Hello From Texas.

Well, it is 4am local time in Texas, and 9pm tomorrow at home and I, of course, am wide awake. So here I sit, in my hotel room in Austin, Texas with less than 5 hours before I take to the stage with Joel Levin (aka The Minecraft Teacher) to talk to teachers about MinecraftEdu in their classes. So I should be asleep, I think I have slept a total of 10 or so hours over the last 3 days, but I am just too excited. I just went through my final checks of the maps we are getting the teachers to join tomorrow to make sure they are working.

Meeting, in real life, the people I have been working with for the last 2 and a half years has been an experience. Having never been out of Australia before, even getting 'off that rock' as Shane would say has been an experience. It is certainly different to be the one that sounds weird, I am normally the one laughing at the accents of others, instead I have people laughing at me. Which of course is par for the course, I would expect no less, just an interesting point.

This post is going to be pretty much useless in terms of Minecraft/Education content, so feel free to stop reading now, it is basically going to be a brain dump of some of the things I have noticed on this trip so far. America is just different, apart from driving on the wrong side of the car, and the wrong side of the road, which I have got to say freaks me out every time we turn a corner as there are cars where I think we should be going. There are just some other minor differences, some of which I managed to put my finger on yesterday that just make it feel different to home.

The colours of the houses is 'wrong' now this might seem silly, but never before had I really thought that the colour of the houses would be something that would just make me feel like I was not at home. The colours of the rocks and bricks used to make the houses here lacks the 'red' of Australia, it is all browns here, no real red bricks at all. The reason I am mentioning this is because it had really never crossed my mind that the materials around you, particularly the materials for buildings, are 'local' and that they have a local flavour to them, that when missing, is noticeable.

The other thing that I pinpointed that made me feel like I was not home was the trees, the leaves are not the colours (again with the colour) or shape that they should be. I say 'should be' like where I grew up is what every place should look like, again just something I had not considered before. The trees have a different look about them that just makes them odd to me. A little perspective can go a long way, I am enjoying myself greatly and am really looking forward to sharing a bit of Aussie slang with the group I am working with in the morning.

Ok, enough blabbering, back to bed for a couple of hours more sleep if I can manage it, if you did make it this far, thanks for reading.

Updates on KerbalEdu and Mathlandia.

I got a hold of the first (as in very first) pre-alpha release of KerbalEdu the other night. WOW, it is going to make it so much easier to get information out of the game to help the teaching of 'rocket science', and this is only the beginning. You can read the official blog of KerbalEdu here: (kerbaledu.blogspot.com) but I will say that both the 'troubleshooter' and the extra information you can get about your rocket as you build it are amazing. They should also help students get past many of the issues I saw in getting rockets/planes airborne so that, at least in my class, I can teach them about the forces involved, even to the point of getting into space and removing 'gravity' from the equation, which without spending a heap of time in class, that I could not afford, would not happen.

Mathlandia, oh dear!!! The students were not enthusiastic at all when I threw the idea out there about using Minecraft to help their learning and having a server to play on outside of school. So instead of working on the map as a whole, I have decided to break the map apart, make each lesson a standalone map. There are 2 reasons I am choosing to do this;

1) I should have done it from the start so it was easier for other educators to use/tweak.

2) This way, since these students don't want a substantive world to 'play' in I can just keep each as a standalone lesson and not worry about any of the other server issues I was worried about.

So what now? The first lesson in Minecraft will be the probability lesson, where we explore the difference between experimental and theoretical probability. I have 'split' all the Mathlandia lessons out of Mathlandia, and am in the process of making the adjustments they need from running them last year. The advantage, I guess, of the students not wanting a consistent world is that I need not worry about 'rewards' so much in the game, which makes the submission of work so much easier. I still remember that horrible time I had checking each students' work as they wanted to get their ruby so that they could go back to the main world and get paid for their work.

A short update today, thanks for reading and feel free to leave a comment or suggestion below.

I Wonder….

It is always a bit scary when I wonder things, because once I start wondering I cannot stop until I come to some sort of resolution. So my current 'wondering' centres around Mathlandia, poor Mathlandia was neglected in the latter half of last year because the Pre-CAL Numeracy Project took up all of my time. This year I want to up the ante with Mathlandia.

I already have quite a bit of content in Mathlandia, and also separate to it ready to combine. However I really want to make the map as standalone as possible, as well as giving the students time to enjoy the rewards of completing the learning quests in the game. So I am seriously contemplating running a server that will be accessible to my students when they are outside of school, as well as having the ability to work in the world during class time.

