Snow, Snow, Go Away!

There isn't very much to report on the technology in the classroom front because, well, we haven't BEEN in the classroom! We had 3 feet of snow fall between February 5 & February 10. All of the snow put us out of the classroom from February 5 through February 15, with an additional snow day on February 3. We were back last week, but we had an hour delay each day due to the conditions of the roads and sidewalks.

I reorganized groups in all of the classes to accommodate new students added to the rosters. We have restarted having the students work on their amusement parks, but this time I am requiring them to follow just my rubric, and to work in the Sandbox mode of the software. This gives them unlimited money while eliminating most of the complaints from the peeps.

Another apparent issue is not remembering how to make the various roller coasters, and getting frustrated when the rules of physics kick in during the game (yes, Rollercoaster Tycoon follows the rules of physics for their rides!). I'm trying to fix this by making short tutorial videos on the different coasters which the students can then watch as often as necessary. I'm using CamStudio, which is an open source screen recording package. It is the same as Camtasia, but free.

We are all hoping that there will not be any more snow for the rest of this school year.

Disappointment

I have to say that I'm very disappointed in the quality of projects that my students turned in for the last quarter. With the exception of a few, there was very little effort or thought put into the final versions of the games. One group actually attempted to turn in a hand-drawn board that was done in pencil 10 minutes before the final version was due. Another group traced their board, but didn't bother to use a ruler. In all, I only received 5 games total, and none of them included the required typed directions.
I'm not sure what went wrong... I've tried dissecting the problem, and have decided that at least there was some confusion since they were doing both an amusement park in the RCT3 software, and a game board of their own design based on an amusement park they chose. Clearly, the RCT3 activity was more popular than the game board. I was also out of the classroom more than is typical for me between jury duty, some family issues, and LOTS of meetings. But, the students still had 9 weeks with lots and lots of notice about projects, lots of checkpoints where they were told what still needed to be accomplished.
I have decided to let them finish their RCT3 parks for the first part of this quarter, because none of them have anything to present. And, I'm trying to decide how (and if!) I want to let them do anything with The Sims. I'd love to have enough computers to let them each do their own project.