Constructive alignment through play and project-based learning
Since I’ve started teaching at CCI 2.5 years ago, one of the biggest challenges in the classroom has been the level of differentiation in technical skills of the students. Secondly, our students seem to have various cultural experiences of formal learning environments, including ones with very strict power relationships in the classroom.
This contributes to often limited interactions with students and what appears to be limited engagements. I find it important to note that some students who are not very active in the classroom do excellent work at home, often surpassing the expectations.
In the 2007 paper on constructive alignment Biggs and Tang note the importance of the student activities and the teaching and learning methods being directly related to the intended learning outcomes.
I find that approach closely related to the constructivist concept of scaffolding, where the students are provided with resources and support to learn on their own with gradual challenges (Wood, Brunner and Ross, 1976), and the constructionist learning-by-doing, when students learn new skills on real-life projects (1991).
In line with these theories, I’ve found that that the students meet the learning outcomes best while allowed to develop technical skills from class in a project-based setting with a degree of creative freedom.
One of my favourite activities during the coding classes was inspired by my colleague Mahalia Henry-Richards, who, during a guest talk in one of my modules last year, described an art project where they and their colleague made a playground from modelling clay based on memories, and then tried to reconstruct it in 3d modelling software (Henry-Richards, 2023). Mahalia’s creative work and teaching practice are both centred around the concept of play, which I remember well from my time as her student during my Masters course at CCI a few years ago.
A few months after Mahalia’s talk, I was teaching an introductory class on web 3d environments in JavaScript and p5.js. After a lecture on the technical basics of 3d models, the students were asked to work in pairs and design a simple 3d scene using modelling clay, only featuring primitive shapes (p5.js, no date). Later, they had to translate these scenes into a digital realm. The students seemed to be having a lot of fun, and the level of engagement during the exercise was much higher than usual. The final results, being part of the final submission, were of much higher quality than first 3d projects of the previous cohort. The students were quite literally “rearranging and transforming the evidence” (Brunner, 1961, cited in Lee and Hannafin, 2016). Next year, given that I will most likely get to re-teach some units, I aim to introduce more hands-on projects as a part of the class.
References
Biggs, J. and Tang, C. (2007). Using Constructive Alignment in Outcomes-Based Teaching and Learning. In: Teaching for Quality Learning at University (3rd ed., pp. 50-63). Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press.
Bruner, J. S. (1961). The act of discovery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Henry-Richards, M. (2023). Guest talk during the “Introducing Creativity” module, Foundation course in Creative Computing 2023/24. London, UK: UAL Creative Computing Institute.
Lee, E. and Hannafin, M.J. (2016). A design framework for enhancing engagement in student-centered learning: own it, learn it, and share it. In Education Tech Research Dev 64, 707–734 (2016). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-015-9422-5 (accessed: 23.04.2025).
p5.js (no date). “Geometries” example. Available at: https://p5js.org/examples/3d-geometries/ (accessed: 23.04.2025).
Papert, S. (1991). Situating Constructionism. In; Seymour, I. and Papert, S. (reds). Constructionism. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Wood, D., Bruner, J.S., Ross, G. (1976). The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving. In: J. Child. Psychol. Psychiar., vol. 17, pp. 89-100. Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press.