I'm very sad about that, and all the little 6th graders who ask me in the hall "How do I get into Minecraft?!?!?!?!" are very sad about it. This class has been immensely different from my 7th grade class, and that has been wonderful for my crash course in MinecraftEdu classroom management, but WOW what a steep learning curve and a lot of flying by the seat of my Diamond armor leggings!
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| Me in my Diamond Armor! |
My 6th graders, and there are a lot of them- 29 in total, are enthusiastic, excited, and eager, but our class room is more like they are a litter of kittens and I'm their mama cat trying to keep them all together.
They are also more interested in individual play, and less interested in community oriented cooperative play. There are a handful of students who do barter and trade, and it's fascinating to watch these informal systems evolve, but to be honest, all of my Minecraft classroom management learning is thanks to this group!
Tutorial World
We started in the tutorial world and I was quick to learn the value of freezing students!! When I click the button "Freeze students" on the teacher menu, they can't move in the game. It only took about 10 seconds for me to learn that it's the only way to get them to stop moving, and they equally quickly learned that frozen = I need them to listen to me. It was a win win discovery! The other lesson I learned quickly and out of necessity is how to use border blocks! These blocks create a barrier that students can't pass. The second they were unfrozen, like the kittens above, they scattered! The tutorial world has paths that guide them, and challenges you have to master before you move on, but the variety of abilities in this class was more of a scatter graph then the nice cluster graph of the 7th grade. In order to give directions and demonstrate the challenges, I needed to have a way to stop students from just barreling through. I placed border blocks at the exits of the various areas, let them congregate there, demonstrated and talked about what they were about to do, then broke the blocks and let them pass. Looking back it seems simple, but at the moment it was a monumental discovery! I let the fastest kittens build in what is called "the campground" as they waited for the rest to catch up. I think I learned more in this unit then any of the students did!
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| A wall of border blocks stopping a player from passing. |
For our second unit, I decided not to use a world from the world library. Looking back, I'm not sure why I used my big unruly class to try new things, but I did and I learned A TON doing so!! I decided that we would do a unit on communities. It's actually a 5th grade learning objective, but I thought it would be good to try something that they already had the background information for. I researched communities, wrote a lesson plan, figured out groups, and building areas, and then presented it to the class. A student raised his hand and asked, "Can we build a medieval village instead?". I waited a beat, thinking, and didn't have a reason (except that all my previous planning was for naught) to say "No". I gave the class a choice- if we changed to building a medieval village we, and by we I meant they, would need to do research on Medieval villages. Their desire to switch was high enough that they agreed to take on the research! After researching, developing a village map, determining groups and group responsibilities, they started building. Here is where I made another tactical error!
MinecraftEdu has three student building modes- MinecraftEdu is the default, students can't fly but they can build. They need to mine and craft tools and building blocks, Survival mode allows for monsters, and Creative which allows for flying and gives students access to all building supplies. I should have put them in creative, but I put them in MinecraftEdu mode. The issue with this choice is that their focus was not on the actual building, because they needed to mine for supplies and craft what they needed. They got very caught up in exploring mines and looking for items such as diamonds and redstone which they didn't actually need for the project. If they were in creative, all their focus could have been on doing the actual building of the village. The other unplanned consequence of not having the world set on creative, is that they developed very extensive trading and bartering systems. It was very interesting seeing who because an unofficial leader, and what groups of students gravitated to each-other. In a classroom, whom you interact with is determined by proximity in the space, but in Minecraft, students can be working together even as they sit on opposite sides of the room. There was also some thieving which led to not allowing students to use nicknames as their player name. If StampyLongNose is in your mine, it's more difficult to figure out who is thieving then if AlexW or MaddyL is in your mine. Yet another unit in which I think I learned more then the students!
World of Humanities
After the chaos of the Medieval unit, I needed the relative safety of a predictable unit! I decided to take the 6th graders to the World of Humanities, but they needed much more structure then the 7th grade class. I put them in groups of two or three, and assigned each group a scavenger hunt. My plan was to do one scavenger hunt a week, and be in the World of Humanities for two weeks. If you haven't been in the World of Humanities, it's like letting a crow loose in a jewelry store, So many shiny fabulous things to see! The combination of distract-able students, a world of amazing, wonderful things to see, and scavenger hunts that require decent attention to detail and a lot of reading meant we only got through one scavenger hunt in the two weeks we spent on this unit. It was still an excellent use of our time, and introduced the students to NPCs (Non Player Characters) which they then used in our Bud, nor Buddy unit.
