Ooka Island ESL Pilot in Medellin, Colombia
Ooka’s First Week in South America was a Success!
Read the full report below to learn more about Ooka Island’s first week in Medellin, Colombia. Ian Vickey is working as an English as a Second Language Teacher with the Marina Orth Foundation.
- Ian Vickery, ESL Teacher
Report: Ooka Island 5/22 – 5/24
School: Colegio Camino De Paz
Location: Medellin, Colombia
ESL Teacher: Ian Vickery
Program Overview: Ooka Island is a Learn-To-Read Adventure English language computer game designed for adaptive, blending learning for pre-kindergarten to second grade students. Ooka Island’s headquarters is based in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. I had the privilege to fly up there a few weeks ago to be trained by the creators of the game and their staff. There, I learned the methodology behind the program and how to successfully operate and implement the learning system in a classroom environment.
Ooka Island, which just launched earlier this year, has been mainly used by students whose native language is English. While there have been more than several ELL (English Language Learners or English as a Second Language) students that have used the program and have had success with it, the system had not yet been officially monitored in an environment where English is not the dominant language. Colegio Camino de Paz in Medellin, Colombia will be the first test of the program with non-native speakers of English that are not immersed in a principally English speaking environment.
Implementation: Week 1
This past week, I had three sessions with five students (ages 7-8). Their native language is Spanish, and their collective knowledge of the English language is still very basic. Each Student is given their own individual profile (the 5 are all under the account of teacher Viviana Rendon) and their own picture password that they remember and click on each time in order to log on.
Tuesday, 5/22/2012: During this hour and a half session, I spent the first half going over basic English descriptive adjectives. We worked on ways to describe the physical appearance of a person coupled with the verb “to be” in the present tense. The students greatly enjoyed the exercise and were attentive and taking notes the whole time. The second half, I attempted to get the students on Ooka Island. Each child had their own HP laptop which are property of the school, used for classroom activities. However, it took me 20 minutes to get some of the children on the game due to some technical difficulties with connecting to the internet. Three of students only had 15 or so minutes on the program, while I could not get the other two on to the program during the session.
Wednesday, 5/23/2012: During this session, I decided to spend the whole time on Ooka Island. I was able to get all 4 of the students (Ricardo was absent) on to the program. There were plenty of technical difficulties that popped up throughout the session, but each student was able to make some good progress into the game.
Thursday 5/24/2012: For this session, I decided to hold it in a different classroom than the previous two sessions. This time, we had a round table for all kids to put their laptops on instead of individual desks. The students played for the a good duration (about an hour), but many times their sessions were interrupted by the usual crashing of the computer program or internet disconnection.
Results and Observations: Week 1
Phonemic and Phonetic Skills Introduced:
- Alphabet Mountain: Identify and sequence letters of the alphabet
- Bubbly Trubbly: Letter/sound correspondence
- Cake Factory: Letter/sound recognition, segmenting, blending and decoding
- Cave of Sounds: Auditorally recognize single phonemes, letter/sound correspondence and identify initial and final consonant sounds in syllables and words
- Clumsy Wacky: Blend onsets and rimes into words, blend sounds into words and rhyme
- Word Ball: Auditory discrimination between syllables and words and decoding
- Submarine Listening: Identify vowels in the initial, medial and final positions
Reporting Legend:
- Current Level = Current Level in an Activity
- Session = Number of complete activity attempts in the current level.
- Score = Number of correct answers in the current level.
- Percentage = Percentage of correct answers over all levels
Individual Student Snapshots
Student: Daniel M.
Ooka Mist (In-game currency): 9
Books Unlocked: 3
Time Played: 1:25
|
Activity |
Current Level |
Session |
Session Score |
Overall Percentage |
|
Alphabet Mountain |
3/24 |
1 |
11/12 |
97% |
|
Bubbly Troubly |
1/24 |
2 |
8/10 |
80% |
|
Cake Factory |
1/24 |
3 |
7/11 |
64% |
|
Cave of Sounds |
4/49 |
3 |
12/12 |
100% |
|
Clumsy Wacky |
1/24 |
1 |
1/7 |
19% |
Student: Daniel S.
