I love the creativity of students. We worked on a whack a mole game in class today. The purpose was to create a user control but of course students want to do more. Or at least different. Clearly the images I provided are too boring for most.
Several students used pictures of themselves or a friend. Others found other images to use. As you might expect at least one student went and found a picture of me. Yes, “whack Mr. Thompson.” But he was clever about at. He took a standard picture of me wearing my hat for one image. For the other he found an image of a hat much like the one I wear. When the program runs it almost looks like the hat is moving up to show the "mole" underneath.
Another student wanted to add sound. I made him look that up and figure it out for himself. I expect sound to show up in projects from a lot of students in the next few days. That may or may not be a good thing. The jury is still out on that. In any case students do a great job of teaching each other and learning from each other.
Letting students get creative really seems to help them learn. They do more and try more things. They decide to look things up and so learn how to teach themselves. That is more than worth being used in a whack a mole game.
2 comments:
This is one of my favorite assignments for my game class. They use Corona and install it on they phone. If they have an android that is.
Creativity is a great thing, and a challenge too. I get outstanding creations from kids that I never would have envisioned if I had structured their projects a little more. AND, there are some students who struggle mightily with "analysis paralysis" and never figure out what to do with that creativity! But overall it's much more enriching and fun to err on the side of letting them be more creative.
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