Wild Earth: African Safari

Having been encouraged by the feedback from others who had used this game, I decided to use it to enhance a cross-genre, and cross curricular, writing led project called The Island.
Led by a small text extract, the children construct their own narrative of the strange goings on, on an unnamed island.

I used the game over a series of lessons to build the reality of exploring an alien environment - as in alien to their experience, not aliens of the space kind!- Once the children had grown used to the objective based approach to the game, I began to remove the context, and muted the sound. Over 2 lessons we observed a child 'walking' through the environment, and we began a vocabulary harvest. Recording sights that caught their imaginations, simple things that we asked whoever was playing to focus in on. The good thing about this game is that the player has a camera, and therefore we could zoom in to distant events, or tiny things, such as the shape of leaves, patterns on rocks or the flow of a stream.
We collected both words and phrases, and shared them, whilst the game was still on, narrating the scene.This experience fed into an extended piece of writing about their journey on the Island. Examples are from three groups, extension last.Evaluating this has been interesting. There is no doubt that the walkthrough was really productive. I have a very boy-heavy group of year 6s. Many who are very familiar with computer games (obviously) and have found that when I use the game out of its intended context, time needs to be spent on the game itself - or they just won't move on. Once that hurdle is over, the walthrough and narrations really helped many of them.
When discussing this with the children, after we had finished, a few felt that the graphical rendering may have limited their own imaginations. It is important to note that I have observed the opposite on our current project - a write-up of which shall be posted by the end of the week.

Toby.