Grove Academy’s principal teacher of computing, Kenny Stewart, has created an online scenario based on the novel Buddy by Nigel Hinton (Puffin Books, 1994). In today’s English lesson, S2 pupils studying Buddy are introduced to the scenario and begin to work through it with help from Kenny and their English teacher. 

The scenario invites the pupils to become reporters travelling through Buddy’s world, finding out information about different aspects of the novel and completing exercises that allow them to move on to new locations and new parts of the adventure. 

Kenny has taught at Grove Academy for 20 years. Before that, he taught for five years at Harris Academy. He is currently principal teacher of computing to S1-S6 pupils and has responsibility for the ICT programme throughout the school. He is also the school’s part-time ICT coordinator, a Masterclass trainer and last year was an examiner for Advanced Higher Computing. He is halfway through a two-year research project on accelerated learning for the General Teaching Council for Scotland. 

Kenny has worked closely with the European Union funded Innovative Teaching and Learning Environments for Schools ITALES) project, mainly developing and testing scenarios produced with the ITALCO authoring tool. These, including the Buddy scenario, can be accessed at http://itales.edm.luc.ac.be/italco/Scenarios/start.html. 

School profile

Grove Academy is situated not far from the sea in Broughty Ferry to the east of Dundee. There are 916 pupils: 29 have free school lunches and 49 are registered as having special educational needs. 32 pupils speak English as a second language. The school has won gold awards for its Enterprise activities and has won the Courier/Royal Bank of Scotland debating competition. 

There are 240 computers in the school. The ICT rooms can be booked by any teacher when they are not in use for computing or business studies. Kenny is the part-time ICT coordinator. The computing teachers at Grove Academy offer a programme of in-service ICT courses for staff. 

The Buddy scenario is an online adventure in which the pupils pretend to be reporters: they gather information and carry out exercises at different locations in order to build up a picture of Buddy’s life.

Kenny created the Buddy scenario as a result of his work with the European Union Innovative Teaching and Learning Environments for Schools (ITALES) project. On the technical side, he had to familiarise himself with the ITALCO authoring tool and then construct the scenario, which also made use of Hot Potatoes software. On the content side, he had to read Buddy, write the information pages and create suitable exercises. Luckily the English department had a booklet of exercises that he could adapt.

At the moment, creating scenarios is demanding in terms of time and expertise. However, Kenny says that, as the frameworks develop, it will become much easier for teachers to produce their own scenarios.

Top tip
When deciding which software authoring tool you should choose to develop the learning content make sure that it adheres to the open systems inter-connections standards. This fits in with the e-learning ethos that educational content, delivery services, online solutions are any time any place, and any device learning.

Q. So how do you check that the authoring tool complies with the open systems standards? 
A. Either contact your software vendor or your ICT support staff, they will definitely be able to tell you whether it’s open systems compliant or not.” 

The immediate learning outcomes in English are to improve reading, comprehension, grammar and punctuation and to explore the characterisation of Buddy. 

Kenny hopes that the pupils will react positively to the scenario because it is similar to the virtual environments of computer games like Age of Empires or The Sims, which pupils very much enjoy. He says the scenario should appeal to different learning styles – visual, textual and logical. 

The S2 English class assembles in one of the school’s ICT suites. The teacher, Caroline Dick, asks what the pupils remember about Buddy’s life and character. They say, among other things, that Buddy is a thief, that he is unhappy and superstitious. After a little more discussion, Caroline hands over to Kenny, who runs through the scenario on the whiteboard, explaining how it works and what the pupils are expected to do. 

The pupils log on to the computers and access the scenario. At the first location (the pavement), the exercise they are required to do relate to Buddy’s superstitious nature. They have to reorder words to make up sayings, for example 'An apple a day keeps the doctor away'.

By successfully finishing the exercise, they earn enough money to travel to a new location. This time it is Buddy’s house. Here there is information to read, plus a new exercise based on a passage about Buddy. The pupils have to choose adjectives from a list at the top of the page and use them to fill in the gaps in the passage. In this introductory class, there is only time for the pupils to complete two exercises. In future lessons they will be able to explore more of the scenario, using the money they have earned to find out additional information about Buddy’s world as well as visiting the remaining locations.

Kenny is pleased with the positive reaction the pupils had to the scenario, and that they managed to navigate around and work at their own pace.

This was the first time that Caroline, the English teacher, had used the scenario with a class. She says it is particularly helpful that pupils can work at their own pace. In a normal class she might set an exercise to be done in 10 minutes and inevitably some pupils finish early and others do not complete it. 

Caroline thinks that the scenario is particularly suited to lower ability pupils who do not concentrate so well and who benefit from visual input. She noticed that one boy in her class, who normally has motivational problems, really enjoyed the lesson and was engaged from the start. She says the pictures in the scenario - of the boy Buddy and Buddy Holly, for example - help to bring the novel to life.