My PBL failure

I've been thinking about PBL a lot lately. I've had a few months since the end of my last PBL experience and I thought I'd share a little more about it now that I've had time to reflect.

I ran a project based on this driving question, "How can we, as Christian programmers, develop a video game that honours God?"

The students completed plans, wrote blogs, and learned to use two different platforms to develop their games. (We used Twine and Tynker.) We did gallery walks which I called Alpha testing and Beta Testing. In the end each student was involved in creating a video game. While doing it we had lessons, discussions, and presentations by experts (Thanks Kevin Schut author Of Games and God) on the topic of how Christians should interact with video games.

Near the end as we prepared for our Celebration of Learning at school where we would showcase our work the students asked if we could turn our classroom into an arcade. A few days later the whole room was sectioned off to be black, with glow-in-the-dark lettering, a disco ball, laser lights, music in the background and so much more.

The night of the Celebration of Learning that room was hopping. Of course tons of students wanted to come in and check out our games, which brought all kinds of parents in.

In the end it looked like a smashing success.

But that's not the whole story.

There were three students for whom the project was essentially a failure.

1) A young lady who had little or no interest in video games herself, nor much interest in coding. She was with a partner who struggled to communicate effectively. The work involved was quite difficult for her and in the end the game they produced was buggy and actually had little of her work in it.

2) A young man who loves outdoors and sports of all kinds. He did not care for video games in the slightest. School was always a struggle for him which was just as evident here. Eventually he did create a game of his own, which worked and he definitely learned a few things along the way, but it was not an easy journey.

3) A young lady who was highly competent, skilled, and hard-working. But she certainly did not like video games. But, because the teacher asked her to, she dug in a did the work. In the end she created a highly detailed story based game.

For these three students this was not a great learning experience. Oh, they learned some things, so it wasn't a complete waste of time, but it didn't go all that well.

And that bothers me.