ESCAF game programming evaluation

Evaluation for ESCAF game programming club

One of the Rwanda Center for learning and laptops summer 2010 objectives was to run 3 clubs at ESCAF – Story telling, Game programming and Journalism – for 5 weeks with one training session a week. The game programming club aimed at helping students to develop four different games; we had five trainers in the first two weeks but three during the last three. Through an elimination process, the voted for four most favorite games.
1.Volleyball: This is a mini-volleyball game with 4 players, 2 on each team. The ball moves from one side of the net to the other.

2. UBUTE: Ubute is a game that Rwandan children use to play every day at school or even at their homes,it's played by a group of people and one of the group has to start the game. The game is to run after someone then if you touch him, it's his turn to run after others. The one who's running after others is the one who has Ubute. If i can translate Ubute in this game it's like then you have to touch to another one so that you give out your shame to him/her and everyone has to run away, do his best to not touch him,it's a really funny game children like it in Rwanda.



3.Racing: It consists of runners running and touch a specified line and then come back .


4.AGATI: the athletes stand on two lines, each line facing the other. Two persons standing on one edge of each line, race around the two lines forming a rectangle, and then switches with the other person on the other edge. It kind complicated to explain if you never watched it but it’s like relay- race.
NOTE: Because of the complexity of this game we developed SOCCER instead we developed soccer.


This is like air-hockey where each player can touch the ball only once before the other opponent touches it. The Rwandan kids play this game very often. This video game can be played by two people, the left one uses “Q” and “A” keys to move the player up and down respectively, and the right one uses “UP” and “DOWN” arrows.
Main problems encountered

1. The way of choosing which games to develop: Giving the kids 100 % of freedom to choose games doesn’t help them to learn much, mostly because if the game is very hard to program, the trainers themselves can’t teach correctly.

Our action: For AGATi (relay-race), I suggested LESI, – it’s in the category of football – another game that boys play very often, and they liked it. Another game that was a little more complicated was UBUTE, however the trainer for this game tried to do his best.

Suggestion: I think we should get together and plan the games ahead of the club’s kickoff day and then we should make the students familiar with the concepts of the game before they start developing it. For example, if it’s volleyball; first take them to play volleyball; if it’s a new game to them, it’s even more fun, because they like to learn new things. Moreover we should plan several games and let them pick their favorites among our proposals.

2. Inconsistency of trainers: After week 2, even though we got another trainer, the other two had to leave for various reasons. This means we had four groups for three trainers.

Our actions: I noticed it would be so confusing to mix that group with the others since we would have restarted over. Therefore I asked other interns and staff to give us a hand; however because they had other plans, they couldn’t show up as often.

Suggestion: I believe inconveniences may surprisingly come anytime, but there should be a plan of double-checking the availability of trainers. Another alternative is to teach one game at a time; which helps all the students to be on the same page (disadvantage: this limits their curiosity and creativity).

3. Shortage of available classrooms: Having four different groups in the same classroom with one blackboard was so challenging. Since we don’t use the projector, sometimes we really needed to write on the blackboard for more explanation.
Our action: Some groups like Volleyball and football had to go outside in the yard.
Suggestion: If it was well organized, I am pretty sure the ESCAF authorities would have given us other rooms. In the future, we should specify what types of needs we need from the schools’ authorities.
4. Un-programmable/hard-to-program games: this issue relates to the first one. After the kids were given full right to choose games, the trainers felt pressure to program those games. However we should not forget that OLPC interns are not experts in programming.

Our actions: In our understanding AGATI and UBUTE were the most complicated; so I proposed the kids another game. As I couldn’t come up with a good way to develop AGATI, I brainstormed what else the Rwandan kids may like. LESI (air-hockey-like game) - which is commonly played - was the first game to come in my mind. For this meeting I brought a ball and went outside with my group, and then the kids played the game and were very eager to implement it in Scratch.

Suggestion: If there is a plan to improve the computation thinking of these kids, OLPC trainers should also get more trained how to use in depth this visual programming software (Scratch, Etoys, TurtleArt). Other activities are easier to grasp but these ones are a little harder. SEE ALSO suggestions for ISSUE #1

5. Different educational level: Students were in different grades ranging from P4 to P6. Because of this there are some mathematical concepts they couldn’t understand on the same level, I would say for insistence the Cartesian plan which is commonly used in programming.
Our action: We tried our best to teach all of them the most basic features and elements of a graph and how it relates to someone’s position in the real life.
Suggestion: I don’t think grouping them according to their grades is the most suitable solution because we want students to help each other, instead we should test their knowledge about different mathematical concepts (angles, graph …) before the clubs and then trainers should figure out together the best way to approach those types of subjects.
6. Lack of follow-up on their retaining capacity: We gave them homework only less than two times during the whole time, so some kids couldn’t even remember what they studied the previous session.

Our action: We didn’t do much to test their retaining capacity over time. We always continued from the previous week’s work.

