December 21, 2021
Games open doors for locked down tauira
An Auckland primary teacher says the world of gaming has shown a new way to teach through the lockdown.
Lewin Watene Husband, from Te Kura Ākonga o Manurewa says while classes this year have involved a lot of zooms, he also found gaming platforms like Mahi Maina, the Māori version of Minecraft, were a way to unlock the imagination of tauira and allow them to complete tasks like creating pepeha and designing their ideal environments.
“Prodigy, Education Perfect, Sumdog, they’re all these sort of gamified education websites that teach kids with level-specific, age-specific content through the likes of Pokemon, through the likes of Yu-gi-oh, through the likes of Minecraft, so it seems like we were just gaming together and having a whole lot of fun,” he says.
He was then able to teach his students how to package up the digital content they had created into other formats like blogs and Tik Tok so they could share their ideas.