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Select a practical activity

LEARNING PRINCIPLE

Engage! You'll select a practical activity that your target learners will be enthusiastic about. Later, you'll empower them to apply their new skills in their personal creations.

YOUR CHARTER

Full charter: required

Flexible charter: as indicated

Fast charter: not used

The foundation of our learning experiences is active learning. Therefore, most learning experiences have an associated practical activity where learners can apply their learning. Engagement is the key learning principle here, but the practical activity also adds more opportunities to Motivate, Empower, and Evaluate.

Each practical activity typically yields some work in a Unity project or scene that demonstrates the learning outcomes, but it doesn't have to be made in Unity if that doesn't fit your subject matter.

Most small learning experiences only have one practical activity, but if the scope of your learning experience is larger, then you may require multiple activities.

Practical activity examples

Examples of practical activities include the following:

  • A partially built game, like the one in Clive the Cat's Visual Crypting, in which learners build new game mechanics while they learn how to program with Visual Scripting.
  • An environment, like the one in Creative Core: VFX, that is designed to give learners the perfect place to make a variety of different effects (such as fire and rain) as they learn to use Particle Systems.
  • An empty Unity scene, like the one in Essentials of real-time 3D, in which the learner can experience all the fundamentals of real-time 3D without any other assets. (This approach is inexpensive and easy!)

Select a practical activity

With your Competencies and skills worksheet complete, it's time to brainstorm activities in which you can demonstrate and instruct learners on those skills — if you haven't started already.

Begin by arranging your skills in the order that a learner would typically learn them. Break them down into smaller lessons as needed. Then brainstorm projects that would cover all of the skills.

In this Practical Activity Brainstorm Example spreadsheet, each column is a skill to address, and the body of the spreadsheet contains ways to address that skill in each type of activity.

Ideally, you'll develop several ideas, and if you do, keep them all to use later.

ACTION

Consult your charter. If you have a link to the Practical activity worksheet, start brainstorming and select your practical activity.