Game Making on iPads

As the way I use iPads has evolved over the past couple of years I find that I most value the iPad as a tool for  personalising learning, for assessment and for collecting evidence of student achievements and for promoting student creativity. For these purposes apps such as Edmodo and Nearpod are invaluable for personalising learning and apps such as Book Creator are invaluable for collecting evidence and artefacts and apps such as iMovie, PuppetPals, GreenScreen, Tellagami are excellent for student creativity. For assessment, their are so many options such as apps that collect data when students sign in, taking screenshots of students' results on an app and using screen casting apps like Educreations and Explain Everything to record students' understanding of various concepts.

My favourite way to assess is to have students create games for other students to use. This way games are created that are relevant to the content being taught in your classroom and you will see from how well the game is created, how well the student understands the topic. TinyTap has been (and still is) one of my favourite apps to use for this purpose. The only problem is the games are not editable so if students do make a mistake when they create their game, while you can still use this to assess their understanding, they then need to remake the entire game for it to be useful. I recently discovered another excellent app that can be used for this purpose.

StickAround, unlike many of my other favourite apps, is not free but it is well worth its $3.79. It is available on Apple's Volume Purchasing Program which takes is back to $1.90 if you purchase over 20 copies. I won't go into details about how StickAround works because there is a great deal of information on the website at www.learninginhand.com/stickaround. The website contains video tutorials, user guides, a blog and more. Basically you use StickAround to create puzzles on any topic. Some suggestions they make on the website are:

• place locations on a map
• tag parts of the body
• place items where they belong on a chart
• complete a graphic organizer
• annotate the water cycle
• label people in a photo
• diagram a sentence
• associate powers with the branches of government
• sequence events on a timeline
• associate words and definitions
• label the parts of a plant
• put words in alphabetical order
• fill in a Venn diagram
• match photos of animals to their habitats

What a great way to assess student understanding! These puzzles are fully editable from the project page so, if students do misunderstand the concept, their games can then be fixed. Once completed and repaired, puzzles can be saved to non-editable versions and they can be shared using GoogleDrive.

Obviously TinyTap and StickAround are also more than excellent for creating personalised games/puzzles for students to play.