Yesterday we started to think about how to create enabling objectives from scratch using the Excalibur.js quickstart as an example.
We came up with the following terminal objective:
"Create your first game."
The rough steps, in no particular order, that would be required to reach this objective would be:
- Explain what Actors are
- Explain what Scenes are
- Add Actors to the game
- Create a new game instance
- Handle basic keyboard movement to control an Actor
- Position actors on screen
- Understand how the viewport works
- Install excalibur
- Import excalibur code from the package
- Enable physics simulation on certain actors
They are out of sequence but those are the rough steps.
But... these aren't learning objectives. Why not?
First, there's too many of them. We want to aim for 1-3 enabling objectives for a terminal one.
Second, they don't answer the question, "What's in it for me?" They are scope-oriented and not outcome-oriented.
Remember, the way to create a learning objective is to complete the sentence: "After going through this quick start, I will be able to..." and whatever that outcome is, it should be making my job easier or enabling me to do something I couldn't do before.
To consolidate these into 1-3 enabling objectives, let's try to group related steps together.
Group 1
- Explain what Actors are
- Explain what Scenes are
- Understand how the viewport works
Group 2
- Add Actors to the game
- Create a new game instance
- Install excalibur
- Import excalibur code from the package
Group 3
- Enable physics simulation on certain actors
- Handle basic keyboard movement to control an Actor
- Position actors on screen
I tried to group them based on what I think the learning outcomes might be.
I had some in mind but I'm going to let you have a think on what you'd classify each group as according to Bloom's Taxonomy.
Here's a two-pager with some verbs for each taxonomy level you could reference.
I'll be back tomorrow with how I'd classify them.
Have a lovely day,
Kamran
