Article Preview
TopIntroduction
The phenomenon of the “playing human” has interested many researchers who have all emphasized the understanding that a child needs a large space for play activities in order to enable their appropriate development (Frost, Wortham & Reifel, 2001; Peroni, 2002). In many games, there is a focus on the means and not the goal: on the process rather than the product (Peroni, 2002). Such games provide their own contribution to development, even when it does not involve learning. Emotionally, the children's sense of capability to engage in play reinforces their self-confidence and contributes to their quality of life.
According to the traditional learning approach, the teacher is responsible for learning. The pupil is supposed to assimilate the learning material, but the teacher is responsible for the stages of learning and chooses the methods that will assist learning. When a pupil faces an assignment or challenge alone, without the teacher to help him, he develops action strategies in the domain of autonomous learning. In self-directed activities, the individual employs important self-management mechanisms, such as, planning, monitoring, seeking help and emotional control (Pellegrini & Smith, 1993; Sitzman & Ely, 2011). It is important to choose the time and place for play, an appropriate possibility is during free time in recesses (Ramstetter, Murray & Garner, 2010). The recess enables pupils to consolidate their views about society, about the school and about themselves (Pellegrini & Bohn, 2005). The present field report describes a process over the school year, intended to create experiential learning environments that would enable interaction between pupils as creators and players, teachers as mentors and interactive exhibits, offering opportunities for self-learning and encouraging the use of various strategies to solve assignments.
The main most ambitious and enduring assignment was an “escape wall” that was used to overcome lack of space in the school and involved the placing of escape rooms in niches in the school corridors. The pupils set up purpose-built engines in each niche, but the machines could only be operated by solving puzzles as in an escape room. Each niche contained its own story and tasks. In order to accumulate experience and skills, “little” learning projects were created alongside the main task so that pupils could understand the principles and resolve deliberations. In order to test the quality of the products, an assessment tool was chosen from the gamification world. The pupils were instructed according to Problem-Based Learning models (Savery & Duffy, 1995), active teaching (Johnson & Johnson, 2008) and with the use of strategies from Maker culture (Bevan, Petrich & Wilkinson, 2014; Blikstein & Krannich, 2013).