How do you make sense out of the instructional model that underlies simSchool?
Your simStudents’ initial academic and personality characteristics play into how they react to the tasks and types of conversational exchanges that you select. simStudent characteristics, found in the student profiles on the classroom laptop, are based on settings for academic experience and the Big Five Personality Characteristics – Intellectual openness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Persistence, Emotional stability. When you give a task to your simStudent, his/her characteristics work collectively along the following dimensions: 1. Your simStudent’s level of capacity to do the task and 2. Feelings of affiliation, familiarity and comfort with a task and these produce 3. Academic growth, maintenance or decline.”
A specific example will demonstrate how this works. In the class of 5, Jay is only going to do well with task 13 and 16…and will do medium well with 4,5,6,10, 19 , 20 and will go downhill with everything else. We can see this result right in the help file
http://simschool.net/help/how.php?id=2 at the bottom of the page. So we could suggest that the whole class be given 14 – create a graphic, but then give 13 or 16 to Jay – for up to 40 iterations (20 minutes of classtime). This will be a successful 20 minutes even if the gamer teacher says nothing to anyone.
Try this out and then take a look at the ending chart to see the results on Jay’s academic line and his other characteristics which related to affiliation and comfort.