Suggestion: This issue is the result of lack of pre-session evaluation and organization. Before training there is should be a meeting of trainers to evaluate the previous session and plan the following one.

7. EXPECTED ISSUE: The most common issue you would expect while using XO 1.0 is the mouse freezing. Also some students came without having charged laptops.

Our action: For the mouse problem, we borrowed external wired mice from the office and we would share them among the students who had issues. The kids with dead-battery XOs shared with thosewho had them charged.

Suggestion: Assuming we still have XO 1.0, we should make more mice available for training use. In case of sharing an XO due to lack of battery power, the project done should be copied into the other XO so that the student won’t have to redo the same work.

8. Lack of motivation: There wasn’t any type of material motivation.

Our action: Before we took a decision to install gcompris and english4fun for all students, we installed them only for students who were performing the best; which I noticed was not the best motivation because all kids really need those educational activities.

Suggestion: There should be a very small budget for candies, cookies ...maybe once two weeks. I suggest this because the researchers found the kids are very interested in material things.

Post-view of teacher's training

In this blog i'm going to show my own view about the 4-day long OLPC teacher's training. I believe we (OLPC interns and CLL staff) achieved the goals we had aimed, even though we faced some obstacles I am about to talk about.

If I recall these were our target for the training:

1. Explaining OLPC mission and principles
All the speakers (Juliano, Sam, Desire, Jimmy,..) did a great a great job in achieving this goal.
Juliano's presentation was a nice explanation about OLPC's worldwide mission, and Jimmy and Desire proved that what the kids can do with XO is not a theory but a fact. The teachers were so amazed of the kids' projects about MATSIKO; therefore this was a productive motivation.

Improvement: I understand it would have been a terrible idea to teach them Scratch, but as one teacher suggested "We can see what the kids did, but we want to know how they did it" we should have printed the codes for one of the projects, and distribute them among the teachers. The majority will not even look at them, but some ambitious teachers will use the handouts (old ones) provided to try to figure out how to program. Scratch activity has some sample projects which might be abstract to them (99% of them have never seen Trampoline), but MATSIKOs are more realistic.

2. Helping teachers get comfortable with the laptops

I would say after the training all the teachers knew basic interfaces (checking the power available, changing battery, naming an XO, viewing the frame, ..). The theater (THUMBS UP) helped them to know more about troubleshooting.

3. Teaching basic activities

According to the decision from our meeting, the non-debatable basic activities are write, record, and memorize (plus Browse, Wiki, Calculate, just in case). In my view, the teachers understood pretty well how to use them.

Improvement: Even if I agree the fact of teaching one teacher (who is already ahead) other advanced activities like E-toys, Scratch or TurtleArt; I thought it was not a very smart idea to have some groups learning those A-level activities for the beginners.

Conclusion: I strongly hope MINEDUC will organize the next training phase in less then three months otherwise everything we did would be nothing. A final remark is that communication between us and MINEDUC needs to be improved.

GOOD/BAD? Although we didn't intend it, I think the lack of enough power strips (extension cords) was handy to show the teachers how they can handle a situation like this.

Geometric figures with E-Toys

Lesson: Geometric figures
There are different geometric figures and their most fundamental elements are sides' length and angles. E-toys is one of the best tools to teach a esson about geometric figures.
Process:
1. Since there is always an initial point to start drawing any figure, thus first you draw a small dot.
2. In the viewer of the "dot" object, you create commands by specifying the size of angles and the length of sides, and then use the "pen" to automatically draw a geometric figure.

Example: drawing a Decagon
Angle (exterior) size = 360/10 = 36
Side length = 100

through these computations the students would be able to answer to the questions asked on pages 117-122 of the book Mathematics Pupil's Book Primary Six by the MINEDUC, regarding finding the size of angles, the length of sides,..

Outcomes:
* The kids will learn how to use the calculator through Calculate activity.
* They will have more understanding about angles and their relationship with the number of sides that constitute a figure.
* The kids understand visual elements better than abstract ones
* They will have a coding experience
* The best thing for E-toys, they can create a book of geometric figures

Teacher's training

Objectives

Before planning the teacher's training, we should first specify the goals we want to achieve. People may have different views, but according to my own experience with OLPC learning process in Rwanda, I think they need know not necessary how to manipulate XO and its built-in software but how to use this technology to ease their lessons. Each teacher should be able to use the most basic and multi-task XO software (I will define what programs I think are more fundamental) since we have only one week of training. Note also that it's not a very good idea to overload the material to the beginners.

