Copyright

Anna Reid, Anne de A’Echevarria, Steve Bunce

Summary

On mobile phones, the pupils nurture twin aliens from egg to adulthood, caring for their physical and mental needs by teaching it about the world sharing their informal learning from enquiry.

Description

Using mobile phones, pupils each care for an alien egg, which hatches it into twin aliens; they care physically and mentally by feeding, keeping warm, playing and teaching them. The teaching stems from informal learning outside of school. Each week, one alien is taught a given enquiry topic eg national news, the other alien can be taught anything – prompts are: Topic, ‘Why are you teaching this?’, ‘Was it learnt in or out of school?’, ‘Have you used this knowledge for somewhere else?’. This is submitted as photos, video or audio clips captured by the pupil or text.

All information, for each pupil’s aliens, is collected in a database (what taught, why and whether learnt in or out of school). This can be used to question the pupils about where they learn and how. In addition, the aliens can be taught in different rooms in their virtual world – living room, school or outside. They choose where to teach, so giving an insight into where they perceive learning takes place.

A wiki network of pupils can communicate, sharing the knowledge given to their alien and the effect (showing their justification for the teaching and reinforcing the idea of where we learn).

How it might be used

During a six-week period a group of pupils grow and teach their own aliens outside of school and share their experiences.

The pupils are given a code to enter into an interactive webpage on their mobile phone. They receive an alien egg, give it warmth, stroking, music to hatch it. The findings from this are shared on a wiki or blog eg grows quickly at 24°C but not at 25°C. Sharing information prepares the next stage when twin aliens hatch and need food, water, warmth, play and love to grow.

Next stage, conditions include: number of hours sleep, brain food, exercise (readiness to learn) and teaching. One twin alien is given topics and the other can be taught anything. This feeds into a database which is used in lessons to question where they learnt it themselves (informally/formally). Each week a new enquiry topic helps one alien to grow and any teaching helps the other. The teacher can compare the information for both and look at where the learning is occurring. Each week the pupil can explain to the group why they taught that information and where they learnt it – highlighting out of school learning eg parents, TV, internet, friends.

Contact

Anna Reid
Knowledge Transfer Partnership Associate, Newcastle University and Bedlingtonshire High School

areid01@northumberland.gov.uk

Anne de A’Echevarria
thinkwell
anne@thinkwell.org.uk

Steve Bunce
Northumberland Local Authority and Bedlingtonshire High School

sbunce@northumberland.gov.uk