Sunday, January 27, 2013

Are you "purty smart" or "just plain dumb"?



It worked out almost too perfectly, yet one could tell that situation wasn't orchestrated and was completely spontaneous. As a class we were required to bring in a game. Everyone brought in something, even though it seemed most people just whipped out their phones and went to town on some app (I did). In the midst of all of this we are discussing through our readings certain topics of utilizing games for learning and peer based learning and so on. One of the examples of this was the "peg game". I'm not sure of the actual name of the game, I just know it as the neat little time waster sitting at your table when ever you eat at a Cracker Barrel which I call the peg game. It's in the shape of the triangle, has a set number of holes, and a set number of pegs (golf tee's) which is one less than the number of holes; and the object is to remove all of the pegs by jumping the pegs over each other -like checkers. Ultimately you want one peg left.

Now on to how it worked out perfectly. We all took our turns with the game, I think I whittled it down to 2 pegs left, and others attempted with equal or lesser success, but nobody succeeded in taking it down to 1 peg. Then one of the other students, one of my peers says something along the lines of "there's an easy way to do this, just do this and this and etc.". He successfully beat the challenge. We all continued to pass around the game. We all were victorious. A perfect example of peer learning. A challenge arose and with the help of a game and the advice of a peer, we were able to overcome the obstacle.

5 comments:

  1. Your post this week directly explains what peer based learning truly is. Games bring on the opportunity to meet others in your class and interact. I think we will all be surprised by how much we can learn from our classmates.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think that it was interesting that we learned so much from the guy that was amazing. He essentially showed us the correct way once, and we were all able to do it almost fluently the next time we got the peg board. It's amazing what peer based learning can accomplish!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Peer learning is a really great way as a group to learn how to do a task. Something you don't know, someone else could be an expert at. Things like this is why group work in classrooms is very helpful.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Peer learning is a brilliant way to learn things; who could understand young minds better than young minds?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dylan your description here is really theorizing how things worked out with this simple game... the plan is to keep drawing on this in less tangible work.

    ReplyDelete