Minecraft Education
This week we looked at gamification during class. I am a big fan of online games and believe it is a great way to increase engagement with students. I grew up as a Minecraft kid, my brother and I spent hours building our worlds, trying to survive the creepers and zombies, and creating farms and mines for resource cultivation.
I found the presentation about Minecraft Education very interesting. I had not dove into Minecraft education much and was not aware of the options available. I do think it would be easy to extrapolate curricular connections to it; however, I’m not sure how on task students would be while using it. The buy in to the education piece would have to be high from students. After talking to educators currently working in middle schools, they said they attempted a Minecraft Education lesson once and the class lost interest quite quickly and were not on task. Their students loved Minecraft, but I think they were too excited by it to concentrate on the task at hand. In the future, they would tell the students ahead of time and go over expectations in-depth to try to mitigate the craziness.
When looking at potential lessons on the website, this one stood out to me as being easy to connect curriculum to. This could be tied in to grade 5, being a lesson included in a unit revolving around the Big Idea that Earth materials change as they move through the rock cycle and can be used as natural resources.
I am glad you found the week’s topic worthwhile. Please note that, like with Minecraft, many games require both an introduction and a follow-up to debrief and reinforce the messaging and intended outcomes for students. That is where Minecraft Education excels, as it has designed learning activities and lesson plans. Deliberate design and structure for how learning will occur is key to guiding students in the effective use of any supporting tech and gaming design.