Reflection

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, simplify, 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. 

My middle/high 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. I have found the opportunities for active learning in this course to be refreshing since all of my other courses are lecture based. PBL strategies were, and still are, my favourite and most effective ways to learn and I think classrooms across Canada would benefit from their implementation.

Lesson Plan

Quiz Based on Hypothetical Lesson

Image Alt Text: