Partnership builds creative digital technology in Wisconsin classrooms

Through a new partnership with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, a group of UW–Madison experts will team up with K-12 teachers and students throughout the state to develop educational apps and games.

The collaboration aims to blend hands-on learning techniques with cutting-edge digital tools to create activities that both challenge and motivate students in — and beyond — the classroom.

“If we send kids out into the woods with notebooks, they could do some great things, but they’re somewhat limited,” says David Gagnon, program manager of Field Day Lab at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at UW–Madison. “If we’re learning about plants and animals, students can go out and document phenomena with the HD camera and audio recorder on their phone and have all that data tagged with GPS timestamps and aggregated back to a Google map for discussion back in class.”

Previous apps developed by Gagnon’s team required students to do more than sit and stare at a screen all day. For example, one app encouraged students to head outside to archive and learn about species of birds and plants for a biology lesson. The new partnership seeks to create similar tools that not only have measurable learning outcomes, but also boost student engagement and motivation.

“We would like the classroom to be more of a place that introduces a way to view the world, a launch pad and place to debrief designed experiences outside of school,” says Gagnon, who leads the initiative. “Anyone who’s ever learned anything knows that learning is more than storing facts in your head; it’s based in a context, based in an activity, based in a community, based in some sort of real goal.”

The fact that students are having fun is important, Gagnon says, but more important is the idea of making learning challenging — in a good way. The new partnership is one of many DPI initiatives focused on developing efficient and effective classroom methods that can be scaled up and shared more broadly.

“This approach to education is the right thing to do. It’s how we need to leverage and explore the tools now at our disposal to put kids in the middle of their learning through a personalized perspective,” says State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers. “We are currently working on establishing a portal for all Wisconsin educators to find high quality digital resources. The projects and products created through this partnership will help us meet the goals of the portal project as well.”

Evers says maximizing learning through technology doesn’t minimize the need for quality instruction, but rather strengthens it. The work will empower teachers to develop activities that resonate with their own classrooms, based on each child’s interests and needs.

Calling on teachers, librarians and educators across the state interested in working closely together to create games and apps for learning, Gagnon says the six or so groups they’ll work with the next year will include children and young adults of diverse backgrounds, but will also focus on students at risk of dropping out.

Educators with ideas for their classroom can contact David Gagnon at david.gagnon@wisc.edu to learn more about participating.