To-teach list

1.Record: Elementary school students develop their knowledge much better through visual elements, and pictures can be inserted in a plenty of activities; so Record should definitely be taught.
2.Write: In any activity, you need to type at least the name of the project, so they should know how use keys like Shift in order to capitalize or something else. They need to know to create tables (which easier to collect a database) , to change the font, the color of the text...
3.E-toys: when I get to talk about E-toys, that when I use the term multi-task software, because it helps to make an infinite number of pages in more organized way. You can assign a topic to each page (for example a geography book, having a page for rivers, another for climate, two pages for eclipse and so forth). You can what other activities do, for insistence painting/drawing (Paint), writing (Write), coding (scratch or turtle art).

Training planning

DAY 1: Quick facts about XO (how to open the laptop, role of antennas, capacity, journal, shortcuts keys to home, to network, screen max/min, battery, saving/keeping)

DAY 2: Record and Write. This would the time to teach them these activities and network. They would take a picture of themselves in Record and use to write their short biography and then share them with 3 other people. A then end, we can do an application of making a pictionary that consist of different subjects (geography, math, english,...). Assign them homework.

DAY 3: Help to fix the problem they encountered in their homework. Introduce E-Toys and show them how if they a lot of stuff to write E-toys Book would have been easier. Introduce the painting tool in E-toys. Divide them into groups where they would be required to come up with a lesson/topic and show how they can teach it with the laptop.

DAY 4: Help them for some issues. Let each group present their work. CLOSE!!!!

Understanding teachers' complaints

Even though I didn't conduct any teacher's training, because the teachers were unavailable due to the ongoing exams, I was able to interview one teacher at Kagugu about their life and job. He is a mid-thirty-year old man who teaches math. When we started the conversation he told me the most important thing that would make his life easier is "getting a good salary". Despite having a wife and a couple of kids, it doesn't matter for him even though he would be assigned to work far from his family. After i noticed how ambitious he was, i asked for his views about XOs. "I was so happy when they announced the deployment of XOs at Kagugu", he told me. At first he wasn't open about his feelings about the OLPC learning project. But later on, he cited all the challenges that keep him from achieving the goals of OLPC.
1. " We don't get trained enough so we don't feel comfortable with using laptops in class, moreover usually some kids know more than we do", some teachers think it's embarrassing.
2. " There are some subjects we don't any idea how we can teach them using laptops" which is understandable, but i think sometimes they oppose using them in anything.
3. "Even though we would use them, we would waste a lot of time, since it takes time to distribute and branch the laptops to the power; mainly because of the new professorial education system, we have only less than 45 minutes in a class"
4. "All classrooms have more than 40 students so it's time-consuming to go over and check if every single student is doing the right thing."

I'm still thinking the best planning to oppose these obstacles but if anybody has a point or a suggestion to make, feel welcome to post them here.

Is there any way to motivate teachers to make good use of XOs?

This week, I didn’t do any teacher training session because of the unavailability of teachers both at Nonko and Rwamagana. However I had three game programming training sessions to the kids at ESCAF and Nonko. These student’s trainings gave me a hint of what we should focus on during either teacher’s or student’s trainings. They both need motivation and practicable examples of what XOs can do. For insistence, I noticed that after kids have practiced a particular game, they get more understanding of using Scratch commands.

I figured out this is the same case for teacher too few weeks ago when I was at Kagugu where this English teacher didn’t want to use scratch to teach his students a topic about relative pronouns. His main concern was that he wouldn’t be able to grade (evaluate) his pupils. He didn’t want to grade each child’s XO; but after we explained him that he can tell the kids to submit their work on the host page where he would grade them without checking on every laptop, he found out the importance of scratch activity. This is only one example, but I know all the teacher are like this one, they need to understand not necessarily how to use every single piece of a certain activity but more importantly how it can helpful in the day-to-day life.


Apart of from this observation, I would also suggest to install gcompris and English4Fun activities on the laptops of students at ESCAF because almost all of them have shown a productive result from those activities. I think that even five interns would be enough to install them in all the computers for few hours, so we should schedule a day to do this technical support for the sake of these considerably-motivated students.

Scratch-developed soccer game to be made by the kids

We started this week working with the only private school to have received XOs laptops. From what I heard the students’ parents of this primary school ESCAF situated in Nyamirambo contributed to buy these laptops and OLPC agreed to help training them. The OLPC learning team has initiated three learning clubs at ESCAF: Journalism, Game Programming and Story-telling. In the game programming club which I am part of, we asked kids to cite all games they wanted to develop and we made them vote for the top four then divided them into groups. My group was supposed to develop AGATI – which is a relay-race-like game.

Because there was another group that was developing a RACING game, I proposed to the kids another game called LESI. It seems like air hockey in which they use feet; it’s played by two players where each one defends his own goal by shooting the ball in the goal of his/her opponent. Moreover you can’t stop the ball; you are only allowed one touch. The students - especially boys- love this game because they practically play it almost every single day.



I was so impressed that ESCAF pupils are eager to learn and use XO activities and I liked their communication. The only issue I meet there is that the kids are in different grades; so that if I need to show them some mathematical concepts – for insistence the graph - , some get them pretty quickly but I have to take more time for the others.