Ooka Mist:18
Books Unlocked: 2
Time Played: 1:17
|
Activity |
Current Level |
Session |
Session Score |
Overall Percentage |
|
Alphabet Mountain |
2/24 |
1 |
12/14 |
83% |
|
Bubbly Troubly |
1/24 |
3 |
14/18 |
72% |
|
Cake Factory |
1/24 |
2 |
13/15 |
72% |
|
Cave of Sounds |
5/49 |
2 |
19/19 |
100% |
|
Clumsy Wacky |
1/24 |
3 |
2/18 |
19% |
Student: Dubis
Ooka Mist: 4
Books Unlocked: 4
Time Played: 1:4
|
Activity |
Current Level |
Session |
Session Score |
Overall Percentage |
|
Alphabet Mountain |
4/24 |
1 |
8/8 |
94% |
|
Bubbly Troubly |
2/24 |
1 |
9/9 |
78% |
|
Cake Factory |
2/24 |
2 |
7/7 |
93% |
|
Cave of Sounds |
6/49 |
3 |
12/12 |
100% |
|
Clumsy Wacky |
2/24 |
2 |
4/12 |
25% |
Student: Laura
Ooka Mist: 7
Books Unlocked: 4
Time Played: 1:41
|
Activity |
Current Level |
Session |
Session Score |
Overall Percentage |
|
Alphabet Mountain |
5/24 |
1 |
19/19 |
98% |
|
Bubbly Troubly |
2/24 |
4 |
9/10 |
90% |
|
Cake Factory |
2/24 |
1 |
7/8 |
79% |
|
Cave of Sounds |
5/49 |
2 |
23/23 |
100% |
|
Clumsy Wacky |
2/24 |
4 |
2/10 |
22% |
Student: Ricardo
Ooka Mist: 0
Books Unlocked: 3
Time Played: 1:10
|
Activity |
Current Level |
Session |
Session Score |
Overall Percentage |
|
Alphabet Mountain |
3/24 |
1 |
11/11 |
97% |
|
Bubbly Troubly |
1/24 |
2 |
9/9 |
96% |
|
Cake Factory |
1/24 |
3 |
0/7 |
7% |
|
Cave of Sounds |
4/49 |
2 |
10/10 |
100% |
|
Clumsy Wacky |
1/24 |
2 |
3/17 |
26%
|
Overall Positives:
- Game was successfully installed and each laptop was able to run the program well.
- For the most part, the Wireless Internet was able to handle the requirements of the game
- The activities captivated the interest of the students and they each said that they greatly enjoyed the game as a whole
- The students were able to grasp fully two activities (Alphabet Mountain and Cave of Sounds) and were starting to perform better in two others (Cake Factory and Bubbly Troubly)
- Each student was able to complete at least an hour and 10 minutes in the game and get through at least two books (some 3 or 4!) in basically two class periods.
Overall Concerns:
- Technical Problems. Each time this happens, it takes several minutes to get back on to the activity, taking out precious learning time that the students have.
- Volume. The students have trouble hearing the directions of the activity. Given that this game is not in their native language, they need to be able to listen to the instructions and in-game sounds very closely. I would really like headphones for the students.
- Distractions. Being young students, they tend to get distracted easily from the game. Sometimes they would look onto another students screen and start talking to them about something. When the game crashed, it took a few minutes to get their full attention back on to the game.
Conclusion: Week 1
All of the students are making excellent progress into the program and I am pleased with their high performance in most of the activities. For most of the activies, I did not explain what to do in Spanish, and they, therefore, had to figure out what to do based on the in-game English instructions and simple trial-and-error. They were able to figure out what to do in Alphabet Mountain and the Cave of Sounds almost instantly. For Cake Factory and Bubbly Troubly, it took them a bit to figure out what do, but eventually they caught on.
The only activity that they really could not grasp (averaging around 22% correct) was Clumsy Wacky. I believe this is due largely to the activity requiring a certain knowledge of English vocabulary as a name of an object is read with the stress on the first syllable and the students have to then click on a picture of the object. For the future, I have a list of all the objects and will translate them on the board for all the students to refer to.
Ultimately, as I stated before, I am very pleased with how the five students responded to Ooka. A lot of my initial doubts (principally about the technical problems and the language barrier) have been eased and I see Ooka Island having a great impact on the English reading and comprehension abilities of many students. Next week, I would like to work with the same students to track their progress even further and work on resolving some of the problems that we had this week. I believe most of the Overall Concerns that I had for the week can be fixed or improved with time.
Hasta Pronto,
- Ian Vickery
ESL Teacher at Colegio Camino De Paz
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