HHL 2008 Awards Finalist

MiLK has been named as a top three finalist in the Secondary Category Innovation Award at this year’s international Handheld Learning conference to be held in London from 13 to 15 October.

Award winners are selected by the public via SMS voting, and everyone in the ACID family is encouraged to vote for MiLK.

SMS MiLK to +447786203140 before October 9 2008!

Votes are cast via standard rate SMS messaging and close at midnight (GMT) on Thursday October 9th.

The winners will be announced at the awards ceremony in London on 13 October.

MiLK project leader, Deb Polson has also been invited to speak at HandHeld Learning 2008 Conference, where she will present on Extending Learning Relationships & Environments during the Mobile Learning and Future Schools session on Wednesday 15 October.

This is great news for ACID and for the MiLK project team… .and all the teachers and students that contributed to the sucess of MiLK!!!

Students from Trinity Bay State High School talk about learning with MiLK

Out of 600 entries MiLK was a preselection finalist for a 2008 ATOM award, ranking MiLK in the national top 10 Best Educational Multimodal Productions!

“As we received an unprecedented number of entries this year, being a preselected finalist is testament to the quality of your work.”

Each year, the ATOM Awards recognise excellence in over thirty categories of Film, Television, Animation and Multimedia and celebrate the very best of Australian and New Zealand production.

Congratulations to the entire MiLK team of Yang Wong, Colleen Morgan, Shu-Min Heng, Sherwin Huang and Dave Wallace. What a wonderful achievement and acknowledgement of your professional efforts and evolutions.

This is a short video summary of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens user trial.

Yesterday we held our first MiLK Professional Development Workshop. During the short workshop the teachers played a MiLK event to become familiar with the format of MiLK events before they built MiLK events of their own.

The feedback we received from the teachers throughout the workshop was positive. They enjoyed the hands-on nature of the workshop and imagined many in which they could apply MiLK in their schools.

The workshop ran smoothly with no technical hitches and we received useful feedback from the teachers regarding possible interface and administration improvements.

A big THANK YOU to all of those who attended. We hope to hear from you again soon.

Lee Booth talks about using MiLK with her year 10 Gifted and Talented English Students.

Students from Woodville High School have a discussion with their teacher about learning with MiLK

On June 6, Deb and Colleen from the MiLK team presented MiLK at the Get Game conference held at the ICT Learning Innovation Centre.

We had a great response from the teachers who attended our presentation are are looking forward to seeing some of them in our training workshops soon.

Overall the conference was lots of fun, particularly Vincent Trundle’s workshop on making Machinima with multi-player games.

Get out and about.
Sometimes building an event is as much fun as playing one. For location specific events, go to where the event might be staged to hunt for clues.

Keep a record.
It’s a good idea to bring a camera along so that you can take pictures of interesting things that you see along the way. Pen and paper also help to jot down interesting observations or clues that have been though up on the spot. You can share your photos and notes later in the Event Discussion.

Think in terms of getting participants from point A to B.
Often enough, events are about getting from start to finish, so students have to make sure that participants can start and finish a event. They can do this by choosing a start and a finish, and then fill up the space in between by creating a series of points at interesting spots.

Hints should get warmer.
Each hint should get closer to the answer each time a player makes a mistake. This could even mean giving players the actual answer as the last hint so that they will be able to get to the next checkpoint and progress closer to completion.

Use answers wisely.
Answers will have to be very precise. While they are not case sensitive, students need to make sure that they can actually be found. While the length of answers is not restricted, it’s better to keep answers short so that participants will have less of a chance to make mistakes. You can enter multiple answers by separating them with a semi-colon (;) so you may want to cover any possible answers. For example if the answer is a date you may want to enter a number of possible answers such as, 11/11/1989; 11/11/89; November 11, 1989…etc.

It is also good to think about how participants will discover the answers. Are they hidden in signs, posters, plaques or other elements of the event’s surroundings or do they have to rely on their past knowledge or crack a code to reveal the answer?

What do you like about MiLK?

“It’s fun, better than going to school”

“The way we get to interact with the environment”

“I think the physical side of it is what makes it so great”

“The fact that you can create your own game, publish it, and then it is amazing that people can do it so simply and get text messages back when I/we haven’t even touched a phone.”

Other Comments:

“This is so much fun, so much better than sitting in a classroom.”

“It is important to use mobiles and games and technologies in education mostly because a lot of people in those year levels have access to that technology and can use it very easily. And they are familiar with that type of stuff so they wouldn’t be sitting there going how do I do this?”

“This technology is still a big part of communication after school…you are still using it all the time and you still have access to it”

“Having a deeper knowledge of the space that you are working in kind of helps because it helps you set guidelines a lot easier, but then again if you are working in a space you’re not familiar with you learn a lot more about it because you actually have to go out and look for that stuff.”

“It’s a good way to interact with things that many people wouldn’t usually. I know a lot of people that wouldn’t even bother looking at the signs on the plants and when you transfer it into this game it makes them look at it, makes it a bit more interesting for them and helps their learning experience.”

“Building the game you have to look for things you want to add into it and you kinda look for stuff, even if you don’t put it in it, it still registers in your head and you remember it…We take in a lot more…this way you are going around, you are experience it.”

“We’re learning in a way that is more suited to our generation…this way we can have fun by going around and looking at the stuff in the real world.”

“Because it is technology we understand we enjoy it a lot more”