NB. A Lot of the credit for the work talked about in this post go to Dave Warren from Otago University and also to the Yr 10 boys in my Science class who are teaching me as they go. They are awesome and I am really hoping we can get this to work.
Minecraft has been making more and more noise lately for lots of good reason. Last night I connected into to the live stream from the Microsoft Educator Exchange in Budapest (You can watch the event here) and was totally inspired by the talking around makerEd and gamification and what people are now doing with there classes. I am not sure why I had not come across Stephen Reid before but I LOVED his presentation on games and how he helps teachers and students use them in a meaningful way for learning. (I stayed up way tooooo late reading his blog and will def go back to it)
— Brian Aspinall (@mraspinall) March 9, 2016
I have been thinking about how I can use Minecraft in the classroom for a while now. I used the hour of code last year to kick start my own learning about it, and had some super helpful year 10’s teach me the basics of it.
— Rachel Chisnall (@ibpossum) November 17, 2015
I bought the game (my students laughed at me….) and started having a play. I accidentally killed a lot of chickens, figured out how to put them in a whole and feed them, then build a fence to keep them in and build a little garden (somewhat ironically my own garden got sadly neglected). I have visited some worlds and had a look around in the Molcraft world which is RAD.
At the moment I am exploring two different avenues for using minecraft
The first is my year 10 Science class.
I am really lucky to have a super awesome class of students who are willing to give things ago. To this end, 4 boys (I’m going to try and get some girls involved too but won’t push it if they don’t want to) are building a ‘body’ for the staying alive unit. Other students are making videos, putting together presentations or making some resources for students to learn about – the idea was everyone in the class should become an expert on something that helps us ‘Stay Alive’ that they could present to the class in some way at the end of the topic.
This is the progress they have made for so far (they started with a poop machine but have moved on to what we are learning about)
They have made a heart – the blue is deoxygenated blood, and the other side will be red. When this is live, the ‘liquid’ pulses to simulate a beating heart. They are working on connecting the heart to the lungs via the correct arteries and veins – hence they had the diagram of the heart up next to their model to check they were making it right.
Here is the lung next to the heart. The grey box is air – they couldn’t have it empty so have settled for grey but we wondered about colourless… but then how would you ‘see’ it. And wen this is running, the blood pulses through the arteries and veins. If we get time, there are plans to look at building a model alveoli too.
Because these students are keen and already have the software, setting this up was really easy for me as I didn’t have to do a thing. They have taught me a lot about mods (I still need to learn some more) and also how easy it is to set up a server in a cloud somewhere. At the moment the world lives on a memory stick and on the shared drive at school – but we spent time today talking about how we could set up a school server with the robotics teacher.
The Second is with what Dave Warren has done.
Dave has pretty much built a Chem lab in Minecraft. It is AMAZING. (I think his son helped). I know Dave both through his Chemistry outreach (which Dunedin is soo lucky to have access to) but also through Hands on Science, and we have kind of talked about this project off and on for a while, so it was really really AWESOME to see it for real today.
What he found (I’m sure others might know this but I didn’t) was if you smash up the rocks, or the dirt or whatever using a particular mod, you can break down the substance into the atoms that make it up – ie you can get silicon and oxygen from rocks, or carbon, oxygen and hydrogen from trees. Which you can then manipulate into different molecules.
So they have built this lab to do this in. There are microscopes and all sorts in there. Which you could then make up a quest book and follow some instructions to figure out some cool chemistry
Which is awesome – but so is the ability to just have a play around. We spent some time today talking to the boys about what they would like, and how we could make it manageable for teachers too (I think the students might like to just play, but teachers might like a quest to follow to give some more structure).
There also needs to be a bit of a juggling of some code to make all the molecules we want to (for example, to be able to build ionic compounds so students can ‘see’ the stoichiometyry behind the formulas and equations) – so next week Dave is going to try and get one of his students to come out and have a look with my students and see what they can come up with. Already, my students have had some solutions to a few of the issues Dave had with his set up – such as using an app to combine all the mods into one mod for a more user friendly set up on each machine. He has done all of the ground work, so I am really lucky to be able to jump in and test the proto type 🙂
So my students are going to work with Dave’s students to kick the whole thing off. We talked about servers, to which they replied, oh, that is easy, we already have one set up. But I would still like them to teach me, hopefully I can keep up, and maybe we can make a bigger one.
So at the moment I am feeling really excited about where this might go. I am certainly not ready to roll this out to my whole class, but probably could do so by the time chemistry comes around in term 2. I will also extend the invitation to other interested students and maybe (with the awesome Kevin who teaches robotics and is WAY more skilled in this than me) set up some sort of lunch time coding club. Kevin has some arduino gear that I am really keen to get my hands on as well.
If you are interested in joining in or following our progress, or if you have some tips or ideas, please do get in touch (@ibpossum). In talking to Dave he is looking to spread it round to. I would love any feedback, willing test subjects or technical expertise
Have fun – I sure am 🙂