Categories
Mombasa

Let’s start looking at games

Reminder: in case you’re behind on my blog, I’ve been researching programs to put on the old computers in the small library at the Deaf School in Kenya where I’m volunteering.  My intention is to come up with solutions that work here but can be applied elsewhere.  If nothing else, evaluating as many programs as possible will give me real examples of what works and what doesn’t.  Because the teachers are striking, I would otherwise be bored so I’ve been perusing the Internet a lot in order to make some progress on this front.  This is me in action:

P1020719 Today I will be starting a series of posts in which I focus on the differences between the various classic LucasArts adventure games, specifically as I assess their educational values for pre- and early readers.  I decided to start by looking at these games specifically because they let the player click on words to make rudimentary sentences, which I think is a great place to start.  They also have difficult logic puzzles.  They’re also sufficiently old, so they’re more likely to run on old computers, and at the time they came out, not all computers had sound, so I can safely assume that all text will appear on-screen, which is great for the sake of reading and even better when you consider the deaf audience.  I’ll be showing you a lot of pictures from the games, because the details can be hard to visualize.

As a disclaimer, I know that these games are not free.  Many of them have demo versions I could use in a pinch, which may be just as good if the children’s attention spans are short.  If I’m really sold on one as being “best” for learning then I’ll contact the copyright holder.

I’ll take you through the games chronologically because that’s the order that I’m playing them, and indicate the changes over time that helped or hurt the educational value.  After I’m finished with the later games I will share my conclusions, but please enjoy the process as it unfolds…

1987-1989: Maniac Mansion 1

I will probably be writing more about this game than the others in order to lay the groundwork for my assessment of the later ones, so bear with me.  Pictures below are used interchangeably from two different editions, one “Enhanced” with better graphics and one not, but they are educationally the same game except that the enhanced version allows up to ten saved games, whereas the original version allows one, which is not so good if multiple children want to play at different points in the game.  Someone other than myself has already documented the more minute changes in all the editions of these games.

maniac_008 In Maniac Mansion you control three different characters who you choose at the beginning.  One of them is “Michael,” a black college-age kid, which I like because, thanks to living in Kenya, I am hyper aware of how culturally skewed these things can normally be.

maniac_002Most of the time, you are in “action” mode, where you can click a verb on the bottom of the screen, then either a visual object or a word from your inventory.  In this case, I created the sentence “What is bushes,” which is an example of how this system can go wrong from a learning perspective.  Hopefully this example is an rare one… it seems easy enough to avoid plurals in gave development.

maniac_010 “Pull bushes,” which I used to reveal the grate behind them, is better, but this is not really proper grammar, either.  When playing the game, a special “computer command” grammar is unfortunately being reinforced, but as you can see from Michael’s observation about the grate being rusted (brown font, top of screen), there is enough reading elsewhere in the game that I don’t think harm will be done.

Another problem that these “verb-noun”-style games have is how to deal with nonsense input.  In this game, for instance, I can issue the command, “Close sign,” which of course makes no sense.  When I do this, the character states the generic dealing-with-nonsense reply, “That doesn’t seem to work.”

maniac_005 maniac_004

Having a lot of verbs to choose from, as this game does (14 total– “New kid” isn’t a verb, it’s a way to switch between the three characters), means that there is a lot of opportunity to create nonsense commands like this.  On the other hand, having all those verbs on the screen all the time, begging to be considered, is good vocab reinforcement.

The aforementioned “What is bushes,” though, actually elicited no response from the character, which is inconsistent and might be confusing to the kids.

maniac_007Also regarding the “action mode,” in terms of sentence building, I will point out that some verbs, namely “give,” “unlock,” “fix,” and sometimes “use,” require prepositional phrases after them, for example, “Unlock front door with key.”  The key was in my inventory, which is displayed as text below the verbs.  Even better vocab reinforcement!

The other mode of the game is fairly passive, and that is basically the “cutscene” mode, in which something uncontrollable happens and you as a viewer simply watch and read the dialogue.  There is no level of active participation here.

Okay, then, let’s look at one more game today, which will bring us into the 90s.

1988-1990: Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders

Zak differs from Manic in only a few significant ways.

scummvm00001Firstly, you can only be Zak… no more choosing characters.  Secondly, the verbs are different.  There are still fourteen, but Unlock and Fix have been replaced with Put on and Take off.  Additionally, when in a store, Give and Pick up are replaced automatically with Sell and Buy, respectively.  The contextual verbs are a good feature because they introduces more words in total.

scummvm00002 Like Maniac Mansion, this game sports multiple editions.  The newer 1990 edition has more colors so it looks better, but it also allocates more room for the inventory items: instead of just four, up to six show at once.  This means more text on screen at any given time—a good thing from my perspective.

I worry about Zak’s initial appeal, if only because the game starts in a posh San Francisco apartment and stars a middle-aged white man, so the children may be less excited to get into it, even though from what I understand the adventure is pretty huge by the end.   Cutscenes seem to assume a faster reading speed as well, which means that slower readers may miss plot points.

The game still has all the same inherent problems as Maniac Mansion.  Overall, Zak would be a better tool for vocab, but only for the kids who can keep up with the faster dialogue.

Well, that’s it for today!  Seeing Zak McKracken in that last picture made me think of my trip to SF right before I left for Kenya.  Here’s a pic of my sis on the beach in front of the Golden Gate.  Sometimes I really miss my family!

