Thinking through Minecraft in the classroom

A computer teacher solicited help in Google + today, asking how she might use Minecraft for instruction, writing,

As a computer teacher, I have been getting on my students for playing Minecraft when they should be working on their classroom projects. They will often come up with creative ideas to somehow incorporate it into their project. I have let a couple of students build websites around the use of this game. I have decided it is time to learn more about Minecraft and the potential uses in education.

She created a site to solicit, then synthesize the help she gets from the online community. 

  I'm interested in the responses she gets from teachers as well as students. I've asked students before. I still return to their answers regularly when I think about the implications for gaming on teaching and learning. Some boys I worked with at a writing camp this last summer told me that they think math teachers could use Minecraft because of the factoring involved in crafting resources in the game. They also said  that they think the game is all about geometry.

  One boy was particularly articulate, saying Minecraft allows students to think creatively and collaboratively, and arguing that teachers should give 20 minute Minecraft breaks so students would reconnect with a "free feeling of creativity." It also, he claimed, remind students to work together. (I remember his comments clearly because I voice recorded my informal interview with him.) 

Here's what I submitted to her site: 

I'm planning to teach an enrichment summer course this June using Minecraft.  I want to look carefully with students at the different texts and the research skills that players use to figure out the game. I had a student tell me once that before he ever played Minecraft, he read about it online and watched tutorials to the point where he felt fluent, then he began to play. When I began to play myself, I found that I leaned heavily on the wiki and user-generated YouTube tutorials for support. Every question I had when I was stuck playing the game ended up as a Google search or another return to the wiki. Especially in YouTube, gamers with a need to know have to evaluate the strength of the sources they turn to. Five-minute, focused tutorials are best for me, and I rarely watch anything 10 minutes in length.  The supports gamers use in order to learn Minecraft are rich opportunities to identify and support online research processes.

Here's a great example: I bookmarked this tutorial that I used when learning to work with circuits in Minecraft.  Every time I return to it, I'm struck by the qualities of good instruction and planning that went into it. I think this type of user-generated content is an example of the positive literacy skills that youth are immersed in when viewing and creating tutorials. Minecraft tutorials are great ways to highlight strong presentation skills and to have students teach students.  

What I didn't say in my form response to her question was that teachers interested in capitalizing on students' interest in this wildly popular sandbox game ought to log a few hours playing the game to generate their own insights and ideas about how it might fit in instruction.  In much the same way language arts teachers read the hottest children's and YA titles to better understand students' interests, Minecraft's popularity and potential is deserving of teachers' time and inquiry. See what all the fuss is about. 

Game design and rethinking failure in school #change11

I’ll be blogging in response to a webinar series offered by connectedlearning.tv at the invitation of the National Writing Project’s Digital Is.

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Katie Salen, executive director of the Institute of Play, offered principles for instructional designers to use in order apply the theories of game design in schools in this web session on connectedlearning.tv. Though the session title indicated there were six principles, I got four:

1. Create a need to know

2. Create a space of possibility

3. Create opportunities for authority and expertise to be shared and reciprocal.

4. Multiple, overlapping paths to mastery.

From failure to iteration and prototype

In her explanation and exploration of the fourth point, she made the observation that game designers have to construct games in a way that participants can find success. A game designer has executed a poor design if players cannot find success. This is a distinct contrast from traditional classroom settings, she noted, where the instructional design suggests that not all student will find success and when students do not, schools blame the students more than they rethink design.

Participants in the web session asked Salen how schools built on game design help students with the routine failure that players experience to learn in game settings. She explained that gamer view failure differently. In the schools she works with- one in Chicago and one in New York- educators intentionally talk about failed efforts as iterations, prototypes and proof that approaches do not work. The hope is that students see success as possible. They, like players in a game, learn that risk and experimentation pay off. When students try and do not succeed in game design schools, they can trust that there is a pathway to success and that they are in the process of finding it.

My own failure

During the recorded web session, I paused the discussion to do a little research when I heard a mention of the game Minecraft. Having read recently about classroom implications for games like Gamestar Mechanic and Little Big Planet, I wanted to familiarize myself with Minecraft, a title I’m encountering more and more in my online reading about games in education.

In minutes, I downloaded a free app for the pocket edition on my smartphone. In no time, my little avatar was running over the block landscape and stopping to stack blocks. I had to build a structure that would protect me after nightfall. Entirely too soon, night did fall and hordes of monsters came out of nowhere and destroyed me.

With my short experience with Minecraft, the pocket edition, I gained a new appreciation for the term my students use more and more: “Epic fail.” My epic failure may have hooked me on the game, though. Failure gave me a few objectives for my next experience, too. I know now that I will probably have to explore the terrain more, and figure out how to stack these blocks where I want them to go. Once I learn how to navigate and build, I will need to figure out what kind of structure will impede the murderous monsters. I’m probably going to fail, like, 10 more times before I develop the competency to advance in this game. Luckily, this is a game, though, so the learning is probably going to be fun.