Collaboration with Glow blogs to assist game design

Over the the past year, the Consolarium team has worked extensively with school staff from a number of authorities to develop capacity in game technologies. This has led to these skills being implemented in the context of Curriculum for Excellence in the vast majority of schools.

One example in particular has seen us working with St John the Baptist Primary School in Uddingston who, on the back of their recent HMIE inspection, decided to integrate game based learning and game design across P1-P7 in their school. This decision was part of a strategic effort to engage with contemporary and relevant technologies in order to raise the bar of expectation in the school.

This session will look at the planning and development process and focus that the school carried out on their game design unit of work and how their use of game design technologies such as Scratch and the collaborative networks offered by Glow enabled the school to focus on literacy development.

As part of this programme the school has developed a culture of peer assessment through Glow blogs not only internally, but with other schools around Scotland such as St Andrews Primary in Dundee who have using the same technologies to develop games. The game development blogs that have been kept by pupils are read and commented on by other schools and parents.

The project also aimed to share this work with parents with an open afternoon/evening so that they could come in and see the games and development behind the games.

Andrew Gray, DHT, St John the Baptist Primary School