According to this week’s content, I have learned several trends that will affect students’ educational experience in the future.
The most interesting part for me is gamification. Even though this trend would not expand in K-12 education, gamification can support college students in solving real-life problems. These real-life problems require academic knowledge and non-academic knowledge.
Gamification and Twine
Non-academic knowledge usually refers to tips of solving problems from everyday life like dealing with stress. According to my experience of using Twine for the first time, I apply the activity of narration. This narrative activity is inspired from the exam week, which is close to most students’ current situation.
Here is an example:
College students are usually stuck between school and society, so it is important for them to learn some skills in mental health. In addition, this narrative activity is most suitable for the pre-training principle. The goal of applying the pre-training principle in the Twine story is to let learners familiarize their stress rate rather than previewing the definition of stress.
As for applying academic knowledge, the narrative activity is also applicable for gamification in a narrative format. The best example is a Twine project called Chinese Immigration by Emily McCue. This project involves several historical events like the gold rush. I feel a sense of engagement when I was trying this narrative game. That project is suitable for the recall of all knowledge from the course compare to my project. If not, learners would forget all these contents in a few days.
In conclusion, Twine can collect academic knowledge and non-academic knowledge for college students. However, the way of organizing both types of Twine projects is considerable.
Reference
McCue, Emily, Chinese Immigration: a student project using Twine, https://emilymccue.ca/immigration/, accessed Nov 20, 2022.
I absolutely agree with you that games make studying much more enticing. I also tried a couple of learning games when I was studying English. Actively saying the words out loud greatly helped me memorize a lot of words in a very short amount of time. As for Twine, I also tried the Chinese immigrant project you mentioned in the post, I think the idea of letting the students choose their own future is great, but I would love to have a couple more options for each decision.