I’m currently a permanent supply teaching working at St Andrew’s Primary School in a P6 class in Dundee.

I decided to use Kodu as a stimulus to engage my class in technologies and 21st century literacy skills.

Kodu lets kids create games on the PC and XBox via a simple visual programming language.

I used the built in tutorials to give the pupils a brief introduction to Kodu and then allowed them to explore and experiment further.  I didn’t have a great knowledge of games design or how to use Kodu prior to this Interdisciplinary Learning project and learnt with the children.

In their IDL folders and through discussions the pupil’s reflected on the skills that they were developing such as creating, evaluting, analysing, applying, understanding and problem solving.  The pupils worked in co-operative learning teams to plan, design and evaluate their games.

To make the IDL project more relevant and engaging to the pupils I invited a Dundee Based Games Design company called Future Fossils to work with my class.  This provided an understanding of careers and opportunities in game design.The pupils responded very well to this and were very keen and enthusiastic to show off their work and have a real designer test and feedback on their game.

Throughout the IDL project the activities that we engaged in included:

• shared learning intentions and success criteria
• storyboards of our game design
• used Kodu to design our environment
• created simple programs which we then developed further into more complex scenarios
• designed game covers
• wrote instructions for loading Kodu and playing their own game
• wrote imagineative background stories
• planned setting descriptions
• wrote a theme tune for our games
• to help the pupils understand the need for programming we acted out programming on whiteboards
• took screenshots

This was one of the most successful IDL projects I have done with a class.  I feel that it was very inclusive and the children gained a wealth of skills which they were then able to reflect on.