FLORENCE, SC (WBTW) – Video games are being used as learning tools at three Florence District One elementary schools. The program is called Legends of Learning and is new this year to Royall Elementary School, Sneed Middle School, and Williams Middle School.
“You get to play games while you learn and it’s very helpful,” said sixth grader Zoe Scott.
It’s a new way of learning for Ms. Grady’s sixth-grade science class at Royall Elementary and the students say they are learning more than they realized.
“It’s really fun because you get to, one, play games, and two, get to answer questions that you didn’t know before,” said student Abby Woodrum.
The program is designed to help both teachers and students through a technology connected to the video games.
The teacher is able to create a playlist of games based on a certain category. The students then login to their computers and connect to that playlist. When the teacher starts the playlist, the games begin. The students then answer questions on their computers while the teacher can track and monitor the progress of each student. The students are represented as green dots and progress down a line as they answer questions correctly; however, if a dot is red, that tells the teacher that the particular student is behind, which gives the teacher the opportunity to step in and help that student.
“It’s challenging. I love for it to be challenging because they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s hard,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s good. It’s making you think,'” said sixth-grade science teacher Shonte Grady.
Grady said the video games act as a supplement to her lesson and that they do not replace her as a teacher. Legends of Learning allows the students to learn at their own pace, only moving forward when they get an answer correct. If a student gets the answer wrong, the game will skip the question and eventually come back to it to give the student the opportunity to get it right.
“It’s more fun than just sitting there reading a science book,” said student Ma’kai Darby.
Although the activites are not timed, the students in Ms.Grady’s class said they enjoy the healthy competition among classmates.
“It’s okay to make mistakes as long as you learn from those mistakes, you correct those mistakes and you move on,” said Grady.
Grady said the most important thing to her is for her students to have fun while learning.
“It’s science. I love science. The world is all about science!” exclaimed student Zoe Scott.
Grady said it’s too early to tell, statistically, what impact the video games have on the students, but said overall, she has seen a positive outcome from Legends of Learning. The Legends of Learning program is currently only used for science classes at Royall Elementary School, and only the fifth and sixth grade classes use it.
