Different students, different needs

This week's goal was for students to learn a little about redstone, what it does, and how to use it.  For this goal I set up an indestructable room (using the MinecraftEdu mod's "build disallow" blocks) with an iron door, and gave students a chest of materials and instructions to find five different ways to get inside the room.  My two groups handled this task very differently.  The first group needed very little assistance before they set up a line of redstone with a lever leading up to the front door.  They even made the line of redstone too long to activate the door, so I was able to pass out redstone repeaters and explain what they did.  The group eagerly wrote down the different methods they used to open the door, after which I activated the teleporter inside the room which took them to the village they had started in the previous weeks. 

Group two did not do as well with this task.  While they did figure out that you can put a button or lever right next to an iron door and get it to open, they did not have the patience to see what they could do with the redstone.  They did not want to work together on the project, so they started wandering and exploring the world around the room on their own.  Eventually I got them back around to the room and activated the teleporter, giving them some free time. 

I'm learning that I need to tailor my lessons to the group I am working with, and not just assume that one lesson will work for all. Also, when the planned lesson does not work with a particular group of students, they are still engaged in playing the game.  I need to pay more attention to what it is that engages them when they wander from the planned activity and use it to my advantage, instead of just teleporting the explorers back to the lesson area and asking them to stay focused on what I want them to do. 

So  where do I go from here? The students in the first group have been requesting some time in survival mode.  I want to put together a survival scenario for them.  They even responded positively when I mentioned I would ask them to make a survival journal of the experience.  As much as I would like to do a Rube Goldberg project with them, I want to take advantage of their motivation in this area and see where it goes from there.

The second group would not do as well in survival mode, I think.  They are more interested in building and exploring.  Maybe I could take this group in a more architecture or mapping focused direction.  We'll see.  Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

"Oh, WOW"

I think the recent meeting of the Minecraft club has been the most successful so far.  I learned last week that the students want a challenge, a problem to solve, but they also want a way to preserve their work from week to week.  So my new strategy for the group is to have some sort of challenge for them to complete, and upon completion reward them with free-build time.  All of this will take place in the same world, but I will keep the challenge areas in a different part of the world from where they are working on their village.  This week was the first time I experimented with the teleportation and information blocks included in the EDU mod.  Those were handy.  I had a little bit of problem with the info blocks teleporting people above ground when you walked over them, but I solved that by putting a block on top of them.  The teleporters were great for allowing students to explore the world to find the perfect building spot and making it easy for them to find the spot again, or allow others to easily to see what everyone else was up to.

The students had become fairly proficient navigators of Minecraft, but they had no experience in caves or relying on torches for light.  So for yesterday's challenge I used the no-clip build mode to fly underground and find an expansive cave network.  After exploring the cave and blocking off a couple of side passages I decided it would work for what I wanted to do.  Students began in one end of the cave, had unlimited torches, and had to find their way out.  It went fairly smoothly, with students splitting up in the cave to explore the different passages.  The final challenge of the cave was that once they found the exit, they had to swim up a waterfall to reach it.  Slightly counter-intuitive, but they figured it out quick enough.  The best moment of the day happened when one student exited the cave, saw the world outside, and exclaimed, "Oh wow!"  From that point on they rushed out into the world, staking claims and beginning construction.  While they were in the cave I kept them out of creative mode so they couldn't just bust their way out, but once they were above ground I put them in creative mode.  I would like to do something with survival mode in the future, maybe a shipwreck-type simulation with a journaling component, but that can wait for another time.

This week at the after-school program students were doing some experiments with circuits and lightbulbs, which could segway perfectly into beginning some work with redstone in MC.  I could easily integrate this into my new strategy of giving students a problem to solve with the reward of free-build time.  An assignment  might look like this: "Create a circuit to open this door using elements x, y, and z.  Beyond the door lies a teleporter to take you to your village."  I could create some sort of math challenge, requiring students to build a structure with certain square footage or volume requirements, or do an architecture project where they need to draw up plans for a structure on grid paper and then build it in game.  Feel free to offer ideas for other challenges or ways I could be using this tool in the comments -- all input is valuable.

Round 2

Minecraft Club met last week for the second time.  During this time we went through the second half of the tutorial map, giving students a chance to practice copying simple shapes and get used to right/left clicking to create/destroy.  Some of the shapes required the students to build simple scaffolding to get up high enough for completion.  One student figured out that you can place a block under your feet if you time it right during a jump and was able to teach the trick to the classmates sitting next to him.  As soon as they got through that they were quickly exploring, trying to see who could get to the top of the nearby mountain first.  Next week I'm entertaining the idea of a survival island senario or possibly making a treasure hunt map for them (idea from http://minecrafteduelfie.blogspot.com/2012/03/just-in-time-vs-just-in-ca...).

Right now the schedule at the after-school only allows for Minecraft once a week, but that might be changing due to popular demand.  Also, I'm intrigued at the potential Minecraft poses as a tool in tutoring, if I could somehow use the program to help students have a better concept of arrays or something like that.  I've got the tool, why not use it?

There were a couple of technical problems we encountered, which may be due to the limitations of the computer I am using to run the server.  When students try to break blocks they sometimes reappear at random, making resource collection frustrating.  There were also some lag issues when trying to place blocks.  The thing that I don't understand is when they left the tutorial area of the map and tried to continue building: they could place blocks to their hearts' content, but they were unable to break any blocks unless I put them in creative mode.  In creative mode they could build/destroy without problems.  I'll do some experimenting this week to see if it was an isolated problem or what-not.