Back to Paper

We will call the three students in this project James, Keisha, and Shanika. James was perhaps the most intelligent boy in the school. However, he was also not well liked by the other students. When we were forming groups, we asked people to list other people with whom they might like to work. Only one person listed James—that student being Shanika. We believe that she chose to do this because she realized that, given James’ inclusion in a group, the project would be very good. She further knew that no one else would be vying for his participation. This strategy led one researcher to suggest that perhaps Shanika ought to be considered the most intelligent person in the school.

Their initial work with this project tended to focus on getting photographs of themselves and an audio clip introducing themselves into the document (this kind of experimentation with their images and voice seems to be one of the first things that students do with this technology). After this initial "play/learn" period, they began to immerse themselves in the task. James came up with a classification scheme that included High, Medium, Low and No Violence games. The group then got together and identified a variety of games that were popular for them and their peers. They classified these particular games into the categories that James had identified. Finally, after a short verbal explanation by a professor of instructional technology, Keisha went home and connected her game player through the VCR to the TV. As she played the games, she would press the record button on the VCR and came to school the next day with footage of actual interactions that they had identified in the games. These videos were digitized and integrated into their report as examples of the different categories.

Next, they decided to construct a one-item questionnaire on whether their fellow students thought violence in video games was okay or not. They printed their questionnaire, copied it, distributed it to the entire seventh grade in their school, collected the data, and analyzed it. To analyze it, they entered the data into a spreadsheet program. After calculating totals and percentages, they selected a graphical representation that would best communicate the data (they had a pie chart). This chart and the data were integrated into the document (including the instrument as it appeared to the subjects in the study). Finally, they conducted interviews with people who had responded differently to the questionnaire. These interviews were integrated into the document with photographs of the individual respondents and audio clips of their comments. Within the context of this six-week project, these students applied social science methods and mathematical visualizations to their language arts activity. They learned how to use technology to express themselves. They worked in the mornings before school, in the afternoons after school, and at home to try and complete their project within the time frame provided to them. Finally, their work was published on a CD-ROM.

As you may expect, all was not perfect within this group. There was some tough negotiation on roles within the project. The girls wound up collecting the data, conducting the interviews, and videotaping. James seemed to do most of the writing and classifying of games. He tried to dominate the project, but Keisha and Shanika were able to prevent James from achieving this goal. This caused several conflicts throughout their project.

Return to "Stories"