Sometimes I am not sure who is learning
more here at the after-school program, the kids or me. This week I
very intentionally used what I learned last week about different kids
having different needs in planning what we would be doing in
Minecraft. I gave each student in the first group a journal and let
them loose in survival mode, while I started an architecture project
for the second group. Planning separate lessons does mean extra
work, but I like what I do and it gives the students a better
experience (at least that is my hope).
For the survival group I first found an
area in our creative map far away from any student's previous work to
strand the students and let them have at it. Because the vast
majority of our time in MC has been spent in creative mode, most
students needed a refresher in crafting and gathering resources. I
wanted to give as little guidance as possible during this time to
keep as true as possible to the survival theme. A couple of the
students were asking me to just give them tools and resources, but I
had to tell them they needed to pretend that I wasn't there.
This was working well for a while,
until night fell. The students were braced for a zombie apocalypse,
but it never came. Lesson number one for me of the day: Always test
EVERYTHING beforehand. Sure, there is a button that allows monsters
to spawn, but does it actually work? Maybe it didn't work because
the world had already been started in creative mode. After that
disappointment I had a brief conference with the students and they
decided that they would be ok with starting in a new world to get the
complete survival experience. So I restarted the server in a fresh
world with monsters enabled from the beginning. Things were going
well, night fell, but still no monsters came. I couldn't even spawn
monsters into the world. Not to worry, I was able to release the
hoard simply by disabling and enabling the “Spawn Monsters”
option in the MinecraftEDU option box. As I was saying above, I was
giving kids as little guidance as possible. They were not prepared
for night in Minecraft. Luckily, they didn't stray too far from the
spawn point so they could recover most of the resources they had
gathered during the day. Day came again and they started right away
on a shelter. We ran out of time at this point, and I had the
students pull out their journals to make Entry #1. I hadn't planned
the writing portion of the activity particularly well ahead of time,
so I gave the students a chance for a free written response to what
happened in the game, at least three sentences. I was not sure at
all how this request for extra writing would go – I braced myself
for complaints and whining, but there was none. They all eagerly
wrote their names in the journals and started on their entries.
Granted, they were pretty short, and I didn't really have an idea of
how confident any of them were with writing. The thing that
surprised me most during the day was when one student, bent over his
journal, asked, “Mister, how do I spell zombie?” Believe it or
not, I had given them something to write about. Sure, they got
destroyed in the game, but they all had something to say about it.
I'm excited to see where things go from here with the group, and what
else I can do with the journals.
This is getting to be a pretty long
post. But here is how things went with the architecture group.
Looking back, I put way too much into this lesson. In preparation
for the lesson I printed off pictures of famous buildings along with
their measurements; found pictures of work others had done in MC;
made a blueprint and started my own reproduction of the pyramids of
Giza. In order to finish the project, students need to do historical
research on their building, make a building plan on graph paper,
scale the dimensions appropriately, and spend a good amount of time
just placing blocks in-game. This was too much for one day. I did
understand that the project would take time to complete, I just did
not appropriately space out the content for the project. Instead of
working on one element at a time (first researching a building, then
figuring out how models and scales work, then working with graph
paper to make a plan, etc.) I expected them to just go and do it all
elements simultaneously. Needless to say, it didn't go as I planned.
I realized this fairly early, and was lucky to have a smaller group
than usual (some kids were out on a field trip), so we focused on the
buildings I had already researched, and the students ended up
starting their own interpretations of the lighthouse at Alexandria.
Once they got going, they were fine, and we were able to talk about
the lighthouse, why it was important, and what happened to it. I'll
have to do some more thinking before next week comes on how to
proceed with this group.
Well, thanks for getting through this
lengthy narrative of what happened yesterday. Comments and new ideas
are always welcome, especially any thoughts on how to better run the
architecture project.
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