3D GameLab Guildsite

This was a “made my week” moment! Twice a week I get to work with a group of 7th graders supporting them in an online course. We started in Moodle but I quickly realized the large assignments in the course would lend themselves to smaller chunks of learning as quests, and I started building. Of course, I’m always at least 10 minutes behind them keeping up with approving quests and getting new ones in there!

This afternoon they started saying they were out of quests. I was approving some but it didn’t make sense that they couldn’t access the next ones. We started talking and I discovered I had set the “required XPs” too high. I’m using a form of the planning roadmap, but realized I’d figured in some of the rewards twice. So I asked them to let me know how many XPs they have (I can’t yet see some of their gamer cards.) They were all gathered round. One boy said, “You can build quests?” (I guess they think the game trolls do all the work somewhere?)

Looking at my planning roadmap again, I calculated that I needed to drop 50 “required XPs” off the quest to make it accessible. I told them to try logging out and back in to see if they could access the next one. One boy ran to his workstation, quickly logged back in, and jumped out of his chair, pumping his arms wildly, shouting, “It’s there! This is better than getting a Facebook message!” Then they all ran over, excited to see if their next quest was there. (I started laughing and then wrote down his quote. They thought it was funny that I was writing it down!)

So, of course, you know what I’m doing this evening – building more quests!

Before the “run out of quests” event, I’d been listening curiously to a conversation between the tallest kid in the class and one of the shortest, who seem to gravitate to each other to work on their quests. One was explaining to the other the difference between rewards and awards. The other boy wanted to know how he knew that. The explainer said, “Because I looked it up.” I was fascinated at how important this was to them – they continued talking for several minutes about the awards and how to get them. It seemed to be a very important, deep conversation for them, and I was thinking how wonderful it is to let them experience blended learning and to have an opportunity for communication over how the system works.

Do I need to say it? I’m having the time of my life with this group and 3DGameLab. It’s so great to see the potential for mastery learning. When they don’t read carefully or follow directions, I can ask them to dig deeper. When they say they’re confused, it’s an opportunity for a conversation online, or a face-to-face meet to talk about it. I’ve been in education 26 years and have absolutely been waiting for 3DGameLab! Thank you, Chris and Lisa, and all involved in getting this project going!