Wins So Far.

As I regularly do with any new project, or MinecraftEdu world, I have been reflecting on what has been accomplished in the time I have had with my Pre-CAL Numeracy class, and the 180 minutes that the students have had access to the MinecraftEdu world that I have created. The more I think about what has happened over the last few weeks, and chat to the EduCrew folk about what they heard during their Skype the happier I get.

If I reflect on the process of learning, using something called the e5 instructional model, which for those not in the same educational system as me is "a reference point for school leaders and teachers to develop a deeper understanding of what constitutes high quality teacher practice in the classroom."(follow the link to see the model). The first step is to engage, only once students are engaged can quality learning happen.

A primary focus of the project was to engage students in a different kind of learning. The level of interest and engagement seen during my classes is higher than anything I have seen at this level of schooling, keep in mind that I am not a teacher of the 'cool' subjects that the majority of students enjoy, like Physical Education, or Wood Work, but Science and Maths. So when I say that the students are involved in a Maths project, and wanting to be there, that is a huge win.

Students are reflecting on what they want or need to be more successful in the project. There are students, who have never done homework before, doing homework to gain extra cash to buy more items in the game. They are focusing on tasks for 90 minutes, normally these students would not be able to focus more than 5-10 minutes in a standard classroom. Not only are the students more conscious of their own behaviour, they have put forth requests for me to add additional fines and rewards to balance out the system. In essence they are showing investment into the project.

So the students are engaged, the next step on the e5 is to explore. Now this is natively in Minecraft, but students are already exploring the worlds market. They are beginning to explore ideas about what business they would like to run in the world, that will get them more money. They are exploring how to cost jobs, how to convert a 2d floor plan into a 3 dimensional building. Students are also exploring some of the tools available to them to manage finances, like Google Spreadsheet.

What about explain? Well students are working towards explaining their house costing, justifying their loan application. Just through managing their budget they could explain what some of the key terms mean; income, expenses, fines, balance, budget, unit cost. As we move further along with the project what students will have explored, and be able to explain, should grow much larger.

How are students going to elaborate as they move through the project? When students are writing their loan application, or business application, they are going to have to not only explain their budget, but elaborate on how that budget shows that they can afford the loan they are applying for, or how they business is going to be profitable.

The final part of the e5 talks about evaluating. Students will be evaluating their budgets weekly, reflecting on their purchases, were they the right purchase to make, or should they have done something different. They will be evaluating their business for viability, and hopefully if they decide that it is going down the gurgler, so to speak, they will jump ship, or begin another business to help prop themselves up a bit longer.

So if I were to write a list of what I have seen the students accomplish over the last 3 weeks it would look like the following.

Creating a safe learning environment:

No swearing

No bullying

Don't deliberately break things

Don't hit others

Support others

Life skills:

Bring all required equipment

Be on time

Be respectful to all

The value of money (even virtual)

The value of work

Managing accounts and passwords

Budgeting:

Income

Expenses

Unit Cost

Bulk Cost

Bulk Discount

Think about purchases

Costing a job

Where to from here?? Well I want to see this list grow. Hopefully by the end of the project this list will take up a lot more space and there will be some serious Maths learning in there. The next topic, now that the basics are set up, and most of the teething issues are out of the way, is percentages. This will be incorporated into the students loan applications. Following that, plans, isometric and 3D drawings. Inadvertently along the way students have picked up, or will pick up, the applications of area and perimeter to buildings and costings.

Another activity I will be getting the students to do is to work out what the bulk purchase discount is in my store, as a percentage. How much more authentic can a task get without paying with real money? If a student undercuts my prices later on, students will be asked to work out how much money they can save by purchasing from the student rather than me for different amounts.

Thanks for reading, I will try to reflect more often on the learning happening within this project and share the additions to the above list. As always feel free to leave a comment below.

Mayhem.

Well after being away for the last half of last week on a school camp. Which I found out that I needed to go on Tuesday, as the staff member who was going got sick, and we left on Wednesday, I returned to school this morning to a 90 minute session with my Pre-CAL class. It was mayhem, students are still having trouble remembering passwords. They have not filled in their budget enough for that to be a fluent thing, so instead of spending 10 or so minutes on their budgets, for some it took nearly an hour.

That being said once the budget was out of the way, the students were back into the Numeracy world collecting their pay, and then spending it. More importantly they were putting purchase details into their budget for the week. Some students spent the lesson fishing, one student managed to score himself 18 fish, so now I really need to spend the time getting the sales floor sorted and ready to go.

