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[jb1172]

Educational paradigm - help needed

[smartyman]

What a great idea! I read through your outline and was left thinking 2 things:

1) If I was a student at your university this is definitely a course I would sign up for! I don't know if that's a good litmus test though since I think most people here would say that.
2) It must be very cool to be in a profession where you can take one of your own interests and be able to share it with others as a course. Hopefully the students will appreciate it, and I think they will since students can sense when their professor is really passionate about something and respond to that.

Just make sure you slip in Shuffled as an extra credit puzzle so we can get some more help solving it.

[Caz]

this is a good idea, i seen a teacher friend given out PXC cards to Key stage 3 and 4 kids to do in class because they fitted into the science.

the only thing i can see that may go wrong with trying to teaching like this is that history students may not be code nuts so may not like even easy clippers being used out of the blue. You all ways can use easy puzzle like crosswords or sudoku.

Witch part of history are you teaching. it matters when picking the types of puzzles you can set. i.e. in classics or west religion Latin would be a good thing to use.

[Mikeyj]

Re: Educational paradigm - help needed

[jb1172]

Thanks everyone - especially Mikeyj for that link (the IDGA whitepaper has a great section on academic research).

Caz - the teaching will go across all periods of history: I'll be looking to design puzzles which draw out critical/puzzle-solving skills by asking students to cosider carefully where and who information comes from (the idea of 'who can we trust' which dominated PXC in the latter stages is a great analogy for Historical research - for example, Hitler re-wrote a fair bit of history to justify his own position, and so if you read only state-released papers from 1940s Germany you'd think that the pyramids were created by early German settlers).

I'm also thinking of putting some fun image-related puzzles in - eg. photo clues to a particular shelf and journal article in the library which my students have traditionally avoided like the plague

Given that many of the students won't know about/'get' ARGs or higher-level puzzles, I wonder if any of you have found that particular puzzle types go down well with uninitiated friends/family? I know from my experience that things like [S1#062 Sweet Child O'Mine] and [S1#047 Opposites Attract] have almost universal appeal, whereas things like [S1#066 Lost in Mokba] and [S1#124 Dream Ticket] which need a bit more searching/collaboration are not so instantly appealing.

Cheers,
jb