I’ve got some brilliant Computer Science students in my classes this year. Some of them are really keen to understand how stuff works but struggle in an exam to understand and use the right key words.
I’ve been meaning to put together a selection of game based learning activities for ages and so I thought it’d be useful to try to make some that students could pick up and play with a spare 5 minutes, either at the start of a lesson whilst I’m checking homework or whilst they’re on the bus or wherever.
So, this is a work in progress, but I think it’s ready to be shared: tools.withcode.uk/keywords
Most resources online seem to be for OCR or AQA GCSE Computer Science but I teach the Edexcel GCSE Computer Science so I wanted some resources that students could use to revise for that.
There are 84 learning objectives, split into 6 topics. Spread across those learning objectives are over 500 pairs of keywords with matching definitions.
The plan is to have a load of micro revision games that you can use to learn or test yourself on each of those keywords and their definitions. So far I’ve made 4 games:
Snake: press W, A, S or D to direct the snake to eat each letter of a keyword when you’re given its definition
Eliminate: Rule out all of the keywords that don’t match a definition until you’re left with the right one.
Hangman keyword: Guess letters of a keyword when you’re given its definition.
and
Hangman definition: Guess letters of a definition when you’re given a keyword.
Alternatively, you can choose any game at random
You’ll notice each of the games displays the keywords or definitions in a funny looking font. This is a bit of an experiment based on some research at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia on how to make your brain engage more to remember what you read.
Some of my students find this useful and some find the font really annoying. The jury’s out on that one, so you can turn it off on the About page if you find the text too hard to read!
I hope it’s useful. Let me know if you have any suggestions or spot any mistakes.