Area, Perimeter, Volume
I am rather Math phobic, but I know that MinecraftEdu is an excellent platform for learning math, so I asked our 6th grade Math teacher what the students were struggling with. Luckily it was something simple enough that I could understand it, area and perimeter! I decided to attempt building my very own world, and created a waterfall leading from the spawn area to the student work areas. I got specific math problems from the math teacher, and had the students illustrate the answers and place signs explaining the math. The students LOVED this. We had an extra day before our next unit, so I created "Volume World" as an extension activity for students who were ahead, and they really enjoyed creating containers of water and lava to illustrate volume. One of the students even excitedly asked the math teacher when they would be learning about volume in class, she enjoyed volume world so much!
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| Aerial view of a student work area |
Bud not Buddy
Next we did a unit on the book Bud not Buddy. The students read this in their English class, and we decided to recreate the scenes from the book on MinecraftEdu. Students could chose to work on their own, with a partner, or in a small group. Not only did students have to recreate the physical structure of a scene form the book, but they had to do a good amount of writing. For their writing, they could choose to use signs, a book and quill (This looks like a book on the screen and when you click on it, it pops us and you can read what they wrote as you turn the pages), info blocks, and NPCs. (NPC stands for non-player character. You can program them to interact with players, answering questions, and sending them on quests). Their writing included- a description of the scene, a description of the main characters and their roll in the scene, a description of the setting, and two self to text, or text to text connections per group member. They did a phenomenal job on this unit!! We had some behaviour problems, and I'm learning a ton about how to balance creativity and freedom, with accountability and responsibility, as are they ;-), so I had to pull some students off creative and only let them have materials that I supplied to them. The teacher menu allows for me to put some students on creative and thus allow them more freedom, while still keeping others in MCEdu and limiting their freedom.
Science Craft
I am really getting into creating my own worlds! For this unit, I constructed a sprawling science lab complete with office space, community meeting areas, a front desk staffed by a dragon receptionist, and a supply room filled with large chests! In this unit, the students were scientists working in a remote Lab location. When the students logged on, they used the prefix Dr and their last names, and I supplied each student with a white lab coat for their person to wear! They got a big kick out of just those small details. They developed and carried out scientific experiments, and recorded their data to share with the world! I got the idea from
The students kept a lab notebook on MineraftEdu, and I am really excited about this! Some entries in their lab notebook were things they wrote, but some were links to google docs, and some were links to charts and graphs. The first thing we did was watch the video above about catching fish (in Minecraft) in the rain, and the widely accepted theory that you catch more fish when it's raining, then when it's clear. We then talked about other scientific assumptions about the Minecraft worlds and why we believe them. That led into a conversation about the uses and worth of science and investigation to people and societies. Each student brainstormed a list of Minecraft scientific principles or questions that they were interested in, and from that list they picked a topic and developed a hypothesis. Finally, they designed an experiment to test their hypothesis! I had a wild variety of ideas tested- does different types of armour effect how high a horse jumps, what melts ice faster lava or fire, what biomes do tees grow better in, does bone meal really effect how fast trees grow, how fast do chickens swim, what is the velocity of dropped animals, and on and on. We talked a lot about data and the importance of accuracy, how to set up a data spreadsheet, and then what to do with data one the experiment was over. Each student wrote a one page summary examining their data and developing and explaining what the data showed in relation to their original hypothesis. They also summarized their experiment design, made real world connections, and wrote abut extensions they would do if given the opportunity to continue or redesign their experiment. This unit was extremely heavy academically, and students told me it was also the unit they enjoyed the most! It's so amazing to have both intense academic expectations and content in a unit that also rated extremely high on the student enjoyment meter, but that's the beauty of our Minecraftedu classroom!!!
