Fun and Games in the Classroom!

Tom Bromwich is one of the year 3 teachers at Cooper and Jordan School in Aldridge, and he recently got in touch with us to see if we could help him out with a project his students were working on. They’ve been looking into how beneficial video games can be in the class room and they wondered if the Molecules could help answer a few questions the students had put together about working in games. We were more than happy to help out and Tom has kindly been sharing the students’ progress with us since then.

We’ve been so bowled over with the children’s resulting work on their projects that we had to share with you all! Tom, his colleague Sarah and their students have very kindly written up an awesome report about the work they did, check it out!

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Year 3 Students

Hi everyone! We are a Year 3 class and recently we have been finding out how useful games can be in the classroom.

To start with we emailed the awesome people at Media Molecule to see if they could help us out. Not only did they agree to answer some of our questions but they also sent us a huge treat in the post. They sent us a set of badges for everybody in the Year group!

We spent a few days thinking of some questions that we could send to the fantastic people at Media Molecule, once we had thought of some we sent them along. They were really helpful and sent us back some phenomenal answers. We used one of Media Molecule's brilliant games to help us in Science. The game we used was Little Big Planet. It is absolutely outstanding game where you can create your own levels and have an incredible amount of fun playing them, we certainly did!

Using the game we carried out an experiment using a car, a ramp and our brains to discover more about friction. The car sped down the ramp into different materials like rubber, polystyrene and even milkshake! It was great fun watching the car speeding down the ramp and sliding across the material that was used.

Another brilliant game we used was Tearaway Unfolded. We think this is the best game in the universe because you can explore a world made out of paper, create anything you can think of and get hunted down by cheeky squirrels. After we had played the game for a little bit we then created our own marvellous setting descriptions.

All because the game was so amazing and inspiring we created some of the best work we have done all year, maybe ever! We would all love to live in the paper world, exploring new places, walking out onto crunchy paper into a story and getting the chance to get revenge of the rebellious squirrel.

We also used the music from these games to create our own glorious music reviews, here are a few of them. It was interesting getting the chance to hear the music because we carefully thought about how we felt whilst listening.

We would all like to say a huge, no a monumental thank you to everybody at Media Molecule for helping us understand more about games, life in the games industry and for creating two colossally fantastic games. We all enjoyed them very much and cannot wait to play Dreams, when it comes out! Thank you all and speak to you soon, love Year 3!

The Year 3 students finished off their topic on video games by creating this wonderful video, inspired by the ending message from Tearaway! Beautiful, brilliant work :)

A note from Tom and Sarah about games in the classroom

Tearaway is an absolutely awesome game and has been an integral part of the teaching that we have undertaken over the past half term. It has allowed the children to experience emotions, settings and an understanding of presence within a story that they would not simply gain from a still frame picture, film clip or even a written piece of text. It has inspired the children to create some genuinely outstanding pieces of work that we are both incredibly proud of and we know this would not have been possible without a game as creative, engaging and fun as Tearaway is. Not only did it assist in their writing work but also allowed them to think creatively across the entire curriculum . For example, in Music the children listened to various tracks from the game; thought about their emotional responses to the soundtrack, its appropriateness to the game and even created detailed reviews thinking more about the composition of the piece. We were exceptionally impressed with their reflective opinions on the music and they all immensely enjoyed undertaking the task.

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A massive thank you to Tom, Sarah and all the Year 3 students at Cooper and Jordan School, we couldn’t stop smiling as we read your reports and watched your videos, it means the world to us that our games were able to help out with your studies!

From all the Molecules, we wish you all the best of luck with your studies and we’d love to have you folks in the studio for a visit sometime! <3