Dissertation

Blog

This blog is going to record the process of my dissertation. The title of my dissertation is “Can Gaming be Used as an Effective Teaching Tool?”. I’m interested in this subject as I want to be able to help people who find traditional teaching methods difficult to understand, and also help all students to make education more enjoyable. I have found through my own experience that it’s very important to make education engaging and exciting – games can be a pathway to more enjoyable education.

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So far I have around three thousand and five hundred words – the boundaries for the dissertation are six to ten thousand, with ten percent either way. I want to do the best I can on this dissertation as I enjoy the subject area and also writing and researching.

I’ve now updated my question to talk about mainly the motivation and engagement properties of games.

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I’ve now finished writing my dissertation, and it was a really interesting experience. I have learnt a lot throughout the time I spent writing it. I feel like it was a big challenge, having not written an essay in a while, let alone an essay / dissertation of this length and depth. As for my question, I decided to change it to focus on motivation and engagement about half way through the writing process. This section from my abstract describes it:

This dissertation will focus on the subject of educational gaming. It will be investigating the question of “can gaming be used as an effective teaching tool to enhance and promote motivation and engagement within education?” Ideas which will be explored include; what impact gaming has on education, and how different learning styles can be helped by gaming in education. These questions will be investigated as some people have found educational games to be helpful with learning. It will also look at this area in depth to determine whether or not gaming can be used as an effective tool to help students’ education to be more engaging and motivational. It will look at the link between gaming and education, the experience of play, combining work and play, and how play helps children understand the world around them. It will also look at the use of technology to support individual learning styles, and discuss the concept of the Net Generation, otherwise known as Digital Natives, and explore the effect that games have within education. Hopefully this dissertation will show that gaming can be an important part of education and that it can make education more enjoyable, motivating, and engaging.

Arduino Project - Putting it Together

Below are some images of how we put the alcohol testing equipment together. decided to use a series of gradiented LED's to show the amount of alcohol in a persons breath rather than showing that there was just alcohol present. Unfortunately, it did not work in the end.

The Devonport Wall

The Devonport wall stands separating Devonport into two. The wall is coated in anti-climb paint, and at part of the wall there is a gate covered in a transparent material to prevent people climbing over. In an interview that James did (a member of our group for this project), one person said that it feels like living in a prison. It used to be covered with barbed wire at the top, making it even more intimidating.

The wall is planned to be demolished after around 60 years standing. In its place, there will be shops, offices, and homes built.

Arduino Project

For our Arduino project we will be creating a device that has multiple LED's to monitor alcohol intake. The idea is that this device will enable the user to tell when they have had too much to drink. For this we will be using an Arduino Uno and an Alcohol / Gas sensor.

This was our original idea, drawn by Natalie.

To help us understand how to detect alcohol, we utilised a tutorial. We also had to rehash our idea slighty to make sure that it fell within health and safety guidelines. The principle is still the same but due to health and safety we will no longer be using an electric shock.

In the end we decided to use two plastic disposable drinking glasses, one to hold the device and the other one stacked on top to hold the alcohol. For the demo, as it is not a good idea to get drunk in a lecture, I suggested the use of hand sanitiser as it usually has a very high alcohol level depending on which brand you purchase.

Here is our initial demo, which I have described in an earlier blog.

QR Codes in Devonport

For this module we are required to investigate the Devonport Wall. We are asked to explore the potential to map immaterial qualities of the environment,  visualise change in the space, enable people to interact with the space, and share ideas and opinions about the space.

Today we went to Devonport to get an initial idea of the area and take a look around. We were assigned a task using QR codes. For this task we used the application "Tales of Things" on the iPad to assign an image to a QR code which we stuck on the Devonport wall. The image was of the view over the wall.

The next stage is planning the project which we will do next week.

Arduinos

For this module we are initially looking at Arduinos, little programmable processors which are expandable using "shields". They are also open source, with the code and hardware blueprints being freely available. The Arduino website defines them as "... an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board".

Lee, our lecturer for this part of the module, explained to us the basics of Arduino and discussed some examples. One example of an Arduino is an "I-Pac" which allows the connection of game controllers such as joysticks, and can be used in fruit machines.

Arduinos use optional parts called "shields" to add functionality - Wi-Fi, motors, and other features can be added to Arduino boards.

For our group project, we came up with the idea of using an alcohol detector attached to a beer glass to sense when someone has had too much to drink, and pass a small current through the drink to give the drinker a small shock. An alternative to this idea is that the user sees a red LED light up upon sensing a certain level of alcohol on the drinkers breath.

Iain supplied the electronics to test our theory out. He assembled a circuit using a 9 volt battery.

I contributed to this group by helping to come up with the concept and the overall idea. 

Here we are testing out the circuit.

Adding a sugary drink to test the conductivity.

And it works! Hopefully this test will also work with alcohol.

Dat 302