Now this is something I have wanted to do for a while, but have been holding off due to time constraints, and the 'fear' of managing a server for 20 odd 13-14 year olds as well as licensing concerns. So I am in the process of weighing the pros and cons of running a dedicated Mathlandia server that students can use inside and outside of the school.

My main reason for even considering this is that I do not, as I found last year, have time to run a play session during lunch time. So to give the students ownership of the world and the ability to use the rewards they receive I need another option. My biggest concern is the time it may take to manage the server and deal with any issues that happen outside of class. The main problem is, if I run a 24/7 server for students, then it is my job to 'supervise' the students in that space 24/7. Now I could run the server at specific times, but that relies on me being available to turn the server on and off at the appropriate times.

One 'plan' I came up with this morning was that I could have a set time that I was available one the server for students to turn in quest items and get their rewards if they happen to do some of the quests outside of school and that there is my main wondering. Will students actually do the quests outside of class to get the rewards? I am sure there will be griefing, and am prepared to deal with that. Rolling backups of the server are not too hard to do, and I always have the ability to 'lock' students out of the server (I think, individually or as a whole).

Ok enough blabbering for now. I will keep considering my options, run it by my admin to work out whether they are happy for me to even attempt it as there may be concerns with it. I will also have to send letters to parents explaining what the students are doing and the reasoning behind it. I am leaning towards doing it if the stars align as this will probably be my main MinecraftEdu focus for the coming school year. Thanks for reading and feel free to comment below.

Well, That Was Hard.

That has got to be one of the more difficult lessons I have ever done, in Minecraft or out. I think that it would have been impossible to manage students in that space without experience in Minecraft, and even more impossible to get students successfully completing the challenges without at least a basic understanding of CCEdu.

Shane and I have been discussing ways to adjust the scaling of the challenges to make it more standalone for students and teachers, and there are things that we can do to help, but realistically I think just picking up a map and throwing students into it is not a viable option in the long term. Teachers need to explore the maps that they want their students in and have some basic understanding of Minecraft itself and how it operates as a virtual teaching space. Also I owe Shane an apology, apparently his map is not based on Michael Harvey's challenge map, both maps are completely separate and made completely individually. So sorry to both Michael and Shane for my misleading comment in the last post.

I think one big (and I mean MASSIVE) problem with trying to make standalone maps is that students will not read the instructions. Even today, when the challenges were written in the information blocks, students would not take the time and read them, they were running around with no idea of what they were supposed to be doing. So without my directions to read the blocks, and complete the challenges I don't think the students would have achieved anything today. The only way to make some headway into this would be to 'lock' the map down completely, so that students were restricted to certain areas and forced to follow certain paths.

Enough about the negatives, onto some positives. There were some awesome positives today that I was hoping to see. Some students were able to persevere and achieve the first challenge, and the sense of triumph when they did was palpable. Unfortunately, I was not in the room for one of these triumphs, but the student screamed out loud and came running to find me so she could show me her turtle completing the challenge, I think she had Shane laughing hysterically in Hawaii. What makes this amazing is that this student began by saying "I am no good at computers." but with continued support, suggestions and her own perseverance, she saw success.

Even one of the teachers that came in to explore Minecraft was having a go, and she was ecstatic when she got her turtle to move from point A to point B. Unfortunately the challenge was only half complete as she was supposed to get her turtle to visit 4 specific points in between, but with that small success she began to understand how to get the turtle to do what she wanted.

Trial and error was our friend today, and a sense of 'it is not failing, it is just trying something, finding out that it doesn't work and then altering it so it does' was also important. I think, in general, students are afraid of 'failing' at things, where what they need to do is see these not as failures, but opportunities to improve. I think doing these challenges in Minecraft certainly helps students feel less threatened with failure and more inclined to take the risk and see what happens and because everyone else has not achieved success on their first try, including the teachers, it makes it a more 'friendly' environment for design iteration.

Well that wraps up the teaching part of my MinecraftEdu journey this year, more testing of the new versions and hopefully some awesome collaborative map building will be happening over my teaching break. Thanks for reading, feel free to leave a comment below.

One Last Hurrah!

Not forever, just for this year of classes. All of my formal classes have ended, we have been doing 'headstart' programs getting students ready for next year, and today begins our 'summer program' where we do activities and more relaxed fun things with the students who still remain.

So today it is the Science faculty's turn to do activities, for 90 minutes later today we will have the students and we can run what ever activities we want, they don't even have to be about science. But me being me, I want to do some interesting science type activities. Well maybe not science as such, but computer science. It is computer science week after all, and I always wanted to do some thing to do with hour of code..... so what better opportunity to get students thinking about coding and computer science.