Other students continued working on their houses, with a deadline for costing being the end of this week, then next week loan applications. All in all, for being a young project, still with teething issues, I think it is going well, and I think my learning outcomes will be met. I even have one student who has already begun her letter of application for a loan, she has costed her house, has chosen to build it herself, and is now in the process of collating the costs for tools, land and materials ready to put into her application.

I also have given one student the job of being a 'helper' and offered other members of the class the same opportunity, however they need to write a job application. The first student does not, as he has shown time and again that he is able to help. One students first response when I asked her why she wanted the job was "I need the cash." This gave me the perfect opportunity to bring back a comment that a guest speaker made only last week to this group of students, that if you ever apply for a job, never say that you want it for the money.

Also since I have been away, I have decided not to spend more time on the Transcription/Translation lesson with my senior Biology students, but I may give my Year 11's a go later in the year when we are preparing for their senior year.

That is a quick update, thanks for reading, feel free to leave a comment below.

Massive Day Part 2 Done!

Well the transcription/translation lesson has just finished. It ranged from a massive disappointment to a mediocre success. The principle is completely sound, and the machinery worked as it was supposed to. However there were a few issues getting in the way of it being the roaring success I was hoping for.

The top one being the lag, when on my computer, with one lot of machines running and only me on the server, I could place blocks quite fast, so the RNA sequence moved along at a decent pace and got to the ribosome relatively quickly. However having 10 of the machines running with 8 students at only 4 of them, the lag was atrocious. This is not client lag, this was server lag, and I think it was due to the number of computers on an infinite loop to do things. (I was warned to stay away from infinite loops, but I did not quite realise the impact they would have.)

As I stopped, or killed off, the unnecessary computers the lag got much better and the sequences started flowing a lot more smoothly. Hence the mediocre success. The other main issue was my sequence, and it is yet to be determined whether this will be a success or failure as a lesson in terms of looking at mutations and their impact. Tomorrow the students will come back in and complete the mutated sequences. Then we will be able to see whether it is a valuable lesson, or whether I need to do some tweaking before it becomes a lesson worth repeating. The sequence was a fair bit shorter than I expected it to be, which in itself, given the way today went, could possibly be a blessing.

The third issue was that a student managed to break the machinery, they were able to break one of the DNA bases, which I am unsure how to prevent at this stage. This caused the sequence to fall well out of sync and of course impacted severely on the sequence that was presented to the ribosome.

As I said, not a complete failure, but definitely a lot of room for improvement and a lot of investigating on improvements to be made. Thanks for reading, feel free to comment below.

Numeracy World Lesson 1 Done!

The first lesson where students were allowed to join the Numeracy world finished about an hour ago. I am still trying to wrap my head around exactly what happened during the lesson, the recording will help with this, but one thing I am definitely sure of is that students were engaged. There were some teething issues with the install, but they were quickly fixed. Then there were some naming issues, which caused some students to be unable to collect their pay until they logged in with their 'proper' name.

Shane and Matt were on Skype for the hour or so students had access to the world, and their feedback on what they heard has been fantastic. An interesting point here is that the students were amazed that these people wanted to hear what they were doing. They have both given me some of their thoughts on things to adjust before next time, or at least in the near future, that will make it easier to manage, and perhaps free me up in class too. One great idea that I will most likely be offering to students next week, is an extra payment for being a 'helper' that goes around the room helping other students if they get stuck.

One student, already, killed a spider, went to the not yet implemented sales floor and wanted to sell his piece of string to get some extra cash. Now that is an entrepreneur in the making right there. Many students did exactly what I was hoping they would do, once they ran out of cash, or things to do in the numeracy world, they wanted to log into the creative world to make their houses. So what I am thinking of doing is putting that creative world as a MystCraft dimension in the Numeracy world, so that they can stay in the same log in, and head over and keep building. This will also make it easier for me to copy/paste their houses over when it is time to do so.

Another interesting thing that happened was students were helping defend each other from the monsters at night, one even learnt from their first death, went and bought a sword and then went back out to help out even more.

The discussions with students were quite interesting, one student was trying to buy 64 raw fish, so I went over, asked her if she really wanted to buy 64 raw fish, she said no, I only want one. So we headed to the right floor and went to buy one. Then I went on and asked if she wanted to buy a cooked fish for 4 stone, or an uncooked fish for 2 stone. She said, "Will I need to cook it?" my response was yeah you probably should. She then needed to add it to her budget, when she worked out she just paid $20 for one raw fish she went "20 DOLLARS!!! WHAT!!!!" Hopefully students will learn the value of thinking about their spending as time in world progresses.

