Developing Situational interest: A project
Genesis of the project
Here, learning monitors with counters. A student lists the tasks they have to complete, choses which they prefere and like least and can place the counters on the board depending on a task they have achieved. Their apreciation rating factors into the size/colour of the counter they put.
COVID-19 and repercussions
During my experience as a teacher/educator, I realised that without an interesting context, students tend to let go of the educational experience quite quickly. With influence from Cordova and Lepper's paper "Intrinsic Motivation and the Process of Learning : Beneficial Effects of Contextualization, Personalization, and Choice", I started working on ways to develop the motivation to learn/work of primary school students in the Western world.
More generally, I have been looking at different ways in which children can find enjoyment in learning. Everything doesn't work for everyone; some students don't need the extra pressure of an educational board, they need to feel understood and able to perform, gaining confidence to find their place in an academic environement.
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The motivational tools I developed at first were very physical. They were objects, designed to capture a student’s interest in their learning experience through tangible means.
My very first iterations were a simple system I created, where students got to fill in a “learning path” that kept track of the activities they did. These activities were listed in advance, broadly. They were exercises such as “reading a chapter from a book” or “doing a maths exercise”. Every time one of these had been accomplished by the student, they got to go further in their learning plan, aware that some steps in the plan, much like rewards, were more playful and less academic than others. I used that method rather successfully with a student I was tutoring.
Now, the Covid-19 Pandemic has hit. Throughout different countries, children are being forced back home to do their learning. This made me think: isn’t there a way in which the project I have been working on could be really beneficial for this new occurrence? Could it not both facilitate motivation for children at home and communication with teachers who may be at loss regarding the amount that their students are actually achieving?
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This is why I have started to work on digital occurrences of this material which I am hoping to make accessible for teachers stranded at home. To do so, I need support and help from both teachers and parents, to get as much feedback from them as possible to create the best possible outcome. I also greatly appreciate help from designers with different specialties, as their knowledge and mastery of their tools could truly bring another layer of quality to these emerging tools.
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The student moved, and I went on to do something else, trying out more narrative/ story-led versions of this. Stories then became an envelope for students to follow their progress with, in a more motivational but also creative and playful way.