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 :)