L. Leavett-Brown's EDCI 336 Blog

Albert Bandura and Bobo Doll sprites with Pixelorama

Tag: Games

Topic 10 – Weekly Reflection Blog Post

21 March 2026 /

This week, we watched the first batch of group presentations and also heard about Citizenship Online, Privacy, Safety, Bullying & Consent.

Group Presentations – Pods

The pods to which I was assigned before Friday’s class were:

  1. Pod 4: Old vs New School Projects
  2. Pod 11: Using Film in Classrooms
  3. Pod 2: Using Stop Motion Animation to Support Multimodal Learning
  4. Pod 15: Can teachers use Slido effectively to engage and help students learn?

My takeaways from these were that both digital and analog projects are useful depending on the context, film and stop-motion animation are useful for the engagement and that Slido was a resource that might be more trouble than it is worth for classroom use. I was impressed with Drew’s curated collection of films for classroom use, which he had organised according to the subjects in which they would be likely to be useful. I also liked the creative way in which Pod 4 presented their material.

Pod 4's "Robe Report" presentation in a podcast / daytime television style.

Online Citizenship

This is mostly about online safety and online conduct. I conducted a Google search of my name and I was pleased to find that I am largely absent from the internet. There were few exceptions. I have a Facebook account, but it is private and I haven’t posted anything to it in years. My name appeared associated with UVic on ResearchGate and LinkedIn, but I have no posts. I have an X account, but I don’t follow anyone, don’t accept followers and I don’t post. I was surprised to find someone with a similar name to mine: Lindsey Leavitt Brown on Instagram @justanotherlindsey. While I used (early 2010s) to be more active online, these days I use Discord and WhatsApp and only sparingly.

For my children, we limit their screen time to a maximum of 30 minutes per day and they are only allowed to watch Korean content. They are not allowed to select the videos and they must watch it where we can see them. Regarding mobile phones, we may buy them a basic phone with which to call home, but we have decided that they may not have a smartphone until they are 18 and only if they buy it themselves. When I am teaching, I do not intend to make having a smartphone a prerequisite to success and I expect my children’s teachers not to make Chromebooks or phones essential either. My own parenting decisions notwithstanding, I can see that teaching students safe practice online is important where they have much broader access to social media.

I liked the Is My Phone Listening to Me? game: https://richmccue.github.io/learning-games/phone_listening_quiz.html

I scored 12/14. I probably would have done better, but I was reading too quickly and misread “legally” for “illegally.” Dumb mistake.

Topic 8 – Computational Thinking & Gaming in Education

7 March 2026 /

Shall I be using programming in the classroom?

Probably not. I think that even with the simple stuff, there is quite a learning curve for me and I suspect that many of my students will be far enough ahead that any lesson I gave them on the subject would useless at best and laughably wrong at worst.

I wish that I were better. The blocks in the above screenshot did manage to complete the shape, but it still was not right and I have no idea why. I can see that the ability to code would be an asset and I am sure that in my teaching areas of Social Studies and English I could find a use for it. Perhaps some dull summer I shall get stuck into coding to try to make some game or activity for my class.

I like making games

I hate playing games. Sport bores me. I haven’t an jot of competitiveness in me. Games, however, are a fun way to teach things to secondary students. When I taught English in Korea, every lesson ended in a game. The mandate from the principal was to make English fun for the children and games were a big part of that.

I made my games enjoyable with a few techniques. First, I had a rotation of the types of games that I would employ: teacher-led, games played in groups (i.e., board and card games) and games that involved a lot of movement. Second, I tried to make it so that students felt that their decisions influenced the outcome of the game. This could be done by giving them choices, even blind choices, in the game. It could also be done by having success simply depend on how well they studied. Third, I liked to put surprises in the game. For instance, students would watch a video series, one episode per lesson. My games often had video clips from the series, edited to be amusing, so wrong answers would have the main character trapped in a block of ice, being fed to crocodiles or accidentally turning the queen into a harem dancer, Father Christmas or a flatulent little girl. I think these games effectively work as flash cards, but they are more engaging and, hopefully, more effective.

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