Lee Booth
Churchie - Anglican Church Grammar School
Year 10 English - Gifted and Talented students

Lee saw MiLK as an opportunity to teach poetry in a fun and interesting way and to challenge her gifted and talented students to work at a high level, to think analytically and to synthesise. She used it as a pre-test activity, testing her students’ knowledge of poetry before going into a more in depth subject.

“They gained a lot of knowledge that they would not have necessarily got if we just studied two poems. They saw a bigger picture…most of all it was fun and the kids were engaged.”

(more…)

Steve Meredith
Outreach Education Officer - South Australian Botanic Gardens
Year 8, 9, and 10 students from 3 different Adelaide Schools

In his role as Outreach Education Officer at the SA Botanic Gardens, Steve Meredith creates resources that make the gardens and all of the information embedded within them as accessible as possible for as many different learners. Steve saw MiLK as an opportunity to make the student experience with their learning an interactive, two-way process.

“They had a task that they were wholly motivated by. They had control over the learning and they were setting up structures for others to inquire and investigate.”

(more…)

Katie Salen
Parsons, The New School For Design, New York
Master of Fine Arts, Design and Technology

Katie Salen used MiLK to encourage her students to explore three related domains: Game Design, Psychogeography, and Microfictions. The students also explored the adaptation of MiLK for 6th grade curriculum standards as a way to define the use of mobile gaming within formal learning environments. The students made games for and with 6th grade students from the Ross Global Academy.

Janelle Williams
Trinity Bay State High School
Year 10 Multimedia

Janelle Williams used MiLK to deliver a year 10 multimedia class. Janelle used MiLK as an opportunity to encourage her students to work more effectively and to begin to emulate industry behavior, knowledge and work processes. She also used MiLK to introduce a game design taxonomy which the students applied when assessing themselves and their peers.

“ The relationships I strengthened with my students are perhaps the thing I found the most powerful about the project”

(more…)

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

Grant High School