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.”

18 Students and 3 teachers from three Adelaide schools participated in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens workshop. During the workshop the students played a game, created their own games and played each other’s games. The teachers learnt how to use their MiLK teacher profile pages to administrate learning activities with MiLK. The day started out with students forming teams of three and playing ‘The Amazing Garden of Evolution’ event that had been created by members of the MiLK research team. By playing the event, the students became familiar with the question, answer and hint format of MiLK events and were able to identify what types of information could be used when making their own event and how to encode that information into questions and answers.

The next activity of the workshop was for the students to design their own games. Remaining in their groups of three, the students were assigned a particular area or ‘room’ of the gardens in which to design a game event. Each ‘room’ highlighted a section of the gardens that had a particular theme (such as the Economic garden, the Mediterranean garden, and the Desert Garden). The students were given the very short time of just under an hour to explore the sites and design their 10-checkpoint game. Once they had collected all of the information for their event, the students returned to a computer lab to build and publish their games with the MiLK interface. Once the games had been published, the teachers used the ‘administration’ interface of MiLK to assign groups to play each other’s events.

The students made games that ranged in theme. One team made a game that revealed the many features and origins of water saving plants of Australia while another game instructed groups to ‘set up house’ by finding domestic plants useful for construction, decoration and medicinal purposes. After playing each other’s events, the students go together with their teachers to critique the events they had played. The students also engaged in a two-way discussion with their teachers about the learning involved in making and playing MiLK events and learning with new technologies more broadly.

Curriculum Aims:
The Adelaide Botanic Gardens workshop was designed to fulfill the aims of the MiLK research and development team as well as the gardens’ Education Officer, Steve Meredith. The MiLK research and development team used the workshop to apply MiLK in a context outside the classroom and to test the teams’ assumptions about the potential learning outcomes of the latest version of MiLK.

Steve used the workshop to explore a new avenue for disseminating his knowledge of the gardens and for inspiring students to independently explore and draw knowledge from the site. He saw MiLK as an opportunity to motivate students to learn and to appeal to a wide range of learner types. Unlike the traditional paper worksheets, Steve saw MiLK as a way to make student’s learning in the gardens more of an interactive two-way experience.

Steve’s Reflection:

“The technology is this generations pens and pencils. They had a task that they were wholly motivated by. They had control over the learning and were setting up structures for others to enquire and investigate”

“The real learning takes pace when they have to design a learning program that other kids will engage in…students designing learning for other students and sharing it…that is part of the motivation of it. They are stimulated to discuss things because of a natural desire to find out how their game worked.”

“All the time the knowledge is being added to…there are iterations of learning going on…feedback loops of discussion going on as they trial each others events.”

“The technology just facilitated human interaction, and that interaction between the kids itself was phenomenally powerful.”

The learning was “not just on the gardens itself or the content, but a whole lot of other learning took place that wasn’t necessarily on the specific agenda, but it was real learning.

“Obviously it was clearly motivational because they did engage with that higher order thinking.”

“It lets them build and make things for each other which is what we do in life so it gives them motivation”

“The collaboration is great, the kids are actually bringing together social skills, communication, collaboration, everyone contributing, managing the group and all that stuff is important for life skills, so it is excellent.

Student Response:

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”