{"id":67,"date":"2021-02-10T22:32:28","date_gmt":"2021-02-11T05:32:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2021etec540\/?p=67"},"modified":"2021-02-10T22:32:28","modified_gmt":"2021-02-11T05:32:28","slug":"task-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2021etec540\/2021\/02\/10\/task-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Task 5"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bunsen Burner<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Click above to download the .zip file.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I am a terrible storyteller, so I decided to make an educational game, a simulation to prepare students to use the Bunsen burner safely. I added visuals and sounds to make the experience as real as possible and tried to be funny to make the game enjoyable. As the simulation is intended to mimic the lab, I set most of my links to be decisions. I created good decisions and poor decisions so that students can experience both success and failure. The simulation gives students a safe place to fail and opportunities to remake erroneous decisions.<\/p>\n

At the start of designing the game, the process was relatively straight forward. There is definitely a starting point to setting up the Bunsen burner \u2013 connecting the rubber tube to the gas outlet \u2013 so I created a list of decisions around that. Hierarchies and sequential steps are a large part of learning science and so beginning my Twine design in this same way felt natural. Having decisions be the links set the expectation that the linked page will be about the resulting consequence of an action. To reinforce that page B is the result of what was decided on page A, I set a welcome message on page B to remind students of their decision that led to the result (Bolter, 2001).<\/p>\n

I had expected that the remaining steps in setting up a Bunsen burner be sequential as well, but to my surprise, they were not. I realized that the following steps, adjusting the oxygen and gas valves on the burner, can be done in any order. In fact, when I set up the burner myself, I am just as likely to adjust the oxygen valve first as I am to adjust the gas valve. And so, my Twine game narrative was no longer linear, but had parallel pages, and this, to my surprise, also reflected my focus and thinking process. In this fork of my narrative, I started to have rapid fire thoughts about both valves and the decisions for each simultaneously. At the same time, in the middle of my coding, I decided to incorporate sounds and images. I would frequently interrupt my own coding to run into the lab to take a picture or to record a sound. My mind indeed operated by association at this point; as soon as one thought occurred, my mind snapped instantly to another that is associated with the first thought (Bush, 1945).<\/p>\n

Upon further reflection, is connecting the rubber tube actually the first step in setting up the Bunsen burner? One could just as easily check the valves first. The cognitive structures in my brain are a web of trails (Bush, 2001) that are made linear when memories are accessed. However, the linearity is different each time. One day, I may check the oxygen valve first, then the gas, then connect the tube. On another day, I may do the complete reverse of these steps. At this point, I deleted all the arrows in my Twine, and reconnected the pages so that connecting the tube to the gas outlet was no longer the mandatory first step.<\/p>\n

So if our thoughts are webs, why are we so obsessed with teaching sequentially? Why are our subjects organized into units and our notes labeled with numbers and indexed? I think there is a difference in how information goes into the brain and how information is stored and accessed in the brain. If information is stored linearly, like if our brain was a big scroll, it would take much longer for us to find and recall information. It is much more efficient for ideas to be stored as a web, with each idea hyperlinked to many others. But, in learning new ideas, linearity may reign supreme. Learning is already a difficult task. I cannot imagine learning history from multiple points in the timeline simultaneously or learning chemistry by jumping around from atomic theory to the mole. Information must be presented in an organized way so that students can first understand the topics, and then hyperlink them to their own existing web. Only they can make sense of new information within their own contexts. Each student arrives to class with their own internal memex; only they have access to the levers and buttons.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bolter, Jay David. (2001).\u00a0Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print<\/em>. New York, NY: Routledge.<\/p>\n

Bush, V. (1945).\u00a0As we may think.\u00a0The Atlantic Monthly,<\/em>\u00a0176<\/em>(1)\u00a0(Links to an external site.)<\/a>, 101-108.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bunsen Burner Click above to download the .zip file. I am a terrible storyteller, so I decided to make an educational game, a simulation to prepare students to use the Bunsen burner safely. I added visuals and sounds to make the experience as real as possible and tried to be funny to make the game […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83467,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tasks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2021etec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2021etec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2021etec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2021etec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83467"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2021etec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2021etec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2021etec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions\/72"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2021etec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2021etec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/2021etec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}