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 :)

Fictional Class Country - Students learning from doing - Teachers learning in order to teach! Observations and reflections.

For the past two years, I've introduced a Class currency as part of the Government unit to the year six classes I've had. At the start, it simply served as an additional classroom management strategy, to compliment the Classcraft elements already in place. However, as we were also doing a modified version of the PEO's role play activity, Parliament of Wizards, where we transform the class into a fictional country, I thought it'd be a good opportunity to use this currency to add some mathematics into the mix.

We started it out by first having everyone receive an equal amount every week. They had expenses such as desk rent and fees to use iPads and computers. Just like in the real world, nothing was free.
As we progressed and we started to create jobs. At first I created these jobs to get it up and running. Usual classroom jobs such as messengers, lunch collectors, book hander-outerers, etc, were the first to be taken by selected students and earn an income. I started to create more such as secretaries, cleaners, librarians, IT specialists, etc... We then introduced an income tax, where the money collected from these taxes will pay for the class elected representatives of the fictional Parliament. These representatives would then need to create and pass bills and use some of this money to benefit the class. For example, the Sports party would suggest using it to run a soccer competition, and the money be used as a prize pool. But one problem I had was that I was running out of jobs, and also I had to keep printing more currency because 99% of the income was coming from me!

The next year, we were able to transition to this a little faster, as I was able to take a lot of what I learnt the pilot year to improve on it. A few students the previous year created a business to sell sweets. This was really interesting to me, because in essence, these students were spending real money, in order to gain fake money! The reason they did this was to accumulate enough money to purchase the desks they wanted, in order to be able to sit together once again (and permanently for the rest of the year!). It made me think about the aspect of value. To me, it was just like Monopoly money, play money for a role play task in class. But for some of them, they saw enough value out of it that they were willing to spend their pocket money in order to gain this currency. Even though it was due to ulterior motives, it still did fascinate me that this even occurred!

So back to the point - the second year, I encouraged students to create businesses. At the start, many of them stuck to selling lollies again. However, this started to become not worthwhile for them, as the competition drove the prices down. The returns just wasn't worth the real money investment! So we started looking at what types of businesses exist in our community. They saw that it wasn't just goods, but there also were services. Students started to be more creative; some created items, such as duct-tape wallets. The previous year had a group of students do the same thing, but this time it was a little different. One of the students was a big Steve Jobs fan and using his skills/knowledge in Apple marketing and design, he somehow made students WANT his particular brand. He even tried to patent his design! Other students used their skills in IT, website creation, arts and craft, etc, and offered these as services to their classmates as well.

This second lot also were more active in the elections for representatives and in adding to the class constitution. They were constantly holding meetings to try and pass bills and the week building up to the next big election would have the two major parties furiously campaigning to try and get the majority votes come election day. Both years I ended up keeping the system going for the remainder of the year as so many of the students enjoyed it so much. Students not only learnt about Government, persuasive skills, poster/website/video creation, budgeting, tax, business but also were able to learn other "non school-based" skills through experience. They needed to work on people skills, gaining trust to build strong political and/or business relationships, for example.

The second year also saw a few future entrepreneurs, creating businesses, selling them off and buying others. Some would group up and pool their money to start one, some would go around trying to investors. But I still found myself too tempted to intervene to try and keep it more in line with the "vision" I had. Perhaps I just wanted to play too?

Now this year, using all the things I've learned so far, I've decided to do it again. This time, I've got a few other classes on board. We all use the same currency, so it's kind of like the EURO. However, each class is free to run their country the way the class teacher or students want. Some classes had really high income as the pay there was just very generous. On the other hand, some classes had very low income, as they made it a little more difficult to earn the currency. This made cross country trading and business a little difficult, and in hindsight, I shouldn't have had everyone use the same currency. Having different currencies would be another great way to look at exchange rates and the notion of value even further!

For my own class, we have an exchange system of sorts. They can exchange Classcraft gold for the currency. But the exchange rates change weekly depending on how much is bought/sold. I am also trying to "sell off" a lot of jobs so that eventually, only a few people will be actually getting income directly from me. This should prevent me from needing to constantly print more currency.

Finally, I've been trying to study a little Economics in my free time, as I realised this is something that could help me improve the system. Thank you to Crash Course for their easy to follow and entertaining videos! John and Hank Green used to host a lot of the episodes, but as they started branching out to cover more and more subjects and topics, they inevitably got more people to help! I never picked Economics up in high school so I've really had no idea, basically learning by doing - just like the students! A lot of the times when watching the videos, particularly about inflation and deflation, I find myself thinking, "Hey, that's what happened to us last time when so and so ...!"

Here's the first episode for Crash Course: Economics, if you want to see what it's like.

I've noticed that the increased focus on the economy of the country, has created more thought by the students when thinking about the constitution and introducing new bills. They realise that they can't please everyone, and everything has a compromise. Should be interesting to see how this year's system develops as I think this is the most comprehensive version yet! I'd like to write it all out as a system for other teachers to follow (if they want to), but I still feel like it's not quite there and it's still in its alpha stage.

Overall though, it does seem to be improving every year, and this year I think I have everyone at least somewhat engaged in the experience. They all know that they have a voice and the power to make changes in the class. It allows a lot of students to break out of their shells; I can see some of them being killer marketers, salespeople, business managers, designers, etc... This year, more than ever, I'm going to really try hard to intervene as little as possible, because I think if something goes horribly wrong, it's a great experience to learn from and try to pull the country out of it. I mean, at the end of the day, it's not a real country. It's just a game. And like any other games, it should encourage you to take risks, learn from mistakes without any real life repercussions.

I will try to update the blog with any more interesting observations and development as we go. If you have any suggestions please feel free to leave a comment below!

Sorry for the big wall of text! If I remember to post more frequently, I could keep it more succinct. (But then again, I'm not very good at keeping things short... yet!)