During Semester One, a number of our staff were involved in a range of innovation projects looking at different, creative ways to help students improve their learning.

Our Year 11 Ancient History class studied a unit on Vikings. Mrs Warfield decided to increase student engagement and collaboration by gamifying the unit by attaching the development of skills with unique rewards (based on an existing Vikings card game). The idea was to have students collaborate in groups (or clans), gather resources by completing tasks and work together towards common goals. Clans were able to trade their resources with other clans to improve their overall clan rating. A survey of students at the end of the unit showed over 80% of students agreed the gamification activities improved their engagement, other student’s engagement and that they were motivated to collect cards and trade with others. 73% of students stated the activities helped their motivation to develop the skills needed to complete their assessment. Over 90% of students stated the activities helped them to better understand Viking clan life.

In Year 7 Science and Math, Mr Macauley was interested in using ClassPoint, an add on to Microsoft Powerpoint.  ClassPoint allows teachers to gamify quizzes on Powerpoint and give students timely feedback. He was also interested in testing whether pre-testing students was beneficial in learning. Upon completion of the units of work students were asked their opinion via survey. Over 80% of students found their learning was more engaging when using Classpoint and would like it used again. Over 90% of students liked the immediate feedback on questions and around 70% of students believed it helped their learning. End of lesson quizzes were dramatically improved if students were given a pretest at the start of the lesson with the average result increasing by 25%. Mr Macauley is working with another teacher this semester with the intention of comparing data to verify if the above corresponds with improved student results in exams.

We would like to take the opportunity to thank these teachers for their work and dedication to finding new ways to improve student outcomes. In the next newsletter we will cover two other interesting projects done by our amazing teachers here at Wynnum State High School.

Adam Christie
HOD Innovation, Technology & Interactive Teaching