- What is your experience with video game learning supports? Which principles (Mayer’s and Merrill’s) seem to be commonly applied in in-game support and which ones are often missed in your experience?
When I was younger, I used to love the game “The young person’s guide to the orchestra,” based on and utilising music from the Benjamin Britten symphony of the same name. The game introduces an adventure plot wherein the player must locate all the missing pieces of the instruments on a safari expedition in order to complete the orchestra. The players must play additional minigames further familiarising themselves with the instruments in order to win them.
This game is a stellar example of Mayer’s multimedia principle, beautifully combining visual animations with relevant narration / musical interlude for a fun and engaging experience. It also effectively employs Mayer’s segmenting principle by breaking the orchestra down into sections (percussion, strings, brass, woodwinds) and even further into individual instruments! The young person’s guide to the orchestra also uses Merrill’s demonstration principle by using animations to break down and show each instruments’ complex composition. While the game does utilize Meyer’s voice principle, it does not very effectively employ the personalization principle since it uses relatively formal language for the young audience it’s aimed towards.
- In the reading, Students Need to DO Something, do any of the author’s experiences with passive learning in K-12 classrooms resonate with your own? Why do you think active learning is not more prevalent in K-12? Have you tried using any of these activities in a classroom? Which one looks most appealing to you?
My middle and high school (same school) continuously emphasized the importance of PBL and from this young age I was doing weekly discussions and presentations as well as independent studies in various classes. Additionally, I went to a Montessori elementary school so I was always very involved in my own learning since Montessori’s core value is self direction. I think the reason my school was able to implement PBL and active learning so effectively was due to our smaller class sizes; since I went to a private school, our class sizes were about 15 students, half the size of an average public school class in my hometown. I believe that class size is a constraint to the mainstream implementation of active learning since it’s much easier to teach a group of 30 students when they’re sitting down versus to have them all moving, doing activities, or coordinated into smaller groups etc. Collaboration, mini-projects, and kinesthetic work were the cornerstone of my education growing up which I loved at the time and look back on with gratitude. They were, and still are, my favourite and most effective ways to learn and I think classrooms across Canada would benefit from their implementation.