Enter ComputerCraftEdu. Later today, for the first time I will be picking up a map someone else has made and getting students to 'do' it. I am talking about a ComputerCraftEdu coding challenge map made by Shane, which I think is also based off a world made by Mike Harvey, both are great contributors to the google group and are much more advanced in CCEdu than myself.

I am really excited to get students into the world and trying to complete challenges, none of which should be above their ability, particularly with the visual programming that CCEdu provides. Shane is going to Skype in and join the world with the students I think to get an idea of what is happening. He has already run the world a couple of times with his students, and is currently making alterations to it before he sends the most recent version to me to use later today.

But I am also really nervous. I probably shouldn't be, but there are a couple of reasons I am nervous, one, as mentioned I normally don't just get other peoples worlds and run them without at least some exploration, that is good practice. But I am deliberately doing it this time, to see if it is actually viable to just run with a map/lesson that someone else has created, with no pre-work. It seems that there are a few teachers beginning to join the community who want to do just that, take maps made by others and just use them, not explore themselves, but just let students in and the lesson should run itself.

So is this viable, will it work? We have been doing some testing of the online templates area of MinecraftEdu, so I want to know what teachers need in our maps to make this happen. What supportive materials do they need to ensure that even if they don't want to explore the world first, they have enough of an understanding to make the lesson a success for both themselves and their students.

The second reason I am nervous is because I am actually not going to be the 'main' teacher in the room, I have 2 staff that I will be assisting with their activities, one being the CCEdu activity, the other being a Lego robot activity where I have programmed the 'bricks' and students are tasked with building the robots around them. Of course they have instructions to help, but I was planning on moving between the 2 rooms to help out where I could and get the students thinking in some different ways.

So realistically both activities could go completely awry, I don't think they will, but there is the possibility. Both teachers supporting me do not have enough of an understanding of the 'systems' we are using to 'fix it' if things do go in the wrong direction. So why do it? Again, more information gathering to see if picking up Minecraft (and Lego), with no experience and trying to use it for a specific purpose/lesson/activity will actually work.

So I will probably have some thoughts to share later, but before I close out this post, I will say, the next update of MinecraftEdu that the guys are working on now, and we are testing as much as possible, is amazing. A few new features that will make things a lot easier for everyone involved (hopefully) and for the first update in a while I might actually get to record a feature video and share. My poor EduElfie youtube channel is feeling a bit neglected but hopefully soon I can get back into sharing some of the features, tutorials and maps with everyone again.

As always thanks for reading, leave a comment below if you feel like it and there should be another post later.

Just Another Tool.

So I have been in a pretty stressful situation these last couple of weeks. I was told the other week that there are some areas of my teaching practice that I am not up to scratch on, little things, but things that are expected of me in my role as a teacher in this school. Now this in itself is great for my own personal development. It is giving feedback on things I can do to improve my own teaching practice.

The stress has been caused by a request to provide “hard data” to prove that Minecraft is assisting my students in their learning. I have anecdotal evidence that supports the value of Minecraft as a teaching tool, but collecting “hard data” has never been a goal as I use Minecraft as a teaching tool. So after gnawing on the meetings and discussions I have had, I requested a follow up meeting to clarify the reason for seeking this data, and why my professional opinion was not enough to allow me to continue using it in my classes.

It seems there is a perception in my school that I use Minecraft in my classes ‘a lot’. Now over the weekend I actually did some calculations to show how much class time over the year I have spent with each of my classes in Minecraft. The results surprised me, the percentage of time spent in my classes using Minecraft is way lower than even I thought it would be. Excepting the Pre-CAL Numeracy Project, which sits around 50% of class time spent in the game, all my classes used less than 10% of available class time in Minecraft.

Now about 4 or 5 months ago I asked my admin at the time whether I could share the work I was doing in Minecraft with the staff at my school. My hope was that of removing some of the misconceptions about using games in classrooms, and also to see if any other staff at my school would be willing to have a go at using this tool in their classes. I was told back then a flat out no, and to work with a small group of interested staff.

Now, given the large misconception about the time I spend using this, my current admin is suggesting that perhaps it is time to share. I will be surveying my year 8 students, as they have used it more than most of the classes. The survey will focus on their thoughts about Minecraft in class, and how they feel this learning tool has assisted them in learning. I feel that the relevance of this data would be enhanced with a greater understanding of what we actually did in those classes.