P1020247

Categories
Mombasa

I’m in research mode.

Finding the document today with recommendations for Kenyan Deaf schools made me want to find more documents like it—formal audits and recommendations of the Kenyan school system at large.  As it turns out I may have a lot of research time on my hands if the strike happens.

But first, some pictures.  Yesterday I was asked to take a look in the woodshop to see if I would feel comfortable teaching it. (Gut feeling: no.)  The woodshop sports a vast tool collection, many of which are electric, man-sized, and sharp, and although the labels are all faded, I’m sure at least one must have been called the “Unintentional Amputator 9000.” I wandered around to see if there was any sort of official textbook or curriculum.  In the process I found this issue of Climbing Magazine mixed in with some Newsweeks and swimsuit catalogs.

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If you like climbing, or even if you simply don’t necessarily dislike it, you should visit Oakley Anderson-Moore’s movie site and excellent blog at The Rock Adventure Guide: Portrait of an American Climber.  Oakley, I knew that rock climbing had an appeal in the emerging markets!  Swahili subtitles here we come…

The vocational students noticed the open door so they came in to ask me if I would be teaching the class.  “Maybe,” I kept saying, as I kept thinking about the first aid kit on the wall that contained only Dixie cups and cobwebs.  “Are the Dixie cups for holding severed fingers?” I thought as the students excitedly swept, organized, dusted, and mopped the entire room.  They had been idling around the campus all week and are clearly happy to have a potential teacher!  I felt quite invigorated by their enthusiasm and stayed up late reading about wood planing (fascinating, really), but this morning in a talk with the headmaster it appears that the duties will be split and I won’t been teaching the handiwork part of the curriculum.  In any case, check out the room all cleaned up:

P1020687 

Now onto the dry stuff.

I quote from a 2001 report presented by the Kenya Ministry of Education:

“…parents may choose to withdraw their children, especially girls, from school or the pupils themselves may refuse to go to school for fear of being raped, tortured of [sic] killed by raiders.”

I haven’t seen any raiders (lowercase r, for those of you from Oakland who might have understandably been mistaken) in Mombasa, but reading something like that in a PDF report on education is an eye-opening anachronism nonetheless.  Also from the report, specifically in a section addressing Mombasa’s educational problems (emphasis mine—maybe even if I don’t teach these classes I can influence the teachers by making an example out of whatever else I do):

The common practice in primary schools is for the Headteachers to place their best teachers in STD 1 to 3 which are considered foundation classes and STD 7 and 8, which are KCPE examination preparation classes. There is need therefore, with innovative ideas and training, to help motivate teachers of STD 4 to 6 classes to be more creative to experiment with integration of curriculum, new approaches to concepts and methodology.

For the most part classroom practice is characterized as teacher dominated, where lessons consists of presentation of textbook materials forcing children to memorize information with little understanding. Children remain passive and do not ask questions and are not accorded the opportunity for discovery of problem solving. Children lack stimulation due to inadequate or non-existent use of teaching aids; there is overemphasis on testing all the way from STD 1 to 8 (which prepares the child for the final KCPE examination) due to parental wish for children to join secondary schools.

The latter is something I have seen in action.  What is interesting is that the students are very much conditioned to just copy from the board into their little notebooks in order to demonstrate that they understand.  Even the teachers who sign find themselves trying to explain to some students that the assignments was to SOLVE, not to COPY.  I think that all it takes is one previous teacher who didn’t sign, signed poorly, or signed sparsely, to force the student to develop this strategy, to pretend to understand, to wait for something to be written on the board, and then to copy it.  The student who does this can look at the paper of the neighboring student who actually understood, and therefore copied AND SOLVED, and at least be reassured that the two students’ pages look similar.  Perhaps I should never use the board…?

In another extraordinarily long PDF, this one more recent and focusing on Kenyan education (emphasis mine again—these are the variables where maybe-MAYBE—I can make a difference in the earlier grades):

It was also found that certain predictor variables do exist and impact on pupils’ performance in English language. Such were age, language spoken at home, access to books, nursery school attendance, school location, headteacher’ and teachers’ experience, parental assistance with homework and socio-economic background.

Book access I think I can handle by managing the library.  Experience as a variable is something that I am confident I can accumulate quickly.  From the same document, I found this interesting as it reflects the difficulty I am having in finding comparing stats between Kenyan students, schools, etc:

Most of the personnel that will be involved in the conduct of National Assessment have little or no expertise in research methods, data collection techniques, data analysis, report writing and monitoring skills.

There is limited knowledge among KNEC, KIE, DBE and field officers in use of computer in data analysis and Information Technology in general.

So it would seem that my search to get data on Kenya probably not go very far, as things tend, even in the school, to not be very centralized, with teachers keeping all their own records with no centralized reporting available.

Well, that’s it for now for the Kenyan school system research.  I think now I’ll look more into papers that might help me with what I’m leaning towards now, which is testing the Class 1 students, splitting the class in half accordingly, and teaching one of the halves.  I feel that Class 1 is where the real learning can start happening, but at its current size it would be difficult for me (and I think it’s difficult for the other new teacher) to really reach all of the students at the same time.  That would occupy my mornings, and woodshop/library might be able to occupy my afternoons.  I’ll be proposing this tomorrow (if the teachers come to school).  Hopefully I can find some good assessments online and not have to reinvent the wheel.