Continuing our series of featured contributions by ocTEL participants, here Nicola Whitton draws out some points from blogs and forums in the Week 3 activities (which she led). It’s good to see that several of the discussions from ‘past’ weeks are still drawing interest and interaction. 

I was struck by an interesting conversation in the ocTEL forums discussing the game NotPron. This is a particularly hard game, with a steep learning curve, that also requires high levels of technical expertise (or the ability and confidence to pick up technical skills very quickly). I think that NotPron is an interesting example of how technologically-simple games can stimulate learning; but it is a very bad example of how to make a game accessible for a wide audience.

Sue Folley blogged about the game, discussing the difficulties she had getting started and being able to play the game. In her analysis, the lessons learned from her experience for students:

… the hints provided were not sufficient scaffolding for me to guess what to even try to do to get to the next level. I suppose this is a lesson learned in making sure that that enough scaffolding is provided for all level of student, and it provided me with the insight of what it felt like to feel way out of my comfort zone.

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