably the easiest workshop ever for us ‘trainers’ and really showed how the next generation of learners can adapt to things like coding much more naturally.
More trainings coming up in December!
