Mentorship and Collaboration

Today I’ll be reviewing another Edutopia podcast entitled “Teaching Teamwork through Video Game Development.”

This podcast focuses on Computer Science teacher, Ben Chun,  and his high school class, which is making  educational video games for a 5^th grade class. This is a really neat integration idea between different students and schools. The designing students had the opportunity to meet the students and teacher that they are designing these games for.

I think this is a really awesome opportunity and neat idea. Technology isn’t often used to mentor and connect students. However, this relationship has obvious benefits to everyone involved. The high school students have a clear real life application for their work, which is a HUGE plus. The elementary students get games personally made for them, to engage their interests to help them learn. The elementary teacher gets incredibly more say than the average teacher over what the educational games played in class actually entail.

The high school students are broken up into groups of three to create the video games. The roles are broken up quite similarly to the way that they might be broken up at a real software company, which gives the students great experience and understanding.  Except that all of the students in the group are responsible for designing the game, which maintains academic focus. The real-world emphasis in all aspects of this particular project is especially appealing to me and fits in well with the 21^st Century Skills Model.

The fifth grade students were even able to visit the high school to further their relationship with the high school class. During this visit the fifth grade students were able to play some demos of the games, which allowed the high school students to get live feedback from the ‘customer.’ The level of real-world and mentorship integration in this project is mind-boggling to me. It seems like this is an ideal situation that more teacher should be striving for to really make learning collaborative across schools, ages, and content-areas.