My Role and Experiences
Thus far, I have had the opportunity to sit in on multiple classes and found the environment at School One* to be welcoming and friendly. I sometimes worry that my mere presence in the classroom, especially in the middle school, disrupts student focus. On several occasions, students have dropped whatever project they were working on to speak to me about what my role in the classroom is. This conversation has then developed to talking about things irrelevant to my fieldwork — as exhibited by one friendly student who interrogated me thoroughly on what music I liked and listened to.
While this can be seen as a distraction, I also realize that this process is essential in building the trust and connection needed to create an ethnographic account. I also find that having students realize that I am not just another body in the room, but a person, makes them more comfortable with having me wandering around and asking questions. Hopefully, as time progresses and my presence is no longer a novelty, the students’ distraction will subside.
Teaching Gaming
I have had the opportunity to observe several classrooms: sixth grade social science (2 sections), seventh grade computer science, the middle school computer club, and the upper school computer science elective. In these classes, I have noticed that a method of getting students interested in computing proves to be through gaming and the motivation to create something that their peers will think of as “cool”.
Gaming has come up in multiple classrooms that I have visited. Particularly in the computer science classrooms, students are more willing to create a product that will have an influence on their peers and even, in the wider. This influence, I’ve noticed, has a great deal to do with their perceived popularity. The product, in this case, have been games produced on Scratch (a programing software designed for programmers and non-programmers alike).
In the middle school computer science club, the incentive to create games is the possibility that they could win a nationwide STEM competition targeted at middle schoolers. After teacher Jane** showed students several examples of past winners, the students seemed much more motivated and inspired to complete their games. Realizing that no student from School One has ever won the competition, the students in the class seemed to want to step up. As such, they exhibited more of an interest in considering and exploring what made a good game. While these projects have not been completed as of yet, I am interested in seeing how this motivation of gaining acclaim/popularity for their work influences their understanding of game creation.
In the sixth grade computer science class, where the girls are working on slightly different games on the same program, the idea that some sort of social incentive as the motivation for their work proves evident. While Jane had been through key elements of a gaming experience with her students, they did not seem to fully take everything onboard. This was until Jane mentioned that if their games were finished and ready for users, they could open up an “arcade” for their peers. This prompted several students, working in groups of 1-3, to consider how to make their games “cool”. I noticed that after this announcement, several students started altering their games to incorporate references to popular TV shows and music groups.
In considering how the motivation for producing video games seems to be the approval of other peers, I want to further investigate the social aspect of the school outside of the classroom. In my group interviews with students, I hope to also ask about their perceptions of being in a computer science class, and how they react to their assignment and how they motivate themselves to stay on topic.
*school one will be the name that I refer to my field placement site on this blog.
** not her real name; also my field placement supervisor