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Required MinecraftEdu Update and Other Changes

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 14:37:49 -0400

Today we released MinecraftEdu version 1.7.10 (stable build 22). This will be the final version of MinecraftEdu.

All MinecraftEdu users should update to this version to keep your software and services current.

PLEASE NOTE: It is critically important that customers using the MinecraftEdu Hosting Service install this new version on their computers and update their servers immediately. Older versions of MinecraftEdu will no longer be able to connect and play after 30 June 2016.

What’s happening?

In January we announced that Microsoft will be acquiring MinecraftEdu. Starting on April 5th, we will begin the transition process. We want this to go smoothly for everyone, so there are some changes you should know about.

More information will follow from Microsoft explaining how the new Minecraft: Education Edition will work. Go here to opt in to communication from Microsoft.

How will this affect me?

If you are currently using MinecraftEdu, or plan to do so again in the future, here are a number of upcoming changes you can expect. Some of these will happen right away, some will follow over the next few months.

1. MinecraftEdu license sales will end.

You will no longer be able to purchase new copies of MinecraftEdu after 5 April 2016. You can continue to use the licenses and software you have already purchased, and you may download the final 1.7.10 update.

2. MinecraftEdu.com will redirect to education.minecraft.net.

The Microsoft-hosted site, education.minecraft.net, will be the primary destination for all educators interested in Minecraft. A version of the original TeacherGaming site will move to a new address: http://hosting.teachergaming.com

You will need to use this new URL to contact TeacherGaming support, download the MinecraftEdu installer, or to manage cloud hosted servers.

3. Support for some Launcher features will be discontinued.

The Updater, World Library, and the Online Mod downloader will no longer work directly from the buttons in the MinecraftEdu Launcher.

NOTE: You can still download updates, worlds, and mods and apply them manually. Only the automated installations are being discontinued.

What do I need to do?

To ensure that you can continue using MinecraftEdu, it is critical that you update to the new version released today, particularly if you are a user of the MinecraftEdu Classroom Hosting service. Additionally, you may need to update any network firewall exceptions to include “hosting.teachergaming.com”.

Also, please bookmark our new URL: hosting.teachergaming.com for access to MinecraftEdu downloads, server management, and more.

What if I need help?

For the next few months, TeacherGaming will continue to provide basic technical support and installation assistance for current MinecraftEdu users. You can contact us at: support@teachergaming.com

Microsoft will continue to share more details about their own plans for supporting the Minecraft educator community soon.

- The TeacherGaming Team

Minecraft & 3D printing

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 07:35:46 -0500

Hey guys! Our team is working hard on the 1.8.9 update for MinecraftEdu and getting the classroom version of the game up to date with regular Minecraft. On other fronts, we are working on something completely new with our very first own IP title plus we are putting together a strong line-up of new games to bring to schools later this year.

Meanwhile, we wanted to tackle another trendy education topic besides games: 3D printing. With affordable printers making their way to schools, libraries and museums, it’s time we took a look at how Minecraft and 3D printing might benefit from each other. To do that, we brought together two pioneers to discuss the topic: Stephen “Elfie” Elford and Eric Haines.

Introduction

Eric Haines: I’m Eric Haines, a 57-year-old 3D graphics programmer for Autodesk, Inc., living near Boston, a hotbed for 3D printing companies. I’ve been fascinated by 3D printing for a long while, and once I saw Shapeways offer colored sandstone prints I was inspired to write Mineways, a free open-source program for exporting and 3D print Minecraft models. Nowadays I use Mineways as a way for kids to learn about 3D printing, and for art projects such as T2Z, which turns simple animations into 3D prints.

Stephen Elford: I am Stephen Elford, aka EduElfie, a secondary school teacher in Australia. At a technology conference where I was sharing how MinecraftEdu had impacted on my classroom, I saw a 3D printer in action. My first question to the sales rep was “Does it work with Minecaft?” His response was yes, and he showed me a 3D printed creeper. From there I started my own 3D design journey in Minecraft, designing the educational DNA model and the Braille Periodic Table

Photo: 3D printer in action, Wikimedia.

For us newbies, could you explain what 3D printing is all about?

Eric: In my view, “3D printing” is a clever marketing term for “additive manufacturing”. The idea is that a machine adds some material bit by bit, layer by layer, and so form an object. This is quite different than “subtractive manufacturing”, where you carve, drill, saw, or otherwise remove material to form an object. For 3D printing you usually design some object in a 3D modeling program, send it to the 3D printer, and some hours later the real-world object now exists.

There are lots of different processes used to make the object, and about a hundred-odd different materials you can use for prints, ranging from plastic to gold, glass to chocolate. The process is not yet as easy as 2D printing, as you often have to do some work making the print usable, such as cutting off support structures. This situation is similar to how letter writers long ago had to spread sand after writing with a quill pen. Happily, 3D printers have improved considerably in the past few years in terms of speed and ease of use.

Stephen: At its basest level, 3D printing is layers upon layers of 2D ‘images’, this allows people to 3D print objects that are not easily produced by traditional manufacturing methods. I personally see 3D printing as an opportunity! It is a different way of manufacturing, from the home user perspective (industry perspective is not my strong point) it allows people to model and create their own items. These could be children’s toys or even replacement parts for broken items or perhaps just something they want to ‘see’ in real life. People can also download and print designs created by others or tweak them to suit their needs and then print off a custom version. I also see 3D printing also as a relatively cheap and fast way to prototype parts. It is so easy for a user to print a piece, check it suits the purpose and if it does not, make modifications and reprint it until it does suit.

Photo: Mauricio Vives: Eifel Tower in Minecraft

Why should schools be paying attention to 3D printing?

Eric: Everything physical thing we create is designed and manufactured, by definition. 3D printing is one of the easiest ways for students to get exposed to the world of design and manufacturing. The low-end market for printers has made them affordable, a few thousand dollars for a prebuilt, pre-calibrated 3D printer. At the same time, the Maker movement has helped make creating your own things cool, versus simply consuming what others have made. Being able to create, modify, and customize something is a great opportunity to let students be artistic, while also highlighting the relevance of math and science to what they’re making.

One of the nicest elements of 3D printing in particular is that it’s almost unconstrained as to what can be printed. Not entirely unconstrained: you have to worry about wall thickness, you want to avoid fully enclosed hollow areas, etc. However, these constraints are much lighter than most other manufacturing processes, including CNC milling. For the most part, you design it, you can make it. I see the few constraints as learning opportunities for how various materials truly work, a touch of material science.

Stephen: 3D printing is not going away; like paper printing it is more than likely going to end up that every house has a personal 3D printer. This means that the skills of design and also the skills of actually 3D printing designs are going to be household skills. The price of 3D printers has already dropped dramatically, and the technology is ‘moving’ quite fast in terms of new options to print with.

Even the software is getting to the point where it is very usable by people without experience. There are a great many design packages that are free, and simple to use. All of this combines to, what I believe, the fact that schools need to be looking at 3D printing and design as a future key skill required by our current students.

Take this one step further, and if 3D printing is common in the household, it will be equally common in employment, so the skills that 3D printing revolves around will also be employable skills.

How should a school get started with 3D printing? Can you give an example of how 3D printing can be aligned with curriculum?

Eric: I’m definitely no expert in this area, though I occasionally try to help local teachers with advice (I organize a 3D printer meetup in the area). For beginners I’ve created a simple page with links to groups and resources I like. There are plenty of good free guides, modelers, and other software available, as well as forums.

Stephen: I am probably biased here, but before we started at our school I spent a lot of time researching what printer would be best for the school. Should we build our own, or purchase a pre-made one? While making our own printer would have been an awesome project, from my research I found that the quality was a bit variable and took a considerable effort to get ‘right’.

So my first suggestion is to buy a 3D printer, then begin exploring. Offer it to students as an extracurricular activity, just get them designing anything. Minecraft is a great place to start ‘3 dimensional thinking’ as it is a native place for many of our students.

Have a look at competitions if students are struggling with what to design, Thingiverse, Instructables and Pinshape have regular competitions, in many of which 3D printing plays an important role. The design skills that students use to fill these ‘design briefs’ are linked to the technology curriculum. (at least they are in AU)

What’s the connection between Minecraft & 3D printing? What’s the added value of using Minecraft to design 3D models?

Eric: Minecraft is the world’s most popular 3D modeler, bar none. I work for Autodesk, and we’re proud of having developed and sold millions of copies of AutoCAD and other design software for decades. Minecraft’s distribution dwarfs these numbers. It has sold nearly 100 million copies, and every user is a builder - it’s the main part of the game. A large portion, if not a majority, of those users are school children.

This makes Minecraft a natural springboard for getting children involved in other activities. Minecraft has been called “virtual Legos.” Some kids’ eyes light up when they realize they can make their virtual creations real by using 3D printing. If they get into it, they run into the limits of Minecraft as a modeler: it’s a bit tedious to build a large wall, curved objects are problematic, and so on. This provides an opportunity for them to learn about other modelers, either interactive, such as 123D Design, or more mathematical, such as OpenSCAD.

Stephen: Minecraft is a safe and easy place to start thinking and designing in 3D. Well over 100 million users are already 3D designers, many probably just don’t realise it just yet. It is where I began my 3D design and printing journey and has many opportunities for ‘worthwhile’ designs. Like most modeling software it has its limitations, but it is hard to find a more familiar or friendly design space for beginners.

Photo: post-apocalyptic research institute

What’s the potential impact of 3D printing for education? How do you see 3D printing changing the everyday life in schools?

Eric: 3D printing lets people more easily make their own designs real; I find this an empowering concept. I think the impact is potentially large, alongside other Maker activities, high to low: laser cutting, soldering, fiber arts, woodworking, jewelry making, welding, glassworking, and with software and programming folded in. Such areas have a wider use than simply vocational training nowadays. Not everyone will grow up to be a professional designer or craftsperson, nor may get involved as a hobby or creative outlet. However, having an awareness of how all the things we use went through some design and manufacturing process makes us more engaged, less passive, and less willing to settle.

Stephen: In a word “huge”. It has not been long that we have been able take something from our head, through a computer and into the real world as a tangible object. This is a positive gold-mine of opportunities, for students and teachers. Teachers can create custom models to help them teach their students, and due to the relative low cost, students should even be allowed to keep the models. Students can also create their own models to display their understanding of a concept, and use this to help their peers learn.

