Teacher training is successfully underway this week for three Palestinian UNRWA schools in the West Bank as one of OLPC’s Middle East projects, and it’s been an amazing adventure discovering creative ways of learning and teaching with the XO.

Jumping right into activities teachers explored the Memorize activity during the training and then took their XOs home to spend time developing their own Memorize games. Presenting their games the next morning sparked a great discussion on ways to enhance literacy, spelling, grammar and more through the XO. One teacher developed a Memorize game to assist her students with spelling, by splitting a word in half and asking students to match the pieces in order to form a complete word. Another teacher suggested Memorize as the perfect tool for teaching synonyms and antonyms, while another excitedly noted its merits for teaching English and Arabic.

While curriculum-based activities are always great, particularly when teachers are enthusiastically taking ownership, another teacher in the room noted its significance for social interactions and friendship building between students. For her assignment she went home and took pictures of all the children in her family and built a Memorize game that matched their pictures to their names, fun for everyone in involved! Overall a fun project for collaborating on ways of making relevant content for Palestinian kids on the XO.

What ideas do YOU have for building games with Memorize?