Week 5 Reflection

This week has been the most confusing, stressful week of all. First, my husband and I moved into our new house and our internet isn't working. The earliest a technician can come and fix it is in the middle of next week, so driving across town to find internet is quite stressful. Our small group has now become a larger group, where I think this was a great move it's now we're inventing the wheel. We have created a planning document on google drive, which has let everyone voice their ideas and opinions. I think this is important to keep everyone on the same page and communicate with one another. We all have been assigned a task to focus on. From the reading's this week, I learned some excellent strategies for a successful project. After reading the blogs from this week the overall strategy that I think everyone feels is important is communication, focused meeting questions and specific tasks delegated to one another.

I also have experienced how minecraft can be very successful in schools. During our challenge this week, we were put into two groups. One where German Leaders and the other were Advocates for Women. We had a small section to read (history of Germany) and then we had to build, leave citations from the text in treasure chests and create Germany how it would be after the destruction. While building, I saw slightly how this could work for literature. After watching the overview Dr. Graham created and shared, I saw how building in Minecraft can be used for a diorama, books and signs can be used for evidence in citing the text. The building showed evidence the students (us) read the text, used the text while citing and understood their role. During the overview and immediate feedback Dr. Graham, mentioned students could do a write up after building and using their screen shots in their presentation. It's amazing to me how we can take a game and turn it into an excellent tool to use with literature, history...etc Take the lectures, excess worksheets away and turn it into a fun learning experience