Survival
Like the 7th grade class, our last unit was survival. This was a completely different survival experience, as most things have been with this 6th grade class. The first difference was that I didn't feel comfortable logging in as a student and playing along with the kids like I did with the 7th grade. One factor was the sheer number of students, the second was that, over the preceding 10 weeks, the 6th grade class didn't develop the collaborative, respectful class culture that the 7th grade class did, so I felt like I had to do more observing and policing in the game. To accomplish that, I needed to both fly, which I couldn't do in survival logged in as a kid, and also not be worried about food and monsters and staying alive! We had the same conversations about griefing and stealing that the 7th grade had, and the 6th grade students also came up with a compromise for students who wanted to seal and students who didn't. I was very clear with this class that I would not let them harm or kill each-other, but on one of the very first days one student saw another student with something he wanted, and buried her in sand so she would suffocate and die, and he could pick up the item. The consequence for his behaviour was severe but, I think fair, I took him off the computer for the entire unit and had him complete the quests by writing out what he would have to do to earn each one. The students struggled to complete enough quests to earn passing grades, but it had more to do with their focus and lack of planning then any other factor. I showed them how to use a split screen so that they could have both Minecrat up, and a crafting wiki on their screen. This allowed students who were less familiar with the crafting recipes to search recipes and figure out the requirements of each quest. All the students who earned a large number of points, were students who followed this advice. Many students got caught up in game play, and even with daily class and individual reminders, were less focused on planning out and completing the individual steps needed to earn quest points. I don't have another 6th grade class until next year, but when I do teach this unit to 6th grade again, I will make it far more structured with daily goals and requirements, and far less freedom and self-direction.
This class tested me, not only my MinecraftEdu skills, but my virtual classroom management skills. I learned a ton of invaluable skills for student management, world designs, and unit designs. I'm very grateful to all of them, even you stompylongnose, for making me a infinitely better MinecrftEdu teacher!
Survival
Like the 7th grade class, our last unit was survival. This was a completely different survival experience, as most things have been with this 6th grade class. The first difference was that I didn't feel comfortable logging in as a student and playing along with the kids like I did with the 7th grade. One factor was the sheer number of students, the second was that, over the preceding 10 weeks, the 6th grade class didn't develop the collaborative, respectful class culture that the 7th grade class did, so I felt like I had to do more observing and policing in the game. To accomplish that, I needed to both fly, which I couldn't do in survival logged in as a kid, and also not be worried about food and monsters and staying alive! We had the same conversations about griefing and stealing that the 7th grade had, and the 6th grade students also came up with a compromise for students who wanted to seal and students who didn't. I was very clear with this class that I would not let them harm or kill each-other, but on one of the very first days one student saw another student with something he wanted, and buried her in sand so she would suffocate and die, and he could pick up the item. The consequence for his behaviour was severe but, I think fair, I took him off the computer for the entire unit and had him complete the quests by writing out what he would have to do to earn each one. The students struggled to complete enough quests to earn passing grades, but it had more to do with their focus and lack of planning then any other factor. I showed them how to use a split screen so that they could have both Minecrat up, and a crafting wiki on their screen. This allowed students who were less familiar with the crafting recipes to search recipes and figure out the requirements of each quest. All the students who earned a large number of points, were students who followed this advice. Many students got caught up in game play, and even with daily class and individual reminders, were less focused on planning out and completing the individual steps needed to earn quest points. I don't have another 6th grade class until next year, but when I do teach this unit to 6th grade again, I will make it far more structured with daily goals and requirements, and far less freedom and self-direction.
This class tested me, not only my MinecraftEdu skills, but my virtual classroom management skills. I learned a ton of invaluable skills for student management, world designs, and unit designs. I'm very grateful to all of them, even you stompylongnose, for making me a infinitely better MinecrftEdu teacher!
Love it!
ReplyDeleteSwifty7777 and I appreciate the shout-out for our "Fishin' in the Rain" video and blog post. We're so thrilled that you found it useful and that you shared what you did and how it turned out! I thought this kind of activity would engage kids and support serious learning at the same time and your experience confirms that is true, which is terrifically helpful.
Keep up the great work and please keep blogging about the details so others can build on what you've done and more kids can enjoy this kind of fantastic and deeply engaging learning experience!
Sincerely,
// The Education Scientist (http://theeducationscientist.blogspot.com)