So to increase understanding I look forward to a sit down with my admin to go through the lesson, “Path to Percentage Perfection.” During this process I hope to talk about the learning goals, the planning involved, the research based foundations, and what the students were required to do within the lesson. Then we will explore and discuss the data I collected from discussion and student surveys after that lesson. My hope is that my admin will see what is happening in my classes, the real learning that is happening, and hopefully provide evidence that this is indeed assisting my students with their understanding.

So back to the ‘hard data’ collection. After these meetings with my admin, I have had quite a few discussions with members of the MinecraftEdu community about how all of us can benefit from this. How can we get some solid, data based, evidence that using Minecraft assists students in their learning? We already have a few ways, the EduCrew MC Answer System, in-game journals, worksheets that fit alongside the learning in Minecraft and pre- and post-testing. I think, however, there is definitely scope to increase our options for data collection that proves to those not using this tool what those of us who are see clearly during our lessons.

I keep emphasising in all these discussions, that Minecraft is only one tool in my repertoire I use to engage and educate the students in my classes. It is no different than any other teaching practice I undertake in my classes except that it has been tagged a game. It has great engagement power, but it also has great teaching potential. Much like the clickers I used intensively last year, and will use again in the same manner next year to improve my students ability to interpret and answer multiple choice exam questions in a timely manner. In the end, Minecraft, like any other tool, is only as good as the teacher using it to teach lessons. So in reflection, if you see someone doing something new in their class, ask them to show you what it is, spend some time trying to understand it... who knows, you just might find a new tool for your teaching toolbox.

Winding Up.

My Pre-CAL Numeracy class is definitely winding up, we have just about a week and a half left of this project, so I have been doing a lot of thinking about how it went, what I would change for next time (if there is a next time) and what I saw during the time undertaking this project with my students.

I have made a post in the past about what I think I would change if I were to run this project, or one similar, again. Just a quick rehash;

• More structure to the tasks, perhaps project explanation sheets.
• A more fluid market for the land purchasing.
• Proformas to fill in for loan applications to fast track the application process.
• Student 'helpers' that are paid extra for helping me manage some of the land/building permits.
• Mining permits would be available for a % fee of their findings.
• A complete rehash of the map layout to remove the lag associated with too many entities in the one location.

Overall I think the project went very well but it was far from perfect, we had server issues for a few weeks that made us lose our momentum early this term. Over the course of the project however I saw glimpses of awesomeness. Glimpses of what this could be with enough time dedicated to adding more structure outside, yet more flexibility in-game.

One 'lesson' will stick with me for a very long time, I think I will be hard pressed to forget a disengaged student doing higher level measurement calculations than I would have ever expected from him given his work ethic and history in Maths. Not only was he doing the calculations on the board in front of me, he was explaining his thinking, with great clarity, each step of the way.

The engagement of the students in the tasks is also something I am very impressed with, that fateful Friday afternoon where students were focussed and working towards a $100 in-game reward for a whole 45 minute period blew my mind. If only I had the time or ability to maintain that level of engagement in every lesson I teach.

The engagement definitely declined as the weeks progressed, compounded by the server issues many have 'given up' on the Minecraft side of things by now. I think this steady decline was because the students could not see 'progress' towards their goals, as they spent so much time building their houses in the creative world, and then would not go through the loan application process to get the money required to get that house put into the Pre-CAL world. To remedy this I would not give them that option again, I would have some houses they could buy/rent if they wanted, but I would also have 'blocks' of land that students could purchase and then build their houses on.

Students did not really keep a good record of their budgets, it took a lot of prodding to get them to do their budgets each week, and that was only transferring the information from their payslip to their budget. Their in-game purchases rarely made it onto their budgets. I am not sure how to remedy this, it was not like the students had to get out of Minecraft to do their budget, they had their laptop beside them. Obviously I need to find the 'carrot' to make the budget a worthwhile activity to maintain. However I have no way to track in-game purchases, the real question I guess is, is the budget a key component of the project? Originally my response would have been yes, now I am not so sure.

Since the project started I have been shown mods and very cool command block systems that can 'lock' students houses to particular students and collect rent without input from me. With enough time to explore and implement one of these options I think it would make the process a bit simpler. That being said I still feel that the ability to be very flexible with the pay system, down to paying individual students different amounts based on their work output is a key component of making students take ownership of their work and their investment into the game.

The targeted lesson/map I called the Path to Percentage Perfection worked for some students, but not all. I believe that if these activities were a bit more regular that the students would 'get used' to doing them and also find more value in them. The first time doing anything is always a bit scary but with repetition, the process becomes more comfortable for students.

Whoa, that turned into a long post, it was supposed to be much shorter than that. If you made it this far, thanks for reading and feel free to leave a comment below. If you didn't make it this far ....... ;)