A number of converging issues provided the impetus for 12 schools in the Western Bay of Plenty to form a support network to explore and develop play-based learning for the first years of school. This article discusses what has influenced our play-based learning approach and gains we have observed as ...

This article reflects on a school’s approach to gamifying the Royal Society Te Apārangi’s First CREST Award. The article explains how CREST was reconceived as a quest using elements of live action role playing (LARP) and gamification, and the tools that were used to do this. It describes how progress ...

Digital games are responsible for turning my pedagogical practice on its head and landing me in New Zealand. My journey down the digital games “rabbit hole” started in 2007. Not having a map to follow ended up being revolutionary as I learnt to follow the learning. I describe four important ...

We are co-teachers at Rototuna Junior High School with expertise in music and digital technologies respectively. We share our experiences of using digital-game development as the context for our integrated learning module called Sound Bytes. We hope to inspire other teachers to develop their own innovative and integrated curriculum design ...

Harko Brown is an expert on traditional Māori games and play. He has written several books including Ngā Taonga Tākaro II: The Matrix (2016), and Te Mara Hupara (2017), co-authored by his teenage daughter Yves Tennessee Brown. In 2015 Harko was co-opted by the New Zealand Government to organise and ...

Building on earlier work in Set on “confusion” around the term constructivism in education, this article explores four different meanings of constructivism, looking at their very different origins and purposes. It argues that mixing up these meanings has produced the confusion identified in the earlier article. The article also suggests that constructivism has been ...

In June 2016, Paraparaumu College and Kenakena School, from the Kāpiti Coast, investigated the use of digital technology in supporting a personalised learning framework. This article presents three case studies of how personalisation was used, and explains the development of markers of personalisation for the two schools.

This article explores the experiences of Chinese international secondary school students who were in danger of not achieving NCEA credits. Research suggests schools value the income students bring, but little research has explored the nature of the support such students require. The at-risk students in this study had clear suggestions ...

There is increasing recognition that the underachievement of Māori, Pasifika, and other diverse students in New Zealand schools is in large part owing to systemic factors that disadvantage these students. Responding to the urgent need for significant change in our schools and classrooms, the developing mathematical inquiry communities model is ...