Recently, a colleague and I went to pitch our creative ideas for the Lumici Slate Learning Journey to the Queen Elizabeth Academy in Mansfield. An interesting yet somewhat daunting task for the start of your second week at work.
Immediately, I felt apprehensive about the impending presentation in front of high school students; were they going to listen? Would they even care? Understandable worries when you’re showing something to a target audience for the first time.
Visitor badges around our necks and a weird feeling of nostalgia — it’s always a bit odd going back to a high school when you’re older, feels like you shouldn’t be there! — we found ourselves in the classroom, setting up powerpoint, neatening our shirts, having a quick breather before that familiar bell rang and a wave of eager faced students began to flood into the small I.C.T room.
After introducing ourselves. we began our talk, and I was surprised to see that the students were genuinely interested in what we had to say, maybe the words ‘Game’, ‘Gamification’, and ‘Gamefly’ got their attention!
They were then given the task “What would they do if they were in our shoes, how would they design a learning game?”. I was impressed by how they threw themselves into it, and within 10 minutes we had some solid ideas coming from all the teams in the classroom, our apprehension was gone and we were happy with how the presentation was going.
Soon after this task we presented our ideas for the Learning Journey, this was going to help us solidify our ideas and determine which design route we were going to take. We got outstanding feedback from the students on all of our ideas. They told us what they wanted to see and which ideas mostly appealed. We then moved onto our final task for the group, similar to the other one but more relevant to us, how would they make the learning journey? Once again they sprung to the task and began to churn out idea after idea, one about time travel, one about shops, one about Space Olympics, all interesting and thought out ideas. Our presentation came to an end and we were relieved, happy, and excited about the feedback we got, we knew what to do and how to do it. This was an invaluable experience for us and has helped us further develop our Learning Journey idea in the correct direction, I personally can’t wait to see it develop more and to show our product to more schools in the future.
Originally published at www.lumici.co.uk on July 30, 2015.
