Peer Review

Materia - Educational Games and Apps Platform

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Reviewed:: Mar 15, 2020 by Teacher Education

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Ratings

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Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:: From the website: Introducing Materia. A powerful new way to deliver interactive games, tools, and study aids. Get Materia Engage and Inspire Game mechanics, story-telling, competition, instant feedback, and beautifully designed intereractive widgets for your online course. Materia is an learning platform designed to make online learning rich and engaging. Developed from a project from the Techrangers, a Learning Systems & Technologies team at the UCF Center for Distributed Learning ,who make web apps that empower instructors in creating engaging teaching and learning experiences for online students. The University of Central Florida, Materia is now available for any institution to use. It comes with a library of widget engines installed, and integrates into your existing environments. Get started today by downloading the source code.
Type of Material:: The end result of the tool is Drill and Practice, however, this is primarily a web-development tool.
Recommended Uses:: The various widgets can be used to engage students in various ways such as Choose Your Own Adventure, Crosswords, Flashcards, Hangman, Hotspots, Labeling, and other drill and practice type lessons for individual assignments, practice, study or even in-class, group activity. The material can be used in class, individually or collaboratively, for homework, or as a self-paced tool.
Technical Requirements:: Materia is open source, so the server and many of the widgets can be found on Github. Server Setup Guides are provided for the following: Domain Name Requirements Server Requirements Server Setup - Apache Virtual Host Server Setup - Docker for Development Server Setup - Heroku Server Setup - Ubuntu and Apache Server Setup - Windows and Apache.
Identify Major Learning Goals:: Materia is a project from the Techrangers, a Learning Systems & Technologies team at the UCF Center for Distributed Learning. Their goal is to "...make web apps that empower instructors in creating engaging teaching and learning experiences for online students. Using a variety of interactive modalities, learners can practice content-specific skills via instructor-designed tasks.
Target Student Population:: The widgets could be designed for most any age or group from early middle school to professional, however, the Materia site itself seems geared toward developers of educational tools and games. higher education, and professional use.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: Users of the end prduct would need no prerequisite knowledge other than that required by the topic for the study tool. A teacher using a widget as a template might not need more than basic tech skills, however, getting set up on a server which is required, would take some basic developer skills and creating a widget would most definitely take developer skills.

Content Quality

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Strengths:

There are quite a few widgets ready to download and cutomize for instructor use. Some topics include grammar, word use, vowel sounds, 3D mediac space simluator for nurses, math equations and graphing. Templates that can be used in a variety of subjects include: word search, mathcing, jeopardy-style game, surveys, crosswords, sorting, decision-making scenarios, flash cards, sequencing, timelines, and labeling.

Provides link and instructions for creating own cloud server space using Heroku.

Users can also develop new widgets by customizing commonly accepted tools useful for learning in a fun and engaging manner.

Concerns:

User must set up own space to store the widgets.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

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Strengths:

The types of drill and practice available are easily adapted to most any topic or concept in any discipline or field of training. The tools can be incorporated into lessons as tutorials, quizzes, study mechanisms and more.

Learners can interact with instructor designed materials for review or application of skillsets. Tools can be utilized in any content area. Assignments can easily be created from the tools.

Concerns:

Students can create own but only with Guest access due to FERPA guidelines about access to student information.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

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Strengths:

Once widgets are downloaded to a server space it is easy to create own interactives from the templates. Instructions are provided for administrators, instructors, and student users.

Concerns:

Some templates are from 3rd parties. User might need some expertise with or access to expert on integration with certain Learning Mangement Systems.

Player/user sets up profile.

The list of widgets displayed right up front on the homepage of the site was almost impossible to find (finally found it on the Administrators page - widget gallery) and clicking Download did not result in a download.

Although the instructions seemed straight-forward, and guides for players, teachers, administrators and developers are provided, using the demo for the widgets did not result in a widget template to test. Following the directions to use the demo server did not result as indictated as well because the 'free" demo server required a credit card number.

Other Issues and Comments:

Had to search within the site to locate the gallery of existing widgets: Admindtrators tab, then Installing Widgets and then under section labeled Finding Widgets to Install is link to the Materia Widget Gallery.

This site would be more useful if step-by-step instructions were provided so that a user for example at the teacher level would understand they need to contact IT prior to experimenting. Or alternatively, Materia could provide an easy way to try out some of the widgets before contacting their IT dept. with the administrator or developer guides.

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