What we did

Aberdeenshire Council was very keen to take forward the idea of games-based learning and so in conjunction with the Consolarium it identified a number of projects that it wished to undertake. One of these involved using the Myst III Exile software title in order to focus on motivating children to write.

Following a technology CPD event held in March 2007, a number of teachers volunteered to be part of the project. As this game is not expensive, almost 20 schools were given the game and were brought into the project.

In order to take this forward, a further CPD event was organised. Tim Rylands attended to demonstrate how he would teach with the game and to work with teachers to understand how the game worked and how they could begin to integrate it into their practice.

At the time Aberdeenshire was part of the Glow pilot and so a Glow group was created to help teachers communicate and share ideas and resources.

This project is still ongoing and although we have featured only one school and one teacher in this case study, the general feedback from the teachers involved has been very similar to this teacher's experience.