Our most recent user trial has been with Year 10 multimedia students from Trinity Bay State High School in Cairns, Queensland Australia.

Teacher: Janelle Williams
Class: Year 10 Multimedia

The students engaged in four main activities around MiLK.

1. By way of introduction to the tool, the students played an event created by their teacher, Janelle Williams.
2. In groups of 4 or 5 the students then created events that were to be played within the school grounds… responding to assignment briefs with outcomes designed by Janelle to be aligned specifically to the State Multimedia Curiculum.
3. The students then played and critiqued each others’ events
4. In the same groups, the students were then set the task of creating the ‘Ultimate MiLK Cairns Event’ that could be set anywhere around Cairns and for any target audience.

Teachers from Aspley State High School will be introducing MiLK to several classrooms in TERM 1, 2008. On November 1 2007 Deb, Sherwin and Colleen of the MiLK team ran a teacher training workshop. The ten teachers who attended the workshop came from varied disciplines ranging from Drama and Visual arts to Physics and English Studies. The school is a rather large public high school situated in Northern Brisbane.

WELCOME Aspley State High… we’re very excited about releasing a brand new version of MiLK to your students.

Currently researchers at the Gamelab Institute of Play are piloting MILK in New York and Chicago. For this pilot we have adapted the system to work with WEB ENABLED mobile phones as this is more conducive to the current conditions/capabilities/attitudes in US schools (please note that the UK and Australian schools will be sticking to SMS for now with occasional pilot studies using web enabled mobiles.)

We are know sharing our MiLK system with researchers at the Gamelab Institute of Play in New York. Currently Katie Salen and her team are working with students in New York and Chicago to experiment with ways of using MiLK to cooperatively compose mobile game events for a variety of learning contexts.

“The Institute will work in partnership with you to develop a set of demonstrations for the platform, exploring the kinds of experiences that it can support, particularly from a game design perspective.
We will also assist in the development of identifying and designing a set of processes/resources to support the use of MiLK by teachers and students, and will look into the development of supplemental technologies that might extend the MiLK experience.
… we’d really like to think about how to integrate MiLK at an infrastructural level in the new school we are designing, and this initial phase of research will help us better understand how to do that.”

Katie Salen Executive Director, Gamelab Institute of Play (nonprofit organization.)
19 W. 24th Street, 12th floor, New York, NY 10011

Each of these Schools/Teachers participated in the MSTE Teacher Trials at QUT on April 16th 2007.

Brisbane Girls Grammar - Brendon Thomas, Shane Skillen
Cavendish Road SHS - Chinh Nguyen
All Saints Anglican School - David Perry
Christian Outreach College - Samantha Ratcliffe
Ipswich Girls Grammer - Kym Coleman
Centenary Heights SHS -John Harman, Gayle Kutuzar
Calamvale Community College - Nick Hutchinson
Trinity Bay SHS - Janelle Williams, Clyde Williams

Technology School of the Future, Adelaide (Paul Doherty and Karen Church)

Paul (pictured above with Deb) has created a number of exempla mobile events with the MiLK system. Most of his events have experimented with ways to engage different users in learning activities in gallery spaces and with cultural artefacts. His events are significant to the development of the MiLK software as he is demonstrating to the designers ways to incorporate other materials normally readily available (site maps, note books etc). Paul has also aranged and hosted various trials on location… Pauls innovative adoption of MiLK is now explicit in the latest version to be released in mid november 2007.

Ist Contact
January 2007: Paul visited Brisbane to attend a Seminar presentation introducing the original concept of MiLK: The Mobile Informal Learning Kit… this was an attempt to excite possible collaborations… Paul was the first of our partners to engage in a significant way.

Ongoing Collaboration
So far Paul has facilitated the following collaborations with the MiLK team:
March 2007: Deb and Sherwin were invited to present both an evening Teacher Masterclass and 2 day Student Workshops in Adelaide (with Karen Church of TSOF).
June 2007. Deb re-visited Adelaide to play Pauls game and get some vital feedback.
– various trial events –
November 2007: Deb, Colleen and Sherwin are returning to Adelaide to work with Paul on an event he has designed that involves schools, the Botanic Gardens and The Art Gallery of South Australia

MSTE is the Maths, Science, Technology and Education Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology. The team at MSTE assisted in the April 16th teacher trials by sourcing participants, contributing to the workshop evaluation framework, hosting the day’s activities and providing catering.

The MSTE Team:
Margaret Lloyd
Kar-Tin Lee
Shaun Nykvist
Vinesh Chandra
Chris Chalmers
Ken Garrad
Jennifer Tan

Each of the following schools participated in the TSOF Trials in Adelaide on March 20-21, 2007.

Grant High School