Small games. Big learning opportunities.
This World Space Week, we’ve been thinking about how even a few minutes of game-based learning can create a powerful moment of discovery.
Not every learning experience needs to fill a lesson.
Alongside our longer quests, we’ve been developing Vault Shorts: focused, 10–15 minute mini-missions that immerse pupils in a particular scientific idea, while placing it within the story of the people and discoveries behind it.
Our first few prototypes both feature Galileo Galilei.
In one, pupils explore Galileo’s observations of Jupiter’s moons and why seeing them orbit another planet was so significant to his developing ideas about our place in the universe.
In Galileo Drops the Ball, the focus shifts to forces and gravity, with pupils experimenting in a mini lab, with various objects dropping in different simulations of gravity – all inspired by Galileo’s own experiments with falling objects.
So where could a 10–15 minute experience like this fit into school?
As a lesson starter
Rather than beginning a new topic by explaining it, a Short can give pupils something to experience, investigate and question first. What did they notice? What surprised them? What do they now want to know?
To bring context to a curriculum topic
Scientific discoveries didn’t happen in isolation. Introducing the people, places and thinking behind an idea can help pupils understand how scientific knowledge develops and that accepted ideas can be questioned.
For retrieval and consolidation
A Short can provide a different way to revisit concepts pupils have already encountered. Instead of another worksheet or quiz, they are applying their knowledge within a story and using it to progress.
For independent learning
Because Shorts are self-contained and designed to be completed in around 10–15 minutes, they could be used for homework, cover lessons, extension activities or independent study.
To bring interdisciplinary learning to life
Galileo’s story isn’t only about physics or space. It can prompt conversations about history, religion, evidence, technology and how our understanding of the world changes over time.
For us, that’s one of the exciting possibilities of the Short format.
A small window in the timetable can still reveal a much bigger world.