From personal experience, the ‘rush’ students (and me) get when they can see their design ‘coming to life’ is pretty amazing to witness. It is a very rewarding experience to see something that you ‘made up on the computer’ get created into something you can hold in the real world. Personally I have spent hours upon hours watching my designs get printed, and I see students mesmerised by the actions of our 3D printer all the time.

Castle Chambord by Eric Haines on Sketchfab

Anything else you want to share?

Eric: I’ve enjoyed making Mineways, it’s my way of giving back to the community, alongside the many mod-programmers, animation makers, and countless passionate model creators. If you use Mineways in the classroom or elsewhere, get in touch. Mineways gets about a thousand downloads a day; I believe most users are making animations instead of 3D prints. Personally, I enjoy seeing what people have built in Minecraft and 3D printed, so send me pics!

Stephen: I am happy to say that this year, for the first time, I have a 3D printing class running at my school. We have just begun, and already I am seeing students developing design skills at an astounding rate and designing unique and interesting ‘things’. I am happy for people to contact me if they want more information about 3D printers and how they can be used, @eduelfie or eduelfie@gmail.com are the best places to get me.

To get started with 3D printing in Minecraft, check out the step-by-step guide in the wiki.

MinecraftEdu & Minecraft: Education Edition

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 06:06:26 -0500

As you might have already heard, Microsoft will be acquiring MinecraftEdu. You can read their announcement here. You can find FAQ on our website but here are some quick facts for MinecraftEdu users:

You can keep using MinecraftEdu as long as you like.
MinecraftEdu sales will continue normally for now.
MinecraftEdu owners will be offered one year of the new Education Edition for free.
MinecraftEdu Hosted Servers will keep working, and can still sign up for one.
TeacherGaming won’t be going anywhere and we have new exciting plans for the future!

We wanted to take the opportunity and share our thoughts on the matter.

Ever since Microsoft purchased Mojang in late 2014, we have been working with their team to plan for the future. We are happy that these plans can now be discussed openly. Microsoft will release an entirely new version of the game called Minecraft: Education Edition that will have many features inspired by MinecraftEdu. Microsoft will also use their impressive resources and reach to bring Minecraft into far more classrooms than ever before. We believe that Minecraft’s educational potential has barely been explored and that there are exciting times ahead.

When we started TeacherGaming in 2011, we had no idea where this journey would take us. Our company was founded entirely by teachers and programmers who were determined to make a different kind product for classrooms. We believed that great games could empower teachers to deliver new and meaningful experiences for students. And we were privileged to work with one of the greatest games of all time – Minecraft!

We experimented, we iterated, we sought out early adopters. We listened to teachers, students, parents, administrators, researchers, and more. We owe a debt to all these innovative people who imagined new ways to teach and learn. They helped shape MinecraftEdu into what is has become. We are incredibly proud of the product we created and its impact on students worldwide.
Both TeacherGaming and Microsoft are committed to making this transition a smooth one. In the next several days we will be releasing more information about how this change affects current MinecraftEdu users and what to expect. But we wanted to share some basic facts today.

Anyone who wishes to keep using MinecraftEdu can continue to do so. We recognize that thousands of schools have invested time and resources in developing their MinecraftEdu offerings. The game will continue to function just as it has for the foreseeable future. If you are using our Hosting Service to run your servers in the cloud, everything will keep working. In fact, we’ve been adding features to our hosting service to make it better than ever!
If you choose to migrate from MinecraftEdu to the Minecraft: Education Edition once it becomes available, you’ll receive a free year of service from Microsoft. More details soon.

We hope that people will look back on MinecraftEdu as a kind of laboratory that explored the possibilities of new kinds of learning. We helped map the contours of how a game like Minecraft could affect the future of education. And every day we were inspired by the creative ways that teachers and students used the game. Ultimately, we brought MinecraftEdu to over 10,000 schools in more than 45 countries. It is currently used at every level from kindergarten through graduate school, and it has been applied to nearly all subject areas.

TeacherGaming will carry on with its mission to bring great games to the classroom. We continue to work on KerbalEdu which is based on the award-winning Kerbal Space Program. And we’ll be making other exciting announcements about our portfolio of games soon, too! There is still so much untapped potential for using games to educate, inspire, and connect with students. We can’t wait to continue the journey.

-The TeacherGaming Team

“Keep learning fun!”

MinecraftEdu Featured Educator Jason Wilmot - December 2015

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 08:03:05 -0500

It’s almost time for holidays but before we close the shop for a brief moment before the spring semester, we have one more community highlight to share with you.

Jason Wilmot is a K-5 Computer Science teacher from Lincoln, NE who together with his students won the Code.org $10,000 prize in 2014 using MinecraftEdu & ComputerCraftEdu. Without further ado, let’s hear it from Jason!

Introduction

My name is Jason Wilmot. I am a teacher, writer, traveler and an all around believer in good. I have enjoyed eight amazing years in elementary education, first as a 4th grader teacher and most recently as K-5 Computer Science educator. I am an Apple Distinguished Educator (Class of 2015), a $10,000 recipient from Code.org, a founding board member of The Bay and try to be an overall good neighbor. I have traveled the world, met beautiful people, and have seen the many ways education impacts the heart of communities.I was an early adopter of using Minecraft in the classroom and started using with it in 2013 with the partnership of the University of Nebraska. Since that time, I have used MinecraftEdu with over 800+ K-5 students. All the while, I made a point to write, post and share the stories, thoughts and student creations along the way. Some notable creations were our school-wide Thank You to Code.org, Kindergarten Vines, and a heart-wrenching memorial. I have however, recently taken a leave of absence from the world of education in order to make time for my wife and for our first little Wilmot arriving in January. In the meantime however, I’m still very much a MinecraftEdu fanboy and continue to advocate for its presence in learning environments.

What was your relationship to Minecraft before MinecraftEdu?

Minecraft was first introduced to me in my last year as a 4th grade teacher by Tre-Vawn, a bright-eyed genius who had an imagination too great for anyone his age. He had a knack for thinking things through in a “who’s the teacher, now?” sort of way. He and three of his classmates persuaded me to give it a shot. I downloaded it, put it on the iPads and oh my, the fire spread quickly. Within days, my original Minecrafters were awarded with the uphill task of teaching the next person how to play. And as the school year rolled on, almost every student was vying for time on the iPad, just to play Minecraft.As my last days of that season came to a close, my Minecraft crew talked me into having a BYOD Minecraft Party. We got a hold of as many iPads as we could – which, was not many – and connected over the same servers. And on that fine day, I played Minecraft for the first time. Actually, what I experienced was nothing too impressive to be honest. I initially found Minecraft to be a bit underwhelming. It was blocky. It looked outdated; retro. I didn’t understand why kids – in this day and age - would like something so profoundly simple. But for some reason they did; They loved it. So, I decided that I wanted to know why - and over the next two years I definitely discovered a love for the game firsthand.

How do you use Minecraft or MinecraftEdu in the classroom?

One of my primary motivations for the using MinecraftEdu was to learn how to further embedded technology into education. However, it was a splash deeper than that – I didn’t just want to sprinkle in techy gadgets or electronic worksheets – I wanted to find where curriculum, creativity and student desires could meet. Maybe I’m old skool, new school, or something in the realm of other – but as an educator, what I hold onto more than anything else is this: learning must be meaningful, and it must be relevant. That means content must be presented in real world ways. It should make sense and whenever possible it should be simulated, not just presented in information-only forms.Minecraft was the vehicle for this. We have learned about digital citizenship, computational thinking and connected everyday classroom curriculum into student creations. Kids have solved math problems, created digital dioramas, and have built projects like the Great Wall of China, the Orphan Train, our solar system, water conservation tutorials, and everything in between. We have simulated learning goals from Language Arts, Junior Achievement and extracurricular activities. Really, I could keep going, but I think you get point: with MinecraftEdu the possibilities are endless.

What were some of the challenges in getting started?

At the time, getting started with MinecraftEdu held a huge learning curve. I learned about servers, mods, installation - all unfamiliar territory. Additionally, there was the all import aspect of weaving in pedagogy, outcomes and student voice. On top of all that, there were parents to convince, peer educators to persuade, and the overall pressure that comes with pioneering anything new. All in all, It was a perfect storm of discovery, opportunity, and a real-world learning problem solving.Yet the most challenging aspect of getting started was pushing past the traditional mindset of what learning environments can look like. Maybe I’m old skool, new school, or something in the realm of other – but as an educator, what I hold onto more than anything else is this: learning must be meaningful, and it must be relevant. That means content must be presented in real world ways. It should make sense and whenever possible it should be simulated, not just presented in information-only forms.Our job as educators is not to provide the dots, but to facilitate the connecting of dots. This means taking student experiences and building into that specific knowledge base. It means getting to know the students on an individual basis. It’s discovering what they find interesting, what they believe about the world, and where they find significance. And for all these things – for this affinity space – the best place to start was Minecraft.

How have your students responded? Do you have a specific success story?

Out of all the success stories, my favorite memory was our Hour of Code last November. Weeks prior to the Hour of Code, we shifted our focus to discuss programs, loops and repeat features built within coding languages. We had some unplugged coding activities like using x and y coordinates to program movements, and we conjured up some pretty crazy whole-class dances with custom moves (our algorithms) and loops. By the time the weeklong Hour of Code rolled around, the students were ready to take all that we had learned and use it within MinecraftEdu. For our Hour of Code, we used a Minecraft mod called ComputerCraft. With this Logo Turtle-based mod (ComputerCraft), students programed their own ideas and even recorded them on a sheet of paper - making the learning more concrete and enabling them to program at home without a computer. Students used drag and drop movements and actions so that the turtles mined into the earth, built stairways into the sky, and dug a series of holes only to have the turtle turn around and fill them back in. One student programed a hide-and-go seek turtle, another had the turtle build a rectangular house foundation, while another even synced up their turtle to drop materials onto a pressure plate which activated a redstone circuit with fireworks. On top of all of that, at the end of the of the week I got to surprise our entire staff and students with a $10,000 check from Code.org - allocated to be spent on even more computer science goodies and iPads for the regular classroom teachers. It was a phenomenal moment in my mind and a moment I’ll cherish far into the future.

What is the future of Minecraft in your classroom?

As I mentioned earlier, I have recently take a leave of absence from my classroom, nonetheless I’ve stayed involved in side projects like helping lead a Minecraft summer club. Additionally, I recently finished writing a chapter contribution on Minecraft for a soon-to-be published piece on Gamificaiton. Lastly, I’ve have gotten to help connect some pretty cool individuals who are currently developing a mod with loads of potential.

Do you have any advice for teachers starting out, or who are already working with MinecraftEdu?

My advice to any teacher is to share what your kids are creating in class! Let’s face it: there is an uphill battle when it comes to convincing others of the educational benefits of MinecraftEdu - merely because it’s a ‘game.’ Nonetheless, my favorite way to overcome this mindset is simply by sharing what the kids are doing and creating to demonstrate their understanding. So what are the best ways to share? I’ve thoroughly enjoyed using Vine, Twitter and the hashtag #minecraftedu. However, there are also kid-friendly hubs like Creatubbles.com where students can store screenshots and share them in a kid-friendly community. Additionally, you could use Google Classroom or Edmodo, but most importantly it’s all about showcasing what kids are doing and learning..

Would you like other educators to contact you about your experiences?

I love connecting with other educators and talking Minecraft. I’ve spent a lot of time blogging my experiences, creating videos tutorials and writing out processes to help more educators hop on board the MinecraftEdu train. If you want to check out my blog, it can be found at JasonWilmot.com/minecraft. There you can see our classroom creations, view our Vines, videos and learn more about how I’ve used MinecraftEdu in the classroom. You can also reach me on Twitter at @mrjasonwilmot.

MinecraftEdu Featured Educator Francisco Tupy - November 2015

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 07:49:16 -0500

The weather is getting chillier and days are getting shorter. Yep, it’s a sure sign that we’re drawing closer to winter. Let’s take a short break from the autumn weather and take a field trip to warm Brazil where Francisco Tupy, our featured educator of November 2015 resides.

Francisco is the founder of one of the largest educational Minecraft communities out there - the Portuguese-speaking Minecraft Skool. He’s also an evangelist of using games in education and practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu in his spare time. Let’s jump right in and give the stage to Francisco!

(editor’s note: since English isn’t Francisco’s first language we’ve made some minor changes to make it easier to grasp his meaning)

Introduction

My name is Francisco Tupy and I was born and raised in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Geography. Also, I have a Master and a Doctoral degree from ECA/USP with an emphasis on Video Games (for my Masters I studied Street Fighter and for my PhD I’m studying Minecraft).

I have been a teacher for 11 years. I taught at levels from elementary to graduate.

Today I work as an Educational Technology teacher and I am in charge of the Games Workshop at the Visconde de Porto Seguro School. Recently I went to UCSB / Krishnamurti Foundation of America (California) to study teaching and learning processes.

I’m one of the first educators in Brazil to take a evangelist position about Games and Education. These recent years I have been responsible for hundreds of Lectures and Interviews in Brazil and other countries of the world (e.g. United States, Canada, Vietnam, Peru, Colombia, India & Israel.) I won some awards, for example: Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert (with the Minecraft Learning Project) and together with a student we have won honorable mention in Comkids Prix Jeunesse Ibero-American.

When I’m in my spare time I practice Brazilian jiu-jitsu, skateboarding and collect comics.

What was your relationship to Minecraft before MinecraftEdu?

I knew Minecraft through the gaming community. I play a lot of games (digital and analog), so when I saw a tweet right at the game’s release and thought: “I NEED PLAY THIS”. Every time when I have access to new game I ask to myself: “how can I use this game in my classes?”. With Minecraft it was no different, since the first time I wanted to use it as a educational material.

How do you use Minecraft or MinecraftEdu in the classroom?

Basically I use the game in two ways: as a support for game design development practices and to articulate projects related to discipline content.

Design development practices:

a) use Creative mode to build and prototype analog games
b) make collective constructions dividing duties and functions
c) create agile management routines so that they can communicate, identify gaps and thus student train principles of agile management
d) use the turtle block to introduce code, customizing prompts, revealing encryptions that I create to give students to solve and activities related to computational thinking.

Discipline content:

we can create instances of field work in the virtual world, for example, a location that will visit or any activity as archaeological dig, then prepare the world, the activities of rubric and give to the students that need to be done. Furthermore, we use all the tools, for example “how to talk in chat with other languages” or apply concepts of a sustainable home or even a contraption with robotics principles.

We focus on 21st century skills and competencies and the pedagogy of creating innovative minds.

And in addition we use other programs such as OneNote, Excel, Power Point, Sway, for example. We appropriate the interest that young people have about Minecraft and give them activities so that they can master basic concepts of technology.

How have your students responded? Do you have a specific success story?

Students are of course curious and motivated. They arrive in the classroom in a euphoric state, wanting to do and show a lot. Students contribute much to class, you can learn from them, so we propose activities where everyone can get to the final result of the way they want. The idea is that it can be offered to students of different experience levels. Such practices must first stimulate curiosity about vocational issues, technological, aesthetic and cultural.

A student project about Management processes in Collective constructions in Minecraft. Students are planning how to organize and manage the implementation of the project in Minecraft. Excel in this case is a management tool, the follow-up questions were developed by the students themselves: Task, Who performs, Status and comments. Construction plan of the castle was done in Excel. Castle was printed in 3D printer.

A video about the project:

What is the future of Minecraft in your classroom?

I believe that we still do not get anywhere near the potential that Minecraft affords and what can achieved in the classroom. Indeed the role of students is critical because MinecraftEdu allows autonomy and leadership of students and thus there is always an exchange of knowledge. Students always help and suggest approaches for optimizing the techniques employed.

In particular, I’m always thinking and planning how to create a school within the Minecraft, just like Cloud School. Where you can have an entire academic development from basic to technical training within the Minecraft, so the game can help a lot more to educate in many parts of the world (especially in hard to reach places) and revolutionize forever education as humanity really needs.

Do you have any advice for teachers starting out, or who are already working with MinecraftEdu?

MinecraftEdu is an excellent tool to be able to manage activities in Minecraft in the classroom. So the best thing a teacher has to do is: play, use, study and understand how to teach with the tools that MinecraftEdu offer. I can tell by my own experience, server management functions available expand the educational possibilities in the classroom, but to achieve this goal it is essential to know how to operate the game.

Would you like other educators to contact you about your experiences?

Yes. I´m a Minecraft evangelist, the Creeper Teacher lol.

My community is Minecraft Skool, I publish ideas on how to use Minecraft in the classroom and also share works by users and teachers around the world.

My e-mail is franciscotupy@outlook.com.

I offer myself to make virtual conferences, trainings, give lectures, speak with teachers and students about Minecraft and MinecraftEdu.

It is an honor to contribute, I believe that we all have a mission and dharma; in my life this is my mission. I am here to be able to help and can contribute.

Recently I created a server to train teachers, it is down for maintenance, but please, anyone interested should send an e-mail.

Twitter Roundup - 10/21/15

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 09:30:21 -0400

New school year is well underway and we’re excited to see many new schools and teachers pick up the game and introduce it to their classrooms. Fortunately, many people have been active so we have loads of good ideas and happy moments to share. It’s also a great chance to find new inspiring educators to follow. Let’s jump right in!

Kicking off our round is a tweet from MeganAnn Cappuccino showing her fourth grade students studying the phases of moon in Minecraft:

@MinecraftEdu It’s a great day to be a 4th grader! Moon phases in #minecraft!!! @ElisaJannes @ImmersiveMind #STEAM pic.twitter.com/gRNc52HsYE
— MeganAnn Cappuccino (@MCapp1012)
October 2, 2015

What an innovative way to get closer to the celestial bodies, thanks for sharing!

Next up, year 1 class at Merrylands East Public School in Sydney, Australia remind us that it’s great to blend learning between digital and physical classrooms. Imagine the time and effort it took to craft that creeper!

Our #GiantCreeper is staring to look awesome! #MinecraftEdu: pic.twitter.com/tRKH8lxU4X
— 1L MEPS (@Lionfish1L)
September 8, 2015

Awesome (albeit a bit intimidating) job!

Tutorial world is a great place to get started, for both teachers and students. Jennifer Curnow tweeted about introducing a new group of students to the game:

MinecraftEdu gives “Eyes on Teacher” new meaning. Students mentoring each other through a tutorial = collaboration. pic.twitter.com/0e6MZNWwwV
— Jennifer Curnow (@GESCurnow)
September 5, 2015

As a teacher, harnessing the students’ expertise through peer learning is a great tool and help!

We see a lot of examples of using MinecraftEdu with STEM subjects but @Irvspanish reminds that MinecraftEdu is a great way to teach foreign languages as well:

#MinecraftEdu NPC mods and #SecondLanguage learning are a perfect match! My tutorial https://t.co/NE85eWMCjI pic.twitter.com/Yik6VWANom
— Irvspanish (@irvspanish)
October 15, 2015

Be sure to check out his Youtube-channel for more great tips on using the game in second language teaching!

It’s not only the students who are learning with MinecraftEdu; Rebecca Bennett tweets about teachers taking their first steps in the game, led by Lucas Gillispie:

CES teachers rock #MinecraftEDU training!Thx @lucasgillispie #ActAs1CES #SCSed pic.twitter.com/4voOVOO3nV
— Rebecca Bennett (@RBennettSLM)
October 19, 2015

Pro tip: hit F11 to make the game fullscreen! Thanks for sharing!

Karen Slaton’s students explore the universe with Galacticraft mod:

Galacticraft and #MinecraftEDU. My Ss were SO excited to launch their rockets to the moon! #connect2psd pic.twitter.com/DyUTeZvzTG
— Karen Slaton (@techkaren)
October 17, 2015

Mods are a great way to enhance the gaming experience but be careful when adding them as they don’t always play nice. If your students were over the Moon (pun intended) about launching rockets in Minecraft, you should definitely check out KerbalEdu as well!

Back on Earth, Briana Allen and her students have been using MinecraftEdu to create awesome pixel art:

Today’s challenge? Pixel Art! One Ss created a smiley face w/redstone lantern blinky eyes! #BeZell #MinecraftEdu pic.twitter.com/Ku5FxuibFO
— Briana Allen (@techeduk8r)
October 15, 2015

How’s that for creativity? I can hardly doodle a Minecraft block and some people can use redstone to draw in the game? Thanks for the share!

Meanwhile, we’ve been busy at TeacherGaming office as well. We’ve been preparing a board game to go with ComputerCraftEdu where you can put your Papercraft Turtles to good use:

#codeEU week! We have a board game prototype too. ‘Realease’ before #HourOfCode. #MinecraftEdu #CCEdu pic.twitter.com/RUwhlkmvsb
— Santeri Koivisto (@Aalvisto)
October 12, 2015

If you got interested, you can read more about our plans in our editorial post from last month. Be sure to stay tuned!

That’s it for this week! Keep the tweets coming and follow the hashtag #MinecraftEdu on Twitter.

Editorial: Internship at TeacherGaming

Fri, 09 Oct 2015 17:21:04 -0400

Ever wondered what’s it like to work at TeacherGaming? The company is soon reaching pre-school age so a certain culture has formed over the years. To give you an idea, we asked one of our most recent team members, Raido Roomets to reflect back on his internship at the company.

Day 141 of the internship.

They promised me I could go home soon.

Please send supplies.

Okay, all joking aside, hello everyone! My name is Raido and I’m the new face in the TeacherGaming team. I currently study software engineering at Tampere University of Applied Sciences but hopefully not for long. No, I’m not going to drop out and become the next Bill Gates, I hope to graduate in 8 months. My studies include a mandatory 5 months of practical training or internship (whichever you want to call it) and that’s how I ended up contacting TeacherGaming and the rest you might have already guessed since I’m writing this post (I was hired if you didn’t guess).

To be completely honest with you I was terrified when I started my internship. The crew behind MinecraftEdu and KerbalEdu had been working together for a long time already and based on what I had heard the programmers here are pretty incredible and had a huge amount of experience. I wasn’t really sure how much I could contribute and if I had any value for the company but you never really get anywhere by not trying so it was time to just buckle up and do my best.

Right from the beginning it was clear that TeacherGaming is a company made by its employees. Everyone is valued as part of the team and whatever crazy idea you get you should throw it out there - someone will most likely catch it and suddenly we end up doing it. My first assignment was to work on the website for “soon to be released” (now released) modification ComputerCraftEdu and I was somewhat stunned by the idea that I was given complete freedom to do what I wish with the page. It showed me that I’m trusted to do my job and to do it the best I can which made me want to go deeper into the web design which I hadn’t done almost at all previously and learn all I can. The first prototype of the final page was actually done around midnight on Wednesday after I ended up hating all the previous ideas I had and suddenly had an inspiration. After that night I finally understood that it’s not about the office hours or working from eight to five - it’s about getting your job done in whichever way works for you.

Luckily I was able to see pretty much everything TeacherGaming has to offer during my internship. We went to build catapults with the co-workers, release new content, sit around doing nothing while at work, eat cake, fight with code and bugs and most of all laugh like crazy. I worked on ComputerCraftEdu website, KerbalEdu website, paper turtle editor for web, EU CodeWeek website and lesson planner for KerbalEdu. I’m not even joking when I say that no day was like previous one.

Senior team members working on their catapult.

So why am I writing about my internship? Because this is a special week for TeacherGaming since there are four new interns starting at the same time right now. This is actually pretty huge deal - it’s almost a 50% increase to our current staff! And why do we have so many people starting at the same time? Well, I’m pretty sure there will be teasers and leaked information in near future but let’s just say we have started working on something new - something big. So if you haven’t started following us in social media this is the time to do it! Head out to Twitter or Facebook, follow us and you’ll be among the first to know what this crazy bunch is up to next.

In other news, our event for the EU CodeWeek starts next week and it will be awesome! People have been signing up from all over Finland so if you happen to be around do pop in and see what’s going on. All the information you need will be available at http://codeweek.computercraftedu.com . KerbalEdu had a new website released a few weeks ago and what’s more important - Earth History Campaign had first 4 missions released so remember to go and check them out! The missions can be downloaded or launched directly from the website or from the Mission Library. Hopefully you like the missions since we are planning on releasing a fistful more in the coming months.

Thanks for your time and for reading this wall of text. Have a nice October, enjoy the best season of the year and remember to keep playing!

- Raido @RaidoRts

MinecraftEdu Featured Educator Diane Main - October 2015

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 06:44:01 -0400

Programming is making its way to schools around the world and there’s an authentic need for diverse ways to introduce computational thinking and coding to a whole generation, not just us geeky types. Diane has found successful ways to introduce the topic to students who previously didn’t consider themselves equipped for programming. Be sure to follow Diane through social media to see how this years classes use MinecraftEdu!

Introduction

My name is Diane Main, and I am Director of Learning, Innovation and Design (9-12) at The Harker School in San Jose, California, USA. I also teach a computer science class called Digital World and am an advisor to 8 students who are currently in grade 10. I began my career in New Jersey in 1992, and moved to California in 1997. This is my twenty-third year in teaching.

What was your relationship to Minecraft before MinecraftEdu?

I had really only “sort of” heard of Minecraft, and I knew it was a video game, when one of my chemistry teachers asked me if a student could turn in a project to her he had done in Minecraft. I said “Yes. And now let me go find out what Minecraft is.” And then, in my initial searching, I found MinecraftEdu and immediately wanted to try it for myself. A very long time ago, when I was in high school and college, I was a gamer. I played computer role playing games, such as Origin’s Ultima series. I also used to play RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons when I was younger. But I have not had very much time in recent years to devote to gaming (analog or digital). MinecraftEdu has reawakened the gamer in me, and my primary focus as an educational technologist has become the role of motivation and engagement in learning, especially GBL (game-based learning).

How do you use Minecraft or MinecraftEdu in the classroom?

The students who enroll in Digital World do so to fulfill our school’s requirement of one semester of Computer Science. Most students take Programming or Advanced Programming, and some choose to go on to AP CS and beyond. (We have many CS electives.) But my students don’t see themselves as a good fit for the Programming class. So we do three projects in MinecraftEdu during the course of the semester, in addition to many other projects and assignments outside the game. The first is that the students each teach a “lesson” in MinecraftEdu, which is something a player would want to know for Survival Mode. They have a lot of things they need to explain about their lessons, and then I use examples from their lessons to illustrate concepts from Computer Science, such as program, algorithm, subroutine, conditional statement, loop, iteration, array, and abstraction. Later in the semester, my students return to MinecraftEdu for a design thinking project in Creative Mode. Each student is tasked with being a client, a designer, and an independent inspector. With a literature tie-in to the children’s book Andrew Henry’s Meadow, I have the students interview their clients, and then build houses to suit their clients’ needs and preferences. Finally, after using Kodable and CodeMonkey as game-based programming tools, we return to MinecraftEdu and use the ComputerCraftEdu mod to program turtle robots. I’m excited to try the newest version of this mod this semester, as it has a lot of features my former students wished it had before. In addition to these projects, we also have a number of written assignments that have students reflecting on their game play. We study John Keller’s ARCS model of motivation as well as the Bartle Test of Gamer Personality, and we watch a video showing how John Miller’s students use MinecraftEdu to build the ancient Chinese city of Chang An. My students write as a method of reflection on their learning and experiences.

What were some of the challenges in getting started?

As I am the person at my campus responsible for helping teachers try new things, I didn’t really get much pushback, primarily because I chose to take the “seek forgiveness rather than ask permission” route. Once I decided to use MinecraftEdu with my class, though, I did involve my boss and the division head for my campus, as well as the Computer Science department chair, so they would all know what I was experimenting with. I initially ran the servertool on my laptop during class, playing in multiplayer with my students on the same computer. Then, one of our network administrators, who is also a gamer and who is involved with our robotics team and helping me with some of my class activities, helped me set up an online server so my students could continue their work online from home on their laptops. This opened up many new opportunities and allowed me to expand my use of MinecraftEdu in class. He later set up a second partition so I could run two servers at once, which has come in very handy. Our school is very supportive of the use of technology for learning, so I have had a great experience.

How have your students responded? Do you have a specific success story?

Reactions have been mixed, initially. Some students can’t wait until we use MinecraftEdu, because they have played Minecraft before. Common among my female students has been the “my little brother plays Minecraft” comment with a mild tone of disgust. However, even the student who told me she wouldn’t like it but would do what she was told ended up loving MinecraftEdu. The secret there? She loves animals. At first, she was a little intimidated and even turned off by the idea of using a video game in class. Not all students play video games, and that is totally okay. But when she discovered animals in Minecraft, and chose to do her Minecraft lesson project on breeding and raising livestock for food and other resources, she was hooked. And then someone else taught us how to ride horses, and this one student who didn’t want to play Minecraft actually rode off into the sunset at the end of class. “Come back!” I called to her. “Noooooooo!!!!!…..” she replied. And then the bell rang to end class.

Here is this semester’s class, posing for our group picture:

And here is a short video of the same group, working on the “building shapes” portion of the MinecraftEdu Tutorial World:

(The video begins with me saying, “No, you may not keep the bat.” because Kailee had just asked if she could keep it.)

What is the future of Minecraft in your classroom?

Student engagement has always been a primary concern of mine when designing instruction, but increasingly so in the past five to ten years. As I have matured as an educator, and become a parent myself, I have viewed teaching and learning through several new lenses. With MinecraftEdu, I don’t have to worry about student engagement. When students have goals and tasks to accomplish, they are motivated. And also, there is a lot about the game itself that students find engaging enough to pursue outside of our curricular goals. Given that my course lasts only one semester and I have a lot to cover, I don’t know if I will do MORE in MinecraftEdu for now, though I am always revising what I’m currently doing. However, I also share GBL and MinecraftEdu specifically with other teachers, both at my school and around the world. So I will continue to do that, because I believe that student engagement should be foremost in the mind of anyone who is designing instruction and learning experiences.

Do you have any advice for teachers starting out, or who are already working with MinecraftEdu?

The advice I always give to anyone just starting to explore GBL is to get in the game with the kids and just play. Figure out how it works, and more importantly, see how much the kids can already teach you. Ask them questions about their own game play. Allow them to showcase their expertise. Even with students who have never played before, you will find that they pick up on things very quickly, and they are less afraid than adults to take risks and just “see what happens.” For those who are already working with MinecraftEdu, please share your experiences, both positive and challenging. We learn from one another, and we gain strength and insight from what others have tried, whether it has worked well or not. If you’re creating content, please share it. If you’ve come up with a great idea for using the game in a particular subject area, please begin a discussion about it online. You never know how much you can help someone else just by sharing.

Would you like other educators to contact you about your experiences?

I’m very easy to find online. My website is www.dianemain.com and my blog is originalgeek.blogspot.com. I am on Twitter at @dowbiggin. I really enjoy sharing and hearing from others. I also have some videos on my YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/DianeMain

Ready, Set, Code!

Fri, 11 Sep 2015 08:35:15 -0400

This week’s editorial post comes from our CEO, Santeri Koivisto

Europe Code Week and Hour of Code are fast approaching - we are preparing some things to share!

Coding has become a focus in schools over the past two years, but it is needless to say that in many places, teaching coding is a complex problem. It is not simple here at TeacherGaming either, but we are testing new kinds of approaches to teaching computational thinking, and we’d like to invite our community to try them too.

This past June, TeacherGaming launched our own Minecraft / MinecraftEdu coding project called ComputerCraftEdu based on the highly popular ComputerCraft mod made by Dan200. It’s available for free to all Minecraft users, and also included in the newest builds of MinecraftEdu (so your school may already have it installed). More info about what ComputerCraftEdu (CCEdu) is can be found by visiting: www.computercraftedu.com.

The focus on how TG wants to introduce coding has from the start been about making coding useful in places where young people already spend time, like Minecraft. Also we want to make sure it is available and compelling outside of just school.

This autumn the first major ’coding event’ is the Europe Code Week. If you haven’t heard of it, visit http://codeweek.eu. Between the 10th and the 16th of October, all throughout Europe small events are happening where people, regardless of their age, background or skill level, can come together and try coding. Of course it is important for us to contribute something! We are a company known for doing a few unorthodox things, like our workshop tours.

For #codeEU week we are setting up a pop-up shop in Tampere, Finland with the local youth department. Everyone can participate, but couple of days during the week are dedicated for a younger audience. We are also working with a local school called Lamminpään koulu to pilot our workshops and see if resonates with students.

But our #codeEu week offering is not only for the people that have access to our fair city, we are putting all kinds of things online starting from the mod and map itself we are using. So please visit computercraftedu.com to see what we’ve been up to! for more targeted #codeEU information and resources visit codeweek.computercraftedu.com.

One of the coolest things coming up there is a printable ComputerCraftEdu based BOARD GAME that will be available to all. It is meant to work as a standalone game for people who are not interested in Minecraft or just don’t have access to CCEdu itself, but it also serves as a warmup for using the core CCEdu and ’digging’ into programming the turtles themselves.

All of this won’t stop at #codeEU week, but will carry on for Hour of Code later this year. The plan is that all good ideas gathered during #codeEu week will be available for all people around the world for Hour of Code activities. There will also be a more ’advanced’ version of our board game available for older players.

The #codeEU site will transform into Hour of Code site after the coding week and will once more hold all the information and activities we offer. Plan is to offer online seminars, free of charge, before the Hour of Code week to introduce you (teacher, parent, educator and / or person interested in coding and / or teaching coding) to how you can approach CCEdu yourself or with your group of learners. These will most likely be offered over Twitch. More info soon!

How about taking this into even more ’grand’ scale? Why not? Let’s lean forward and build a network that creates similar pop-up events that we can replicate this year in Finland. So here’s the plan:

Code Week - One prototype pop-up shop in Tampere

Hour of Code week - Prototype network around Finland with strong concept and structure

Code Week + Hour of Code 2016 - A global network of passionate people sharing coding + Minecraft love around the world with a well tested concept

Are you with us? Let’s do it!

Now back to the concept building table. Board game proto was just tested with the TG play test group and they found it a lot of fun. Great news!

More info soon! Please follow #CCEdu hashtag for most frequent updates and as always, keep sharing your own ideas with #MinecraftEdu.

Parhain terveisin (=Best regards)

- Santeri @Aalvisto

MinecraftEdu Featured Educator André Chercka - September 2015

Mon, 24 Aug 2015 10:26:21 -0400

Welcome back from Summer Break! Kicking off this school year we are featuring our first European educator, André Chercka from Denmark. André is another of our early adopters to using MinecraftEdu in the classroom. André has used MinecraftEdu for multiple topics, including collaborative urban planning, sustainability, and collaborative building projects that include primary research. We look forward to seeing what kind of new and exciting projects that André is working on with his students, and we are proud to feature him this month.

Introduction

Hi! I’m André and I teach at Glostrup Albertslund Produktionshøjskole. Here students engage in a workshop based setting with a competence based approach to learning. My workshop is The Gameworkshop, and here students get to develop skill sets around playing, making and communicating about games. I have a background as a teacher in danish elementary school and it was here I began tinkering with games in my maths lessons. Actually, my first attempts with game based learning(GBL) were with Battlefield 2!

At the moment I don’t teach in a specific subject, as our work is purely project based. We have two tracks which we work on: One where students work on individual projects, and the other where we work on a common project. Our core production at The Gameworkshop is to develop game content for education and to serve as a testbed for different game based projects. Our approach can be summed up in the words “Play, Make, Share”.

Playing is where the tinkering, experimentation and collaborative energy cause new ideas, knowledge and relations to emerge. Making is the process of giving structure to these discoveries and forming into relevant concepts. And sharing is where the production is presented in its intended context.

Through the last few years we have seen that students are highly competent in many areas and still have their curiosity intact. For many this has been kindled by their passion for games - mainly computer games. We seek to take all their experience and knowledge from games and use this as a springboard into developing new competencies. This last year, for example, I have had three students learn programming by themselves - two did this using Computercraft.

What was your relationship to Minecraft before MinecraftEdu?

I first noticed Minecraft being played at my school during a break. This must have been around fall 2010. I didn’t give it much attention then, but I noticed that my students were buddy gaming, with 2-3 guys huddled up around a computer. A year later I was running a maths course, and here I also had a student playing Minecraft in his breaks. When I saw this, I decided to test the game in some of my lessons, and this is where it all began for me.

Around the same time I was at a GBL conference where I did a pitch on Minecraft in maths, and here I was given a tip on a Finnish/American project called MinecraftEdu. Since then I started using Edu in many courses, and and keeping track of my experiences on my blog.

How do they use Minecraft or MinecraftEdu in the classroom?

I think my angle on MinecraftEdu has been slightly different than many other teachers. When I started out I was convinced that this Minecraft had great potential and I could see that my students were lead users. So one of my objectives became getting my students to teach professionals how Minecraft worked. We organized an open workshop and sent out invitations in our network. This resulted in a full week of workshops, where teachers, librarians, professors and consultants came to see our students present the game.

During the first years we were running more of a learning lab, than a classroom. A lab - in the sense that I was experimenting with different methods and uses of the game, while getting constant feedback from my students. We also had workshops, where we invited teams of teachers with their students to test some of the learning scenarios we had set up. For us the learning was in the process of making a learning scenario.

Firstly, we would have to consider the content and the target age group. Then we would have to design a scenario, while still keeping it to a gaming experience. This has been one of my primary guidelines - that we had to use game mechanics to carry the learning. The building of scenarios has contained a wealth of learning experiences. We have researched, developed concepts, organized information, designed 3D content, tested and re-iterated and delivered our productions to our target users. Through these projects we have developed innovative competency and skills in problem solving.

What were some of the challenges in getting started?

I have enjoyed a lot of freedom in my teaching practice and a leadership that had confidence in my choices. And when leadership and colleagues have seen students engaged in learning with games it has confirmed that there is something here worth developing.

How have your students responded? Do you have a specific success story?

There are many stories of overwhelming positive student responses. Generally I have seen my students become more engaged in subjects and workforms that would be harder to approach if we did not work in games. A good example of this is a project we did for our local municpality. The goal was to make Minecraft a platform for urban development, and at the same time make this work as an multi-disciplinary learning arena.

Initially, it began when the mayor of the municipalty, saw “Chasing Community”, which we built for the Danish social housing sector and the Danish Architecture Centre. Their goal was to use Minecraft as the medium for kids to express what their visions for their local neighbourhoods were. In the end of project students were invited to a conference where policy makers would come and listen to 5th grade kids present their ideas in Minecraft.

Creating this scenario was quite a daunting task, since we had no experience with urban planning or working with the Denmark in 1:1 map. Most of our preparation was experimenting with the map and doing urban planning ourselves. From our findings we began to design a user experience based on a rough lesson plan that I had made. It became clear to me that urban planning is a perfect theme for a STEAM based project - especially around the subject of sustainability. Along with this there are many angles on social studies. I think its interesting to explore how design in architecture expressses the values of a society - and this is where Minecraft becomes a great stage for teachers to put these questions into perspective.

What is the future of Minecraft in your classroom?

With the projects we have completed through these last years, we have built up quite a few learning scenarios, that deserve to be made available to a larger segment of educators - so this is what we would like to work on. At the moment our worlds have been shared in a danish google group along with some basic teacher instructions. We would like to develop the Minecraft based scenarios so teachers with ease can bring the scenarios - or parts of them into their classrooms.

One of the most valuable experiences that we have right now, is the awareness of which pedagogical approach makes Minecraft work as a learning platform. Put simply, its what happens before and after gameplay, that makes the difference in creating a learning transaction with the students. The Minecraft world in itself doesn’t make learning happen the way we need it to happen in school. It takes a teacher to prepare students for a challenge, so they make conscious and qualified choices while playing. After gameplay, students need to reflect on what they have done in game and convert this into real world experience - a transfer of knowledge.

I would like to see Minecraft lessons become far more accessible than they are now. In order to do this I think we need to put ourselves in the teachers place. They consider curricular goals, time usage and preparation time before they start out. So these are some of the parameters we want to consider when we think about developing content for teachers.

This fall we will be working with an online publishing company, in developing one of our worlds for wider distribution. Most of our work will go into developing lesson plans and student material, that will give teachers a structure to work from.

Do you have any advice for teachers starting out, or who are already working with MinecraftEdu?

For teachers starting out, I heard Santeri(TG CEO) say - “Start simple”, I think thats an excellent piece of advice.

My first advice is read the article, “8 ways Minecraft works on your brain”, by Dean Groom. This really gave me a clear vision of how learning takes place in Minecraft.

My second advice would be to use Minecraft as a game. As far as my experience goes Minecraft is an ideal platform for learning engines like interactions, challenges and experimentation. As teachers, we can have a tendency to see games as a new way to “sugar coat” more content. The times that I have done this have shown that Minecrafts’ strength is not as a virtual exercise book.

If you would like to contact André about his experiences, you can reach him with the following methods.

Twitter: @vexmand

M: privatepayne(at)gmail.com

Blog: gamebased.tumblr.com

gameworkshop.dk

News and Updates 8/18/2015

Tue, 18 Aug 2015 13:42:00 -0400

We are excited and ready to kick-off another successful school year! Here are instructions on how you can get prepared.

ComputerCraftEdu

ComputerCraftEdu is a new and exciting way to teach coding. We would love to know what activities have you built around the mod or what kind of programs you and your student masterminds have created. We encourage you to upload your coding activities to our World Library and feel free to share your experiences on Twitter (#CCEdu & #MinecraftEdu)!

If you still haven’t tried CCEdu, head to our ComputerCraftEdu website to get it! It is free and compatible with MinecraftEdu and regular Minecraft.

Back to school!

Soon schools around the world will kick off and we will be flooded with orders and emails. Avoid the traffic and order your MinecraftEdu & KerbalEdu licenses before your academic year starts!

You can place an order at our website: (www.minecraftedu.com/purchase). After placing the order through the website, the order goes in for processing and eligibility verification. Please use an official email of the organisation you are ordering MinecraftEdu for.

Orders can be placed at: (www.kerbaledu.com/purchase). It’s not too late to take advantage of KerbalEdu summer sale that is available until 31st of August 2015. To get KerbalEdu 25-pack for only $199.99 enter TGSUMMER2015 to the additional information / comments section when placing the order.

KerbalEdu: Earth History Campaign

The development for Earth History Campaign (EHC) is well on its way! EHC is a free educational tutorial for KerbalEdu. We plan to release the campaign gradually this fall. The Earth History Campaign will be released in several separate missions. Each mission contains specific learning goals, which will teach your students gameplay mechanics, physics theories and history of space exploration. Put together these missions will construct a clear historical timeline, fluent tutorial to the game, progressively challenging physics concepts and a fun gaming experience - perfect for science and engineering classes!

News and Updates 7/13/2015

Mon, 13 Jul 2015 14:50:26 -0400

Welcome to the July news and updates! This time ComputerCraftEdu stole the headlines, but we also released a new stable build and went to Minecon!

ComputerCraftEdu

ComputerCraftEdu brings programmable turtle robots to Minecraft! It is a free mod available to all MinecraftEdu and regular Minecraft players. CCEdu is an excellent tool to learn coding and with it your students will be engaged to find ways to use turtles to automate and extend their usual Minecraft activities both at home and school.

Robotic turtles can be controlled in three ways. The easiest method is the remote controller, which is good for beginners and excellent for small puzzles. The cornerstone of ComputercraftEdu, the Visual Editor, can be used to create various programs with ease. While different on the surface, it follows the same logic as the Lua programming language. Lastly there is the Code Editor where you can write the actual Lua-script. These available options make the mod easy to use and suitable for all skill levels.

You can download the mod by using the MinecraftEdu Online Mods Repository, by manually downloading the mod from ComputerCraftEdu website or by updating your MinecraftEdu to the most recent stable version (1.7.10 Build 20). Your students can also download the mod from the CCEdu website and continue coding at home!

The best way to start using ComputerCraftEdu is our tutorial world: Turtle Canyon. It teaches the very basic features with clear instructions. These skills will become handy in Turtle Island, which is a slightly more advanced map. There is a separate wiki page (Turtle Island wiki) just for this world, so be sure to read that before exploring the various areas of the island.

New stable build

New stable build (1.7.10 build 20) is out! It comes with ComputerCraftEdu, updated mod support, more skins, better support for different languages and plenty of small fixes and improvements compared to the previous stable build (build 12). Here is a small video tutorial on how you can update MinecraftEdu.

United for Wildlife: We are the Rangers - project!

United for Wildlife is running a campaign to develop a Minecraft adventure map based on the conservation challenges faced by African wildlife. You can participate in the project by creating various animals, buildings and items, and submitting pictures of your creations to their website: http://wearetherangers.com/submit-your-builds/. Now is a great opportunity join a good cause and teach wildlife preservation to students!

Minecon coverage

The largest Minecraft event in the world took place in London on the first weekend of June. Our team showcased new ComputerCraftEdu, took part in panels and spread the word of Minecraft in education to the whole conference.

The conference featured a glass-walled classroom that showcased teachers from all over the world hosting lessons from STEM to pixel art and programming to digital storytelling. There were three educational panels during the weekend - our very own producers Jannika (@jannikaaalto) taking part in one. The educational aspects of Minecraft were a core part of the conference!

TeacherGaming Launches ComputerCraftEdu to Introduce Programming to the Minecraft Generation

Wed, 01 Jul 2015 10:00:42 -0400

Today TeacherGaming is proud to announce ComputerCraftEdu, a new and unique mod for Minecraft and MinecraftEdu. Using the mod, players learn to code within the familiar and endlessly engaging world of Minecraft. We know that children learn best when the discovery process is driven by their own passions and interests. And to millions of boys and girls worldwide, there is nothing more interesting than Minecraft!

(Credit to Jeni “Maize” Krouse for the awesome Letter Blocks mod!)

We set out to create something different with ComputerCraftEdu. In the real world, programmers use code to improve their daily lives, solve problems, and automate difficult or repetitive tasks. Similarly, in ComputerCraftEdu, players apply their knowledge of programming concepts to improve their Minecraft experience. Players will meet friendly mechanical turtles. These turtles can be given instructions by dragging and dropping tiles in an intuitive interface that is instantly familiar to Minecraft players. As players’ ability increases, they can take off the “training wheels” and start controlling their turtles directly with real code.

After more than two years of refinement and testing in real-world classrooms, we are thrilled to finally share ComputerCraftEdu with Minecraft players everywhere! We hope the mod provides children opportunities to experience the feelings of power and joy that come from learning to code. And for educators, we hope the mod provides a fresh tool that empowers their teaching practice and engages their students.

Teachers using MinecraftEdu can simply upgrade to automatically receive ComputerCraftEdu today. Home users can download the mod directly from the website www.computercraftedu.com.

ComputerCraftEdu was made by a collaboration between our learning designers and Daniel “Dan200″ Ratcliffe, creator of the original ComputerCraft mod.

Twitter Roundup - 6/22/15

Mon, 22 Jun 2015 13:47:29 -0400

Summer 2015 is here! At this time of year, we start to see MinecraftEdu used in summer activities, and educator professional development. This week we have an extra packed Twitter Roundup with just that. We love to see tweets about your MinecraftEdu activities and awesome student creations.

Kicking us off is tweet from @jimmypack with some educators on their third day of a teacher camp!

Day 3 of @MinecraftEdu Teacher Camp. Survival mode. #FCPSKIDSFIRST pic.twitter.com/SxbfRe6pB5
— jimmypack (@jimmypack)
June 10, 2015

Great shots from your activities this month! Thanks for sharing!

Next up we have a share of some more professional development from @Joshwfpike .

#minecraftedu teacher session went well! #educatingeducators #etsh15 pic.twitter.com/rl4VEKaTcm
— Josh Pike (@joshwfpike)
May 16, 2015

Thanks for the share!

@captainXav has a great share this week of a fun way to bring some excitement to your math lessons on volume.

Turn something boring into something exciting with @MinecraftEdu. Walk into your math lesson! pic.twitter.com/MTkmedg6Re
— Xavier Flores (@captainXav)
May 7, 2015

Thanks for the share!

Next up is a set of tweets illustrating some great paper planning practices that can really help focus your student’s (sometimes limited) time ingame - and work to expand some of their collaborative capacity. Both tweets are some great examples. Thanks @KalmazooTech and @lambert_kellie!

This should be interesting. @WMSPioneer Minecraft club will attempt a build of the school with @MinecraftEdu !! pic.twitter.com/D37n8DpiU2
— Tech of All Trades (@KalamazooTech)
May 14, 2015

Using Blueprints of Reagan Elem. 2 map out the perimeter of our school so we can build it n #minecraftedu #reaganrays pic.twitter.com/Y2II61rQsG
— kellie lambert (@lambert_kellie)
May 15, 2015

This next tweet from @thewhyeway pictures another great pre-game practice. Electing student leadership, and voting on rules. When working on collaborative efforts, it’s always best to set some guidelines and expectations when the classroom extends into MinecraftEdu. Thanks for the share!

Grade 4 #lskysd students creating rules and laws for their @minecraftedu communities. Elected officials decide! pic.twitter.com/g2JRPgcWrK
— Shawn Whyte (@thewhyteway)
May 25, 2015

Next we feature a world from @TheFaySchool with a really neat Mission to Mars world that he will be demoing at ISTE 2015. We thought this world looked pretty neat, and we’d love to see it shared on the World Library after it’s debut at ISTE!

5thGraders @TheFaySchool working on #MissionToMars project! Will be sharing at my #iste15 session! #minecraftedu pic.twitter.com/5qkqLZlEqw
— John Grube (@jhgrube)
May 18, 2015

Rounding out the roundup is a tweet from our own Santeri Koivisto , picturing a flurry of activity with many young visitors to the TeacherGaming offices in Tampere, Finland!

TG office has never been so busy! :) 23 first graders playing #MinecraftEdu! pic.twitter.com/LREZkhZPfp
— Santeri Koivisto (@Aalvisto)
May 18, 2015

As always, we love to see what students and educators are making and accomplishing with MinecraftEdu. Remember to tag your tweets with #MinecraftEdu and maybe you’ll be in our next Twitter Roundup!

News and Updates - 6/8/2015

Mon, 08 Jun 2015 09:36:10 -0400

Exciting stuff! This week in news and updates, a new MinecraftEdu development build was released and ComputerCraftEdu is almost complete. KerbalEdu gets an update and a new campaign!

MinecraftEdu 1.7.10 Build 19 and upcoming stable build

MinecraftEdu received a new development build, which fixed few bugs and has some redesigned user interface elements.

Old teacher menu..

New teacher menu!

Our latest stable build is 1.7.10 build 12. Since then we have made improvements that have been available only in development builds. Now we have a new stable build, which is almost ready. This means that updated mod support, more skins, better support for foreign languages and plenty of small fixes and improvements will be available shortly for those who are using stable builds.

ComputerCraftEdu

ComputerCraftEdu is a mod where players can program robotic turtles to do anything you want. CCEdu is used in schools to teach coding and it is suitable for all skill levels. This mod has been in beta for a long time. It has been constantly improved during that time and quite soon CCEdu is ready for release! Visual editor has received significant improvements, turtles can be customized, there are more actions available and much much more! Thank you all who have tried CCEdu beta version and have given us feedback.

Visual editor

We want to give students skills that they can directly apply when they go back home. That’s why we’re happy to announce ComputerCraftEdu will be available for everyone, home users included!

Get ready to code, CCEdu and robotic turtles are on their way!

KerbalEdu updated and EHC

The previous KerbalEdu version was based on KSP 0.90.0. and now KerbalEdu is up to date with Kerbal Space Program. All the new features that are in KSP 1.0.2 are now included with the newly updated KerbalEdu! This means that KerbalEdu now has completely overhauled aerodynamics with improved lift and drag simulations, realistic heat simulation, resource mining and new parts! Female kerbals finally made their way to the space program as well!

Check the KerbalEdu blog to discover more! http://kerbaledu.blogspot.fi/2015/06/kerbaledu-updated-now-based-on-ksp-102.html

Valentina Kerman

Post-it note brainstorming for EHC

Since KerbalEdu is now updated, it is time for us to move onwards to the next project! Earth History Campaign will be an educational tutorial, which teaches history through historical space exploration events and the physics behind it all. Through this tutorial your students (and yourself) will learn how the humankind reached space and at the same time the basics of KerbalEdu. EHC is still in early development and thus subject to change. Earth History Campaign is an ambitious project, but we’ll do our best to succeed in it! Follow us on twitter (@KerbalEdu) as we are constantly updating our progress there.

John Miller - MinecraftEdu Featured Educator - June 2015

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 09:15:34 -0400

Fresh off the heals of the TG West Coast Tour, this month we feature John Miller, teaching in King City, California. John is active in his teaching community, and often creates his own great teaching resources for MinecraftEdu from his blog. We are happy to feature him this month to learn about his experiences.

Introduction

My name is John Miller and I currently teach grade 7 (11-12 year olds) world history at Chalone Peaks Middle School, in a small and isolated agricultural community along the Central Coast of California. My background includes experience teaching every subject in grades 6-8 as I have multiple and single subject credentials in history and science.

I am a Google Certified Teacher and enjoy exploring promising technologies with my students. I’m fortunate to have a computer for every student in my classroom, which we use daily. I’ve been a teacher for over 20 years and have a Master’s Degree in Educational Technology and Instructional Design.

What was your relationship to Minecraft before MinecraftEdu?

I consider myself a very old school gamer. My first deep end experience with gaming was playing Dungeons and Dragons in college. I loved the collaborative and creative experience and how I was challenged to become a character in another time and place. I enjoyed playing early computer games like Galaga and Missile Command and enthusiastically supported role-playing and tactic games like Myth and Age of Empires. The SimCity series prepared me for the out of body experience of playing Civilization for hours on end every holiday break. I also enjoyed solving mysteries found in games like Myst.

I began to see tweets about Minecraft in 2011 and looked into it. I enjoyed my early experiences and immediately felt that it was something I could use in class. What caught my attention most was the sensation of being an explorer in a new world with unlimited possibilities. However, it was unrealistic to think that my school district would be able to financially support licensing the game for use at my school.

When I discovered MinecraftEdu in early 2012 I knew that I had to have it. I jumped in with both feet learning gameplay details and teaching strategies from Joel and Elfie at first and then Shane, Matt and the rest of the EduCrew. Once I felt I had a solid understanding of the mechanics, I was ready to apply it in my classroom.

How do they use Minecraft or MinecraftEdu in the classroom?

The large majority of my students were not familiar with the game when I introduced it in Fall, 2012. That helped me a great deal as I freely admitted to them that we would be learning the game together that year. The first large-scale project we did was to recreate the Tang Dynasty capital city of Chang’an. It was a summative assessment for my traditional unit on Medieval China and students not only researched the city, but created buildings with individuals and families in mind. They wrote about the occupants of their buildings and placed the individual histories on info blocks outside each building.

Historical Reflection - student build Tang Dynasty capital city

I’ve since branched out into role-playing scenarios using the CustomNPC mod and I’m exploring ways I can use Minecraft to teach literacy. I had a wonderful experience recently partnering up with Melvina Kurashige and James York to create a poetry unit. Instead of creating buildings, I challenged my students to create a story path based on a Japanese Tanka poem they each wrote. They modified the environment and placed command blocks that told their poem as visitors walked down each student created path.

Japanese Tanka poetry visualized in Minecraft with use of command blocks

What were some of the challenges in getting started?

I’ve been given great freedom to explore Minecraft in my classroom by administrators and have heard only positive comments from parents. Not unlike many school districts, mine is working on getting more devices into the hands of students. We have a fairly robust network that has been able to accommodate Minecraft in my classroom over past years and we now have a district server which myself and another colleague are sharing.

The biggest challenge ahead is that as we scale up, we need to pay close attention to the types of devices we are deploying. Many districts are moving forward with mass purchases of Chromebooks, which are not compatible with Minecraft. I like Chromebooks and think they fit a niche very nicely, but I am also in favor of giving students broad and robust experiences with multiple technologies and devices.

How have your students responded? Do you have a specific success story?

Student response has been wonderful. With each new school year comes more experience with Minecraft. I see it in my students as well. I still have over half that have never played the game and most that have, have not played the PC version. I’ve seen a marked increase in the number of girls interested the game and have had some amazing conversations with students that initially were very hesitant to join in.

Minecraft has been responsible for the most successful unit that I have ever done. My students struggle with reading and writing. It is very difficult for many of them as second language learners. We’ve also shackled their creativity and natural inquisitiveness with multiple choice tests and unimaginative writing prompts over the last few years so that many find school an incredibly boring place.

Minecraft is motivating my students to read for understanding and enjoyment and write serious and highly creative narratives about their experiences with medieval history. Together, we are close reading and annotating short narrative vignettes in class. Students then pop into Minecraft and play out the scene that I’ve recreated using details from the story, adding additional characters, different points of view, and rich content.

In one scene students find themselves inside a cathedral under construction and need to uncover a mystery.

After playing out a series of these vignettes, students are writing chapters in their “historical novel” combining experiences from their reading with interactive gameplay and inworld interviews. At the beginning of the year many of my students struggled with writing a paragraph. Now they are writing hundreds or thousands of words at a time detailing their lives in Medieval and Renaissance Europe.

The CustomNPC mod allows me to place interactive characters into each vignette.

What is the future of Minecraft in your classroom?

I’m excited about interacting even more with my students in the upcoming school year. My 6th grade colleague has been using Minecraft with her students this year, so I know that I will be getting experienced builders in August and that will make a big difference. I’ve had to take time in the past to teach mechanics, but will spend much less time now. It has been a tremendous challenge to get kids to a point where they are independent learners, so I’m excited to work with these upcoming students to create amazing things and travel through history together.

I’m currently exploring how I can add quest-based learning opportunities that fit the needs of my students in a way similar to what I experienced with Dungeons and Dragons. My goal is to create independent and constructive learning experiences within each world that address content standards and literacy.

I’ve also recently been inspired by the fabulous Tate World maps to design a project-based learning unit that uses Minecraft to connect my students with their community and address social issues.

Do you have any advice for teachers starting out, or who are already working with MinecraftEdu?

I always begin each year by having my students create a Minecraft Bill of Rights that we refer to throughout the year. It becomes a poster that hangs in a prominent place in the classroom. I bring it up as a gentle reminder before we begin each new unit.

I also ease into Minecraft. It is just one tool that I use throughout the year. I suggest a strong emphasis on reflection - from both student and teacher. It won’t always go well, that is to be expected. Refine and improve your ideas based on honest reflection, or toss them out.

Involve the students in lesson design whenever possible. As teachers we are too often guilty of thinking that we have to design and control all aspects of each unit we create. Minecraft is a great equalizer. Seek ideas and solutions from students and let them be co-developers and content creators. It’s through this process that the deepest learning takes place.

Would you like other educators to contact you about your experiences?

I love learning and sharing with students and fellow educators. Feel free to connect with me anytime. I blog about my classroom lessons HERE and you can follow me on Twitter HERE, or send me an EMAIL.

MinecraftEdu In-Game & World Library Facelift (+new development build)

Fri, 29 May 2015 10:36:19 -0400

mcedudev:

In the past couple weeks our graphics talent @JoonasPauni has been working on giving a facelift for some of the MinecraftEdu in-game UI:s. These include the teacher panel, student panel, teleport screen and information blocks screen. All the icons have been replaced with new ones alongside with backgrounds, buttons and other art assets. Check some of the work below or download the latest development version 1.7.10 build 19 from our member’s area to play around with!
As always the new build includes bugfixes and other changes. You can read them all here: http://services.minecraftedu.com/wiki/Changelog
@Kulttuuri also spent one day this week giving a facelift for the MinecraftEdu World Library. Check out the refreshed look from www.minecraftedu.com/worlds!

Best, @Kulttuuri, @Tonsse & @joonaspauni

TeacherGaming Tour 2015

Mon, 18 May 2015 13:17:47 -0400

This week’s editorial post comes from our own Mikael Uusi-Mäkelä (@Miiku87).

TeacherGaming Tour 2015 is officially done! The three week period gathered over 400 teachers all over California to experience the power of games in education first hand. Starting from Orange County, our tour team worked their way north towards the Bay Area (tour map). We met with some pretty amazing people and were inspired over and over again by how teachers jumped to the deep end with a new media. Let’s look back and reflect on the tour as a whole.

One goal we had was to have a more permanent impact on teaching practises in schools. Last year, our tour in Europe gave over 2,500 students a chance to try games in their classrooms. While many teachers were inspired by the workshops, we felt we had left them little to follow up with on their own. This time around, we wanted to reach out to teachers themselves and train them to run a workshop with their game of choice on their own. Apart from the workshop itself, we supported them with a host of materials from lesson plans to printable materials for classrooms. If they’d feel comfortable enough to run even a single workshop for a group of 15 students, we’d have more than doubled our reach in numbers. Oh, and we gave each participant full access to our games until the end of the school year, so they could keep playing beyond the first workshop experience!

Photo credits: John Miller (@johnmillerEDU)

The tour also gave us, as game developers, a chance to see our products in the hands of the very audiences they were designed for. As you might know, we are developing a programming mod for MinecraftEdu called ComputerCraftEdu. It enables the students adopt a turtle robot and while using it, learn to program within the game. While there are many great ways to introduce programming, we’ve felt they often teach you some basic concepts of programming, but offer few possibilities beyond the initial challenges to directly apply the skills. That’s not the case here: after you’ve learned to program with ComputerCraftEdu’s robots, you can use them for any task in the game, be it mining diamonds or building a castle. On the tour, the first groups of teachers got their hands on the turtles and put our designs through their paces. There was a lot of aha-moments but also some great feedback. Our initial map went through some major redesigns during the three weeks on the road and we got some invaluable feedback to polish ComputerCraftEdu before the release later this summer. Stay tuned for more!

Also, fresh out of the figurative oven, our participants got their hands on Earth History Campaign, the first major content update for KerbalEdu. If you haven’t heard from Kerbals before, they are a wonderful race of fearless, hapless and adorable creatures who are taking their first steps in exploring the solar system beyond their own planet. Students take charge of their own space program and learned about many STEM concepts alongside Kerbals. In Earth History Campaign, the Kerbals and the students join in the Space Race as the third, silent party. Intercepting radio transmissions from Earth, they try to compete with the humans in exploring the space. The first chapter premiered on the tour teaches the basic controls of the game and sees the students stumble upon Sputnik I, the first satellite the humans created, learning about the earliest steps in space flight. We can’t wait to hear what the students think about it after the teachers who participated on the tour take it back to their classrooms!

That’s it for the tour this spring! We hope that by gathering teachers in the same room to learn about games in education, they went home with a sense of community - you are not alone trying to figure out how to use games with your students. We also hope that, in our hosts, we left behind some new Minecraft community hubs that will keep organising new, wonderful events with our games in the future. For us this was, yet again, another experience of a lifetime.

We ourselves were left with a deep sense of gratitude. Thanks you wonderful people (with a special thanks to Shane Asselstine!), for making TeacherGaming Tour 2015 possible!

- Mikael (@Miiku87), Jannika (@jannikaaalto), Santeri (@aalvisto) & Joel (@MinecraftTeachr)

News and Updates - 5/11/2015

Mon, 11 May 2015 07:42:08 -0400

It’s that time again for some News and Updates! There has been lots of activity these last few weeks!

TeacherGaming Tour 2015

The TGTour Team has been busy. They have managed to arrange several free workshops for schools, have fun in California and keep a great blog of the trip! You’ll find out how they have managed to keep up with their tight schedule, what have they learned thus far, and how things are going. Read up on the tour blog here.

MinecraftEdu Development

There is a new development build available for testing! MinecraftEdu 1.7.10 build 18 removed the gender selection completely and added ComputerCraftEdu options to the teacher menu. This build is NOT compatible with the hosting service. If you are participating in the Hosting Beta, you should still continue to use 1.7.10 stable build. Last week, we released a portion of the web based Server Control Panel for our Hosting Beta Participants, which made a great amount of functionality available to teachers and school admins. If you are interested about these changes, stop by the development blog to see what they’ve been up to!

Kerbal 1.0 and KerbalEdu

Kerbal Space Program 1.0 release is out with new features and changes! We are working to get KerbalEdu up to date with 1.0 as soon as possible. Keep following KerbalEdu (@KerbalEdu) on Twitter for updates!

Stephen Elford - MinecraftEdu Featured Educator - May 2015

Mon, 27 Apr 2015 08:09:34 -0400

Continuing our monthly feature on educators who use MinecraftEdu in the classroom, for May we bring you Stephen ‘Elfie’ Elford. Stephen was an early adopter of MinecraftEdu, and has greatly contributed to the community. You can often find him responding to questions in the Minecraft-Teachers Google Group, or in our public chat channel. He has spoken several times about his experiences using MinecraftEdu with his students. Most recently Elfie spoke at TEDx RosalindParkED, which you can view on YouTube.

Introduction

My name is Stephen Elford, aka. Elfie or EduElfie. I teach in Victoria, Australia and have been a teacher for 10 years, teaching Math and Science to 12-18 year olds.

What was your relationship to Minecraft before MinecraftEdu?

I was introduced to Minecraft by a friend in 2009 and was absolutely captivated. I played consistently for 2 years and found many learning opportunities I would like to use with students. I was just considering working out how I could effectively run a safe and secure server from within my school for students to join and learn within.

Being an avid player I was browsing the Minecraft wiki, chasing information on the next update when I saw a post about MinecraftEdu and a call for people to help test the software. This was on a Friday evening, first thing Monday morning I approached my admin and requested permission to donate to get a copy to use in my school.

This was in November of 2011 and my first foray into teaching students in the virtual world of Minecraft was an experience that I will never forget.

How do your students use MinecraftEdu in the classroom?

I use MinecraftEdu in various ways, and over the last 3 years my own lesson development has evolved and gone through many changes. My first lesson was a very simple, teacher directed ‘roleplay’ where students were neurotransmitter molecules and, as a class, we performed some demonstrations to explain how these chemical messengers get the message from one nerve cell to another.

I had so much fun delivering that lesson, the discussions that we had afterwards and the learning that the students demonstrated that I was completely hooked on the idea of using MinecraftEdu as a tool to help me teach. I started to build worlds to help me teach students particular concepts. Since then I have built worlds that range in length from 1 lesson to 6 months. I have allowed student creative building opportunities to demonstrate their understanding of particular concepts. I have operated within teacher directed worlds and also student self directed exploration and experimentation worlds. We have completed roleplays as well as using survival game mechanics to learn various objectives.

All of my maps are available on request, they are works in progress and many recorded lessons are available on my YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/eduelfie It is always my intention to make the maps available on the MinecraftEdu World Share site, but I find there is always something to adjust based on how the lesson plays out in the classroom, and the time required to adjust them the way I want is swallowed up by the next project. This is something I hope to remedy this year.

What were some of the challenges in getting started?

Initial beginnings were quite simple, I had no pushback from parents, admin or tech staff. Students were, of course, over the moon about using Minecraft in classes to learn. It wasn’t until much later when I was really pushing the boundaries of using games in education, at least within my school, that I started to get questioned about the validity of using games in my classrooms. As with any integration of technology, I was being asked for the ‘data’ to prove that this was supporting student learning.

This is a tricky thing to supply, I had anecdotal evidence that student engagement and learning were increased, but ‘hard data’ is definitely something that is difficult to provide on what I feel is another tool in my ‘teaching toolbox’. My admin and I had discussions about games in the classroom, their place, and how not all games are digital. I put forward many arguments and discussion points about how is this any different to using videos (or any other tool) to help student learning, and what hard data is around to prove that they actually assist student learning. It was unfortunately not a discussion I feel I ‘won’ hence my use of MinecraftEdu in my classrooms has been very limited over the last 12 or so months.

How have your students responded? Do you have a specific success story?

Students have amazed me with their positivity, and their learning over the years. There are two stories I like to share about student learning within Minecraft. The first happened when students were exploring the virtual cell I created and two boys were being regular 16-17 year old boys and were ‘play fighting’ in game. Trying to get them back on task, I requested they stop, after a couple of requests they did, and an offhand joke from one to the other blew me away with the depth of understanding it showed.

The joke was, “Yeah you better run, I was gonna throw you in the lysosome.” Now this may not sound like an amazingly funny joke, however the lysosome is the cells’ recycling plant, so essentially he was going to throw the other student in the trash. Saying something like that in an offhand joke showed me that this student had a very good understanding of the cell, and the fact that it happened at all was due to Minecraft, that would have never happened in a ‘standard’ classroom.

The second story is more about a couple of students over a period of time, rather than on any one circumstance or lesson. I was given a very difficult class for year 10 (16 yr olds) Math. This was basically a class for those who ‘couldn’t do Math’ and were looking at not continuing with academic Math in the future, but were heading down the ‘daily use’ Math path. Needless to say Math was definitely not a subject that these students enjoyed studying. Knowing all of this in advance I thought I would try something completely different, I based the entire class on a MinecraftEdu world.

Some students were ecstatic about the planned project, but the two boys that are the focus of this story were not. One comment was “I am not playing that, my little brother plays it, it is crap.” Some months later the student that made that comment wrote me a letter. Now I can count the number of times I have received a letter like the one shown here on one hand. This was one of those moments that makes you feel like you could conquer the world. To put this in context, this particular boy had completed no homework the previous three years of his schooling and for this project he was regularly completing homework to gain extra in-game rewards.

The other student that made a big impact was one who had completed the absolute minimum work throughout his entire schooling but he was totally into building his house and costing it within the game. He came to me with his costing for his verandah, so I asked him to show me how he calculated it. He took my whiteboard marker and proceeded to walk me through his calculations on the board. He was displaying knowledge at a much higher level than I expected. It was also this student who one day said to me “You know Elfie, you really put a lot of thought into this didn’t you? You made sure that we wouldn’t just play, but that we would do learning as we went through. Thanks for making the effort.”

These were the two ‘big wins’ from this project, there were many more positive outcomes, but unfortunately this was the project that pushed the boundaries a bit too far for my admin.

What is the future of Minecraft in your classroom?

Minecraft definitely has a future in my classroom, I am hoping this coming year will be a year where I go back to using it a lot more than the previous 12 months. I have plans to re-jig Mathlandia for my year 8 class and I am also hoping to create some lessons for my year 7 Math class in the later half of the year. I would also like to get students creating and designing lessons for others in MinecraftEdu, or at least having the option for displaying their own knowledge by creating in Minecraft.

Do you have any advice for teachers starting out, or who are already working with MinecraftEdu?

For those just beginning their Minecraft journey, be prepared to learn and be prepared to not be ‘the’ expert in the room. Make sure you are ‘part’ of the lesson, not a bystander, join the students in the world and work with them. Also make sure to reflect on your lessons and ask for feedback from students as this will help you improve your lesson delivery and give students the opportunity to have some say in how it moves forward. Whether you are just starting out, or are a long term user don’t judge your lessons by what others have done. You know yourself and your students best, dont let others tell you that what you have done is not worthwhile if you feel it was.

Probably the most important advice I have, for those beginning, or even those who have been using it for a while is play the game. Actually play, players are captivated by this game for a reason, see if you can figure out what that reason is. If you learn the ‘why’ it will help if you want to design your own lessons in-game. You will find building and managing students within the world so much easier and if you can capitalise on what makes makes the game fun your lessons will be much more engaging for your students.

Would you like other educators to contact you about your experiences?

Sure thing, I am more than happy to talk to anyone thinking about or using Minecraft in their classroom. Contact me via
Email: eduelfie@gmail.com
Twitter: @eduelfie
Minecraft Teachers Google Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!categories/minecraft-teachers
MinecraftEdu tech support room: http://minecraftedu.com/chat
YouTube: http://youtube.com/eduelfie
Blogger: http://minecrafteduelfie.blogspot.com.au