Two weeks ago, Grockit participated in the Games+Learning+Society conference. On the second day of the conference, I joined Jeramy Gatza, Curriculum Innovation Specialist on the Research and Discovery Team at Florida Virtual School, to discuss a recent project in which eight Algebra I classes at Florida Virtual School piloted the use of Grockit as a supplement to their standard course curriculum. The presentation, entitled Collaborative Learning Games in the Virtual Classroom: Piloting Grockit at Florida Virtual School, took an interactive form. Each participant had a laptop, which allowed us to ground our discussion of the social, motivational, and collaborative aspects of the platform in first-hand experience. Here’s a bit more about the discussion, taken from the presentation abstract:

A virtual school can offer a student the ability to complete a course on their own schedule, from any location. The challenge in providing a flexible, individualized learning environment is that students may feel disconnected from each other, and can miss the opportunity to learn from interactions with their peers. Multi-player online learning games may hold a solution. By providing a venue for learners to connect and interact, these games can extend the benefits of collaborative learning opportunities to the geographically-dispersed students in a virtual school.

…Our goal for this workshop is to share with participants both an intuitive sense and data-grounded evidence about how multi-player learning games, like those in Grockit, can help connect, motivate, and engage students who are geographically and socially isolated. The workshop will conclude with a group-wide discussion of other experiences with, and opportunities for, using game-based collaborations as a way to connect learners across the web.

Two days later, Jeramy and I again presented together, this time to discuss our work with a group of educators as part of the GLS Educator Symposium. This presentation was nominally grounded in work that I’ve published on how we go about deciding between synchronous and asynchronous interactions for the various components of Grockit’s collaborative learning activities (for more info, see the source paper and the asynchronous discussion thread on this work). The real heart of the session, however, was devoted to a series of interesting questions raised by participating educators about the real-world task of incorporating Grockit (or a system like it) into the classroom setting. Jeramy Gatza provided a very interesting perspective, responding to several questions based on his experiences using Grockit at Florida Virtual School.

While I was at the Games+Learning+Society conference, I saw/heard/participated in a number of excellent talks, tutorials, demos, and keynotes. It was exciting to see the incredible variety of ways in which researchers and educators have been incorporating games into learning and learning into games. I’m excited to bring these ideas back to Grockit, and use them as inspiration for our own internal brainstorming sessions on games and learning. Stay tuned for new announcements on this front…