Learning Strategies

So I’m teaching a course called “Create Your Own Computer Game” to fourth-graders at The Saturday Course, and last week I’m talking to Eileen, an artist who teaches “The Art of Drawing”; I happen to remark that some of the kids in my class are having a hard time drawing convincing backgrounds for their games. Microworlds provides the standard 2-D drawing and painting tools, along with the capability of producing graphics under program control, but that isn’t sufficient for those of us who are artistically impaired. I have no skills in creating accurate perspective, nor in teaching others to do draw well, so Eileen suggested that we could combine our classes for part of the period, and her students could work with mine on their game backgrounds. What a good idea!

So today we team-taught for about 20 minutes. It was quite an unusual experience for both of us. The experiment was definitely a success for the kids, and we’re planning to repeat it next Saturday. This bears further consideration: we did it with very little planning, and it would be worth seeing what would happen if we did some serious curriculum work before trying it next year.

Labels: teaching and learning