So where to from here? Next up is to demo to students how the traders work, and how the bank currency swap works. I am planning on using the first part of each lesson to teach students particular in-game skills that they will need. Also I will be beginning to offer worksheets on percentages ready for them to apply for their home loan in the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading, there will be another post later today after the transcription/translation lesson is run this afternoon.

Huge Day.

Tomorrow is perhaps the biggest day in my MinecraftEdu journey so far. I have the first time my Pre-CAL numeracy students join 'their' world, and get paid. I am also unveiling my new transcription/translation map, including mutations, to my senior biology students. This is the culmination of a couple of months work (on both maps).

Needless to say the nerves are all aflutter, even now nearly 2 years on from my humble beginnings allowing students to be neurotransmitters in a virtual world. I like unleashing new projects on students and seeing what happens, the problem is these projects suck up so much of my time to generate, and I hope that time is not wasted. Not that I think that will be the case with either of these maps.

I am about to do a video walk through of both of these worlds, the reason I have been holding off, apart from waiting until they were ready, is that the transcription/translation map is relying heavily on an upcoming programming suite for MinecraftEdu, called ComputerCraftEdu (at least that is what I am calling it). The guys at TeacherGaming have finally unveiled the project and are looking for beta testers, so that means I now have permission to publish videos showcasing what it is capable of, as well as how I am using it.

Now if you are interested in getting students to learn programming, I cannot recommend this highly enough. I have been testing some of the early alpha versions with students, and I can tell you that students with absolutely no programming knowledge can pick this up, play with it, problem solve and get things happening amazingly quick.

Back to the actual content of this post, I will talk more about CCEdu in the future I am sure. The Numeracy pay system is not going to be as 'cool' as I had hoped. Apparently when trading, Minecraft villagers ignore the extra data that can be associated with items, so my idea of assigning each student a data value and adjusting the worth of that data value in the villager each week was just not going to work and they would only trade 1 type of coin. I thought about relying on the Custom NPC's but, like the villagers, that would only allow me to pay the students with 1 type of coin.

So instead I have a massive array of command blocks, I have dubbed it the command centre, where students names are checked as to whether they have already been paid that week, if not they are paid their due and then marked as paid. Then at the end of the week I go in and hit the reset button and it resets all students to not-paid and also resets their death count to 0.

All in all a relatively simple to manage system, that gives greater flexibility and accuracy, for a minor loss of 'coolness'. I have been speaking to colleagues a bit over the last week or so, and one of them put forth the idea of live streaming my class. I must admit this intrigues me, how many people out there would be interested in seeing an in-game class live? I am not promising anything, but I can say that I am not wholly opposed to the idea. I think I am going to do a bit of a trial run tomorrow with a visitor in the Numeracy world and on Skype as I wander the room talking to students. Of course this depends on whether the students are happy for me to do this.

All in all, tomorrow is going to be a massive day for me. Thanks for reading and if you would be interested in seeing a live streamed lesson please leave a comment below saying so, and if there is enough interest I will see what can be organised.

Integrating.

Who knew. Edmodo and Google Docs can be paired. Found that out just this morning, that makes sharing documents with students much easier. It also should mean that the students only need to log into Edmodo to access their files. The one disadvantage is that they cannot create docs in Edmodo, that still has to be done in Drive.

However it does hopefully mean that delivery of their payslips should me much easier, as I can just share it with them in Edmodo. The payslip document has begun to take shape, I spent a couple of hours yesterday messing around trying to get a functional spreadsheet that gives the students the info they need, but also gives me a summary sheet so that I can more easily put the relevant information into the game.

Now to work out the easiest way of sharing just one page of the document with students, or whether to export each payslip and share individually as a pdf.

Many hours later.....

There is no simple way to share a single page of a google spreadsheet with students, however there are a couple of options I now need to consider. One option is to have a master file set up that then 'pushes' the data to students. The issue with this is that I would either have to have a different master file for each week, or students will get the every week appearing on their sheet. The second option is to have a master file each week, that is exported to pdf, split into individual pages and then each individual page is dropped into a shared folder for that student.

Many more hours later......

Most of the problems have been solved, and the convoluted set up should be offset by the ease of use throughout the term. I have decided to have a different master file for each week and each student will have their own document with a different tab for each week. The data will be automatically pulled into their document from my master document for that week. Gee, even the explanation seems convoluted to me and I am writing it. Maybe I will try drawing a picture.

I hope that terrible drawing helps explain what is happening. Now this post has taken me a whole day to write, in between testing and trialling many things on google, and my teaching. However I have more to write, today with my smaller Wednesday class we started discussing the income and fines the students can be given.

