Short weeks can be interesting. As a classroom teacher it meant trying to fit five days worth of learning into four. Seeing the students once a week has meant, no big difference, except that when I see my Monday classes I’m trying to fit 90 minutes of instruction into 45. There are other ways of scheduling but this late in the year making changes confuses everyone. Throw a two hour delay in on Wednesday and your plans for the week swiftly go out the window. If you think I’m complaining, I’m not. Changes, while maddening also give me the chance to be creative & try things that I may not have had the chance to otherwise.
This week grade 4-6 found themselves:
—
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
—
Partially due to clean up time & lack of supplies- these classes got to visit Zork – a classic text based video game. A parsely game- one in which you type simple commands to move on. One of the original computer Role Playing Games. We began by discussing memory and how limited and expensive it was when home computing started. Heck, the Apollo guidance computer had 2k. I happen to have an Apple IIe and an original Macintosh in my lab. So we discuss kilobytes and megabytes and gigabytes. Then we start and by the end most of the class has been dragged into Zork, frustrated, but enjoying themselves. Learning, through play. Without getting in details – think about it, these students (many reluctant readers) have to read to play. They need to decode and use context clues to determine what to do next. Then they have to problem solve since games like this are really ginormous puzzles. “I keep trying to break this with my fist, but it doesn’t know what a fist is!” One girl got more and more frustrated, but had stopped reading the description of where she was- that now said “an open window” so she could enter a new location.
Oh, the goal in 20ish minutes was to get into the kitchen, one of the first steps. Those that made it got a Hershey’s kiss. Once the first person did it the moans and groans of how impossible it was died down. The students learned perseverance or at least demonstrated it while playing. The students left my room many wanting to continue and bookmarking the site. I used Zorkonline.net which has a wide variety of text based games for free. I originally had the kids just do a google search on their chrome books for “Zork.” Yes, I did mention that this game was part of the book Ready Player One which may get some older kids to pick that book up.
Next on the docket:
Sixth grade will begin working on a personal project to coincide with the district Science/Engineering Fair.
Fifth grade will have a couple days to integrate their Valley Forge Day experience into either a comic (we’d been studying drawing) or their own parsely game. After that the plan is to finish the year with their rovers traveling across Mars and completing the missions from this year’s FLL game “Into Orbit.”
Fourth grade will return to their robots in preparation for the inaugural Indian Creek 500 – a robot race using light sensors to travel around a track. this is Indianapolis after all.