Female: It reminded me, the situation I was in reminded me of Mr Togs, the tailor; bringing something to the classroom that would give a context for connected learning. And I have three teenage boys myself so I was very familiar with the game, and I thought yes, this is something the kids will relate to straight away, will engage with, will be excited by. We have done as many curricular areas as we can and it’s all been connected and the children like that, that it’s connected, that nothing is in isolation. So we have managed to get ICT, drama, music, environmental studies, certainly language, music, everything, and it has been not only great fun but has been a quality learning experience.
Child: Well I thought, when you first said Guitar Hero I thought it was just going to be … I thought it was going to be just something really small, just going to be like playing games, ... (unclear), do a biography, stuff like that. Then it leads on to other things like the European tier, the newspaper reports, making the guitars, but it’s still, it’s like everything is a one thing going onto every subject as if everything is different. And I found that really good to have something to base everything on.
Female: Guitar Hero was really good because it linked everything together and it made people work as a group.
Child: I found that people were more engaged in this, but then again I liked it while it was like all the subjects linked into one thing.
Child: I usually, my favourite subject is writing, apart from before I didn’t … sometimes I didn’t like it at all because it used to be like about just putting random things really. Like one day you could be writing about a house, another day we could be writing about why the sky is blue, and [laughs], things like that. And, like I said, in the classroom I really, really like how it’s just all based on one thing and it makes me want to sort of take my character all through my work. It’s like in art work and language and drama, and it’s really good fun.
Child: When I heard about Guitar Hero I thought, mm, this could be really good fun. And then she actually let us play the game - she being Mrs Ackland, sorry – she let us play the game and I really thought, ooh, I like this. So I took the way I felt in the game and I tried to put it into words for Lavender and the stuff I wrote about him. And I just really enjoyed it all being linked, like Fiona said, it’s just being like one minute in a day would be maybe World War Two in the morning writing about something, then in the afternoon it would probably just be like writing about a burning house, and that would be strange because it’s not linked at all. But with Guitar Hero everything kind of revolved around it. So like there was writing, where we wrote our biographies, there was drama, we were doing the Brit Awards, there’s …
Child: Also did music videos.
Child: Pardon?
Child: We also did the music videos and things.
Child: Yeah, we did music videos in drama, it’s … we’ve got language, we’ve got PE, because yesterday we did …
Child: We did dancing.
Child: … creative dance. It’s gone into music because we recorded Pure Black Magic. We’ve done lots to do with it, and I think that’s much better than having like it all chopped up into different subjects.
Female: But it just all, it just fits, you know, it just was so easy. A lot of this was coming from, from the children.
Back to case study: Guitar Hero (Organisation and management)
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