What I found extremely interesting is that students were vicious. Not towards each other, but in terms of the fines, they knew what behaviour they didn't want to see in the class, either virtual or real, and were pricing their fines to try to ensure that these behaviours do not occur. To give an example, deliberate destruction of anothers' property virtual or real will incur a $1000 fine + repair costs. To put this in perspective, the base wage students will be earning, having done no work at all is $100, if they complete their budget this will net them another $400. So the absolute minimum of work will get the students $500 for the week.

There are of course additional opportunities to be earning money, doing any homework for maths will get them $3000 for the week. Completing worksheets of varying difficulties will get them upwards of $1000, multiple sheets double the reward. So 2 sheets you get the $1000 for the first and $2000 for the second. Getting no fines for the week also gets you an extra $500. So with my smaller group we have come up with a list of 17 penalties or fines, and only 10 ways to earn money. This will possibly need to be rebalanced.

One student at the end of the lesson came up to me and said "I am not going to go into business with student X, as they are not going to do the work, and I will have to pay for it all." Interesting, another said when we were talking about how much the work was worth said "This will be the only time I ever have done work." Even more interesting, this is a student, whom I taught last semester. I use taught very loosely here, he perhaps actively worked for a total of 2 weeks in the 20 or so he was in my class, so it will be very interesting to see how long this works for this particular student.

I am going to get all this up and running ready for the students to log into the world and receive their first 2 weeks pay on Monday. Then they can start looking at blocks of land which they want to buy and build a house on. I will probably in the next couple of weeks be running a Minecraft maths activity similar to what I did with my year 8 maths students, be it on area, volume, perimeter or even probability and the reward for students will be extra cash, that they will have to add into their budget for that week.

Stay tuned for more updates, and feel free to leave a comment below.

Automating.

I have been having a serious think about how I can automate as much of this Pre-CAL Numeracy map as possible so that it does not become a burden and take too much time to be sustainable throughout the term. I think the process of altering the market prices will be far too involved and suck too much time to be sustainable, so I am taking that off the plans for now. I have explored using command blocks (another big thanks to Shane here for taking the time to be my guinea pig to test things out on, and helping me problem solve) to automate the payment of students.

The plan being that students will head up to the payment area, press a button, the command blocks will 'check' to see who is there are give them their 'payslip' and then mark them as paid. They can then take their payslip to a villager/NPC and trade it for their payment. This of course is still not fully automated, but it is close, the only work I need to do each week is reset the students paid 'tag' so that they can again receive their payslip, and also adjust one of the villager/NPC and copy/paste it over the others. So I will need to adjust how much their specific trade will be worth each week based on the work completed in class.

Yesterday I showed the students through the world, just a quick tour explaining how things work, and giving them a rough idea of how much building materials cost so that they can plan accordingly while building their houses in the creative world. It was interesting to see students doing calculations to work out how much their flooring was going to cost and then changing the material as it was too expensive. I am hoping to get the students more involved in using spreadsheets to help manage their costings. This started yesterday with 2 columns on a Drive spreadsheet, block and number. Then we will add in cost and do some simple calculations within the sheet.

Another thoughtful addition to the world, so that death in game means something, is a penalty system, each death of a student (as they keep their inventory upon death to stop others capitalising on others' demise) will cost the students a certain amount of money. This is achieved through the use of the scoreboard system, but it is not automatic unfortunately. I will need to re-zero the death counter for each student each week and manually subtract money from their pay.

I am also thrashing around the idea of how to manage the students finances, as ideally I want them to be doing it themselves, however there is no easy way for them to pay me, without me spending a lot of my time in-game receiving payments and noting what has been received. Which would be fine if I didn't have a class to teach. So I am thinking that on their payslip they get each week (in real life) I will give them a gross pay, then do the deductions (like a direct debit from a bank account), and then give them their net pay. It will be these numbers that they will need to add into their budgets as well as any extra expenditure.

Edmodo is proving to be an interesting tool to be using. I gave the students a badge last week, and despite being in year 10 (16 years old or so) they are still excited to receive a virtual badge, the majority of students voted for a continuation of badge giving in a poll, with only one student saying they did not care either way. Another big advantage to Edmodo is that I can also easily see who has not shared their budget with me, both through the badge and the mark book, so chasing that up is very easy, this will of course carry on to any assessment item and badge achievement throughout the project.

The next step I guess is to work out a heap of badges that will be available to students, list them down and make it like a set of achievable goals for the students and then of course, give it to the students so that they know what they need to do to receive badges.

I think that is enough for now, thanks for reading, and as always, feel free to leave a comment below.