Colony World - Reflection

Intro

• Usually run a gamified classroom for the Government/Democracy unit (also links well with Global Connections that follows)
• I split the teams into colonies to simulate the Colonial Australia parts and then they will eventually federate, form a constitution and their own government.
• Classcraft is usually the place to make these elements more engaging and it has a currency in it where students can purchase vanity items. I use this also as a classroom currency.
• This has always been an engaging program for students in the past as they were able to live the unit and see how their actions and decisions can affect the whole of the class.

Having the opportunity to use Minecraft Education Edition, I wanted to add an extra dimension to this by using Minecraft as a virtual realm. My goal for this was to have more depth, and try to reach out to all 100% of the class. In the past, though pretty successful, there were always 1 or 2 students who didn’t engage with the gamified classroom approach. However, with Minecraft, this pulled those extra 1-2 students, as they were more comfortable in the virtual realm to voice opinions and take action.

The main question was HOW could I incorporate this. The goal with the previous gamified classroom was to eventually identify problems in the class world that could be compared to the problems in the school, country and the world. This was also a great link to the next unit, Global Connections.

However, I didn’t need to think too hard as I realised the main engaging aspect of the gamified world was it's sandbox feel. There were rules, but it wasn’t on rails. They could do pretty much whatever they wanted to. If they wanted to aim to be the richest person in the classroom they could do this by trying out different business models, creating a product or even via real estate. Minecraft is a sandbox game as well, so it was pretty much the same experience. All I needed to add was a common goal for them to all work towards - this was to sneakily push them towards federating and working as a nation rather than separate colonies.

The Minecraft Survival Guide by Lucas Gillispie would be that common goal. It was perfect. It had a set of tasks that became progressively more difficult and the final ones would require large numbers of people to complete - much more than a colony of 5.

I also grouped them this year according to their results in the Bartle’s Player Type quiz. I was trying to think like a game designer - create some balance among players so that noone feels alienated or bored. I think that was the most challenging and rewarding part throughout this unit.

Very beginning

I found a seed on Ben Kelly’s (a Global Minecraft Mentor) website, that was perfect for this. A limited resources map. I used border blocks to lock them in their own colonial lands to begin with so that they focus more on surviving rather than interfering.
The game was initially on Normal mode, but this posed some problems. The main thing was that certain resources held very little value with regards to cross colony trades. Food was not considered important by the Minecraft veterans, as they knew they couldn’t die of hunger - some would just eat rotten flesh and wait out the sickness effect. To counteract this, I changed it to Hard so that hunger can result in death. This kickstarted the trading and dramatically increased the value of food, especially sustainable ones such as vegetables and fruits. I also started to remove some of the border’s border blocks.

The opening of the borders led to some immediate controversies. There were accusations of theft and colonies were fining each other and imposing their own forms of justice. Tensions were rising. One of the golden rules of this game was that if any of the in game conflicts continued offline, the game would automatically be over. Luckily, this never happened!

I used these moments of conflict as opportunities for learning. We looked at alternate solutions, negotiating and compromising. At the time, we were also looking at Australian Federation and suggested this to the class. I told them we could create a parliament and become a nation representing the Commonwealth (I would be Governor-General) and our Assistant Principal, the Queen. This way we could help each other out, 30 is better than 5 afterall.

There was a divide in opinion on this. Half the class were for it but the other half were not. There were debates held in class and students were trying to convince each other during recess and lunch as well.

The day before the referendum on federating as a nation, we looked at the arguments for and against in class. I showed them the pros and cons Australian policy makers had during their debates as well. The looks on some of those students were gold. They saw that there were many common ones such as the poorer colonies would eat away the profits of the richer colonies, and how some colonies did not want a federal set of laws, but rather, enjoyed how each colony had the freedom of creating their own. It was about freedom and opportunity. This was also the same for the other side, one of the main ones being, if the colonies federated, all border’s border blocks would be removed - this would enable military reinforcement at a faster speed if needed.

Just to push things along, the next colony world session, which is what we referred it to, I spawned a LOT of mobs on multiple corners of the map. These monsters would slowly progress towards the mainland and though each colony were able to fight it off, they took a big hit as well.

Following this, the referendum was run and passed overwhelmingly 28 votes for, to 1 against.

Post federation

The colonies were no more, they were now a states within a nation!

After this, there was a little pause in the colony world game, as we changed the focus to more on the parliamentary side. Once the politics were settled, some laws passed and a federal reserve created, they were ready to start moving on to complete the rest of the quests.

Some interesting moments from here include,

• The decision to invade a nearby island as the “Indigenous” inhabitants were aggressive and they voted that it was to ‘civilise’ them.
• This became the basis for the business district that started construction.
• Expeditions were sent out with cartography teams to map our mainland and also explore other lands in the greater world.
• When I had visiting students from other classrooms due to their class being split, if they had no work to do, I invited them to create their own class embassy building on a little plot of land I created for them in our country.

Eventually, the class was able to defeat the Ender Dragon - though it was a little cheaty because firstly, a few boys found the seed of the map, loaded it at home and did the /locate for the stronghold. Also, during the battle, the dragon glitched out so I had to remove and resummon it, making it a little anti-climatic.

At the moment, they are basically finished with the game’s main quests and upto the community challenges. These are about creating maps for other classes/students to play, running a Minecraft event, writing/filming/recording an article blog/vlog/etc on their experience using Minecraft in class, etc..
 

On the map itself, it is now more a side project. They are working on their business district and exploring the end city and shipwrecks for treasure to fill their shops with. The idea is that I will be inviting other classes in Term 3 to create their own nations in the world and we can use this map as part of the Global Connections unit, identifying problems, shortages, etc.. in each country, creating a UN like organisation, being really ambitious, and things will probably fail a lot but that’s what I’m going for.

REFLECTION

I really enjoyed this approach as a lot of the learning was in the process, rather than a result. I mean, there were results, but they didn’t really have anything to do with the unit. For example, defeating the ender dragon doesn’t automatically make them learn about how the Westminster system of government works! However, the road to get there required them to do so and that’s where the learning occurred. They also see the effects of these in their own lives, that their voices and decisions really can make a difference.

It also heavily helped them work on their collaboration skills. Some groups were very quick to work together, and they advanced through the quests really quickly, whilst some were much slower. However, when things started to get really bad for those colonies, I was able to step in, mediate and again, use them as learning experiences. You could really see how the class grew as a group, and the lessons they learn in forming relationships, compromising and how actions they cause in one world to one person, can affect them later in a different world by different people.

The world could also use other things they learnt outside these sessions. For example, learning about binary code, I used this to place coordinates for the stronghold around the mainland so they could figure it out themselves if they forgot. They also could use their experiences on their writing and rewriting of their persuasive writing task - Does Minecraft have any educational benefits?

Some things that I can definitely improve on - I need to create a more concrete guideline on how to run this. I only had a very broad idea and ended up improvising a lot, making adjustments on the fly to make players take action. (Inaction, will lead to static, which will in turn lead to boredom) Now that I know some of the things to look out for, I can create a guide, like a cheatsheet on this. It’s also more for other teachers who might want to take this approach, because I think many people, from the outside, will look at this as just play. But so much of our learning comes from play, and it comes from here because we are engaged in the activity - it’s just that we’re not aware of it. I need to do a better job at making them aware of it, using things such as learning intentions, but at the same time, not make it so “in your face” that it seems “educational”. I believe Vsauce and MatPat’s Game Theory and Film Theory videos on YouTube do a wonderful job of this - trick people in to learning. A lot of it is tangential, but another large chunk is from the actual activity as well - big chunk on problem solving and critical thinking.

I see the children arguing about laws, trying to negotiate trades, discussing with their teams on purchases among many other things before, during and after classes. The immersion is just unreal. The lesson doesn’t ever end. When we visited Parliament House, they already knew what to expect. I could see smiles on their faces during our roleplay at the PEO (Parlimentary Education Office) because it probably reminded them of something that happened in our class parliament meetings. It’s a great way of reinforcing concepts, ideas and problem solving, without hammering them over the head with it like many “educational” games do.

I recorded a little vlog on some final thoughts, like a rough, progress journal of the journey so far, which can be seen below.

Learning Minecraft - Update

So I've been playing a LOT of Minecraft over the last term and the last week and a half of the holidays...

At the start it was just learning the mechanics with my son on our Survival world. Experiencing that heartbreak of starting fresh every time we felt like we were progressing. For example, venturing off into the world and finding some diamonds for the first time. We made some diamond tools, gathered all our riches and on the way back home, get blown up by creepers...

So that was our weekend for the first month or so. I'd look up some guides to get some tips on Survival mode, learning about animal and plant farms, water mechanics and even a little redstone.

I also learnt a LOT from the students at school during their Colony Game in Minecraft: Education Edition. I found out about potion brewing, little trick mechanics when fighting certain mobs and also about the scary Nether.

Some of my ex-students who graduated in the past also invited me to their Survival world and I learnt about strip mining and about the F3 function, particularly using coordinates.

Bring that all together and back on the Survival world at home, we started prospering. Didn't die as often, and even if we did, we would just run back and get our things back as we learnt how to 'orienteer' out in the Minecraft wilderness. (Using man made beacons, or roads, or torch placements)

Then my wife joined us just as holidays were about to start.

We went on this crazy spree of Minecraft for about a week. Started a new Survival world (on Easy) and she picked it up really fast. We created our own strip mines and we were doing really well. Then I discovered automated farms and that took my obsession to another level. I started researching and watching videos. I created* an AFK fishing spot where we started getting books and enchanted rods. So I looked into enchanting and books. I also created an automated melon/pumpkin farm and sugar cane farm using redstones and I felt like a tinkerer! I watched more videos on what else I could build and found that I needed 'sticky pistons'. That required slimes. So next, I learnt about 'chunks' and used tools to find slime chunks in order to create an automated slime farm. Once that was done, I went in to the Nether and after many deaths and watching numerous videos, I finally made a blaze farm.

(* By created, I mean I built it but the designs were from people I found online)

After the Blaze farm, I was kind of exhausted with Minecraft so I took a little break, just hopping on now and then to play with my son. But later on I also discovered banners and custom designs. That was really fun to play with as well.


It really showed me how deep this game really is and why so many people enjoy it. There's something in it for everyone. There's action, design, tinkering, collecting, organising, homemaking, fishing and I'm sure there's more. It kind of reminds me of Vanilla WoW where I would just give myself these mini missions/goals to achieve in game - I didn't need the game to give these to me. My experience in Minecraft was pretty much the same. I'd give myself a goal, for example, create a blaze farm, and this would entail so many other mini goals in order for me to get there. I use blaze farm as the example because this required the most research and preparing on my part from my playthrough so far. I first looked up the materials I'd need. Found out that I need sticky pistons and slime blocks. So I went about finding out how to farm slimes. Researched Slime Farms. Learnt about chunks. Spent hours digging out a chunk to create a Slime Farm. Once I had this, I located a blaze spawner and spent days trying to light it up and create a covering around it so I could farm them in peace. (Even though I probably died close to a hundred times - from blazes that slipped through, ghasts and fall damage) Finally, I needed to create the actual mechanisms, which required me to look more into redstone and quite a lot of failings.


I've recorded a lot of the gameplay and will upload it once I can edit it all down to a more digestible size. Photos to come soon too!

Learning Minecraft

I've begun my learning journey in Minecraft recently, and who better to do it with than my 6 year old son. We've played Terraria in the past before (pre hard mode only) and a little familiar with it, so we approached it thinking it'd be the same. I've also gone through the Tutorial World in the Education Edition, so packed with this knowledge, I thought we would be okay. We set one rule (well it's more for me), and that is that we are not allowed to look anything up DURING gameplay. We are to note it down if we aren't sure of something or something doesn't work and we do the research afterwards for the next session. So far we've had 3 sessions in total (2 in Education Edition and 1 in Java) and it's been quite interesting.

The beginning

Our initial session in Education Edition was relatively easy. I had it set to Peaceful and realised it didn't affect hunger so after my son got accustomed to the controls and the new 3D environment, I put it up to Normal. The crafting recipe box that shows up makes things so much easier - I remember when I first tried to play a few years ago, I was constantly looking up recipes because I had no idea. Also, from my run through of the Tutorial World in MCEE, I had some basic ideas on what we needed to make to get going at the beginning - crafting table, furnace, chest, and house.

Crafting Table, Furnace and Chest

         

Crafting recipes on the left hand side

                                                                     
We were able to get to stone-made equipment, found some coal to make torches, defeated a few zombies, and we were on our way to experimenting a little and exploring more. I also made use of the Classroom Mode to try a few things out. I disabled PvP damage as we were accidentally hitting each other when we were mining closeby and also teleported my son to the house when he ventured too far off and became lost. I used the fixed equip command to place quill and cameras in our hotbars so we could journal our adventures there. That was the original plan - to do a virtual journal rather than via the blog.

Don't copy that command - it's wrong :(

The last two hotbars are the fixed slots. Camera and Quill (writable_book)

These three are photos taken from the in game camera. (You can use an item called Portfolio to export them as image files)

However, we ran into a little hiccup. My son's game was crashing frequently in our first 2 sessions and when we booted up for the 3rd one, we found out he only had 3 trial sessions left! So rather than playing this out and possibly getting one, maybe two more sessions in, I purchased an extra retail copy for my son and continue/restart the journey there. I mean how different could it be?

Same but different

I created the world and a house with the usual starter setup as mentioned before on my own so that when we have the next Minecraft session, it'd all be there. Java version was pretty much the same but I noticed a few differences. For example, it had the recipe box to tell me what I can make, though it only showed me recipes I unlocked from obtaining new ingredients. This meant I couldn't plan ahead with what materials I needed to find like I did in MCEE, making it a more "raw" playing experience.

Crafting recipe guide on retail.

I also found it much more difficult. It was on Normal, but I never died in MCEE, but I died on my fifth or sixth night on retail. I realised the hard way, that when you die, you drop EVERYTHING you have on you. I was a little greedy because I found an iron-rich area, got carried away mining it all and pushed my luck with time, even though I knew it was going to be night very soon. To make matters worse, I was low on torches and quite far from my house! I saw the death message in the chat channel, so I went back to retrieve my hard earned iron and stone items, but I didn't even make it halfway there; shot down by some skeletons. So I thought I'd sleep until morning and go when it's safe. But alas, I get the message, "there are enemies nearby so you can't sleep". So I AFK'd for a few minutes in the house and waited in real (game) time until morning to collect my belongings. As most of you veteran Minecrafters can guess (and probably facepalming right now), my belongings were gone. I was naked except for the clothes assigned to the default Steve skin I chose. In just a few short moments, all that hard work amounted to nothing. That's when I realised that death in this game mode (on Normal anyway) is something you need to actually worry about and plan ahead to avoid happening!

Luckily, I still had the house, crafting table, furnace chests and bed so when my son and I started our 3rd Minecraft session, 1st in the Java version, we had somewhere safe to hide. Just before we booted this up though, I found out about player skins and it made me realise why so many students in my classes in the past were so fond of pixel art. I got an Optimus Prime skin for my son and a guy with a Chicago Bulls shirt for myself. I also tried editing mine and the experience made me definitely want to go back and revisit this aspect, try to make my own skin from scratch.

Reflection - comparing the two so far

After the 3rd session, we found some more iron to make my son an iron chest armor and myself an iron sword. We stocked up on some food, I tried fishing and we expanded the house just a little in size. I tried planting some seeds and my son planted some trees right outside the house and it was a great experience for him to see his trees grow, absolutely amazed him. I also used the tip I found in the Global Minecraft Mentor resources about using a shovel to pave roads, and my son is obsessed with this! He is so busy creating paths wherever we go, that I need to make lots of extra shovels, but he also drops to his death occasionally too.

I must say, having some basic background knowledge of the game made this much more enjoyable than when I first tried to dabble in it years ago. I don't mind looking up guides when stuck in a game, but back then, it was like I had to alt-tab out constantly. It was like somebody giving me some tools, throwing me into a forest and telling me to craft some furniture. I was just completely overwhelmed! The Tutorial World in MCEE showed me just enough to get me kickstarted in the game, without feeling the need to know more. From these basics, I would try to expand on it out of curiosity. It actually made me want to experiment and find things out myself, because I understood the basics - I didn't want to be told the answer. This in turn would help me remember things more effectively as I was "learning by doing". When you have your own "aha" moments.

There were a few things I missed about the Education Edition from playing the retail one. First is the clarity of name plates. In MCEE, it's really easy to spot where the other players are. The name plates are clearly visible through objects. But in retail, unless I have line of sight of the player, it's very difficult to spot them. So when my son is yelling for help, I am frantically running and looking around, whilst asking him to describe where he is. (Which can also be a good exercise too!) I also miss the camera and the quill, and the ability to add fixed inventory slots. My son loved taking photos, just like he does in real life when playing with my phone (so many random photos on there thanks to him), and when he found out you can set the camera up on a stand and you can take selfies, he was even happier.

One thing I did like about the retail was the way the crafting recipe book worked. I liked how it slowly unlocked recipes as you gathered/discover new materials. It gives a more steady sense of progression, whereas in MCEE you can click a button to see all available recipes, making it easy to just get either overwhelmed by the choices or over ambitious and go straight for the top. (making it more of a result rather than journey based experience) The difficulty isn't a big thing, I can always make it higher on MCEE and I'm sure it'll kick my backside either way.

I will continue the Minecraft sessions with my son on retail, just because there's no trial limit for him. And I might play around with the Windows 10 version that comes free for people who purchased the retail, since you can cross platform play on that. I think that's something MCEE can benefit from, as the school I'm in doesn't have a space where 30 kids can play at the same time. Lots of students have P.E (Pocket Edition) on their devices, so it would make things logistically easier. Also, since it's a little difficult for our school to set up an "always on" server, the cross platform feature again would really be useful.

My plan is to learn the game with my son from the retail version and use the knowledge gained from that to test out things on MCEE. Whether it's lesson ideas, map ideas, designs, etc...

I recorded some footage of one of our MCEE sessions a week ago and edited it so it doesn't go for 70 minutes! Enjoy :)

Minecraft Education Edition!

So, I am officially a 2018 Global Minecraft Mentor (for Minecraft Education Edition) now. It's really odd because I didn't get it last year and I gave pretty much the same reasons for this year, but I got in!

We had our first conference call today. I was overwhelmed with the amount of work the Microsoft team put in to this. There's so many resources and everyone seemed super helpful and enthusiastic.

I feel like I'm a student again, learning about something new, and being really excited about it. I know I haven't posted in this at all in 2017, (and I've always been meaning to) but this year I will be working harder at finding, no, make that, making time to share my thoughts and experiences.

I started off going through the starter kits they prepared for us on OneNote, and playing through the Tutorial World set up. At first, it was pretty standard FPS fare - W,A,S,D, Space, left click, right click, you know the usual. I've played Minecraft before, but mainly on Creative mode with my 5 year old son, trying to create weird creations. We like to do that with LEGO, so I thought why not try it in Minecraft. But this Tutorial World very quickly covered aspects I had no idea about because it's something you'd need in Survival, like crafting, repairing, smelting, cooking, redstone, etc... It absolutely blew my mind. To think that I completely missed all this - mainly because almost all the tasks I've set in class that allowed Minecraft submissions were done via Creative mode, as they were design tasks. (design a classroom, recreate a scene from the play, etc) But also because most of the material I've watched or read online about Minecraft in the classroom seemed to disregard the whole Survival aspect.

I'm not surprised though. Survival is more like a "game". It could be seen as a distraction to the curriculum they are trying to deliver. But the more I went through all this, the more I thought how this could fit in with the whole gamification I've been trying to do in my classroom the past few years. I've always felt that when you say "Okay children, today we're going to LEARN...", that straight away, I've lost half of them. They've been hardwired to see the words "learn" and "work" as negative things. Why do you think they play all these games? Because it's the opposite of work (to them anyway) and we, as adults, tell them that it's not good for them. Thus they see the value in it!

There's also a lot of STEM possibilities here as well. Our school has been approved to be a part of NSW's Minecraft Education Edition Early Access, so I've asked a few of our STEM class teachers to participate. From just the Tutorial World, the things you can do with redstone, switches, levers and buttons, it's like playing with littleBits and Makey Makeys. On top of that, you have all the crafting and smelting elements - computational thinking, maths and science again. You can grow crops, requiring sunlight, water and dirt, the list goes on. Also, with additional tools like the slates, camera, book/portfolios, I can see how it can integrate so many different Key Learning Areas (KLAs - RE: Subjects). Instead of asking students to submit task reflections separately on Google Docs, I can get them to do it via Minecraft. Instead of typing up progress journal entries, they can do it with the book or just do a visual diary using the camera of the progress.

And the more I went on the more awesome features I found. Like Classroom Mode, I could envision myself being the Gamemaster like in Hunger Games, though I can't spawn monsters, I can still teleport people around the place, change rulesets and send messages to the server. Or Code Connection, where you can connect the game to one of 6 or so different coding applications like Scratch, and the game spawns a little bot that you can use the code to do stuff. I'm sure I'm just scratching the surface here - there's bound to be things on the internet people have figured out with this stuff that is way beyond me - but as you can see, lots of exciting learning opportunities.

Personally, I'd really like to explore the Survival aspect more, and try something related to the Tragedies of the Commons. I've done something like this in class with our fictional world, but I'd like to see if the same thing happens inside the game. I know for a fact there are some students who will be very experienced in this game and would like to see how they use this upper hand.... and if things go south, get them back together and see if they can figure this tragedy out. Is it really the survival of the fittest? Maybe the fittest doesn't mean an individual?

Of course, I'll need to start with simpler projects first. I'll get the new cohort to design the classroom, get accustomed to the login system and controls for the newbies, and also steal an idea I read from a blog post here, challenging students to survive one night and write about it.

Still 3 weeks away until school restarts, so plenty of time to plan, play and test things out... As long as I spend that time wisely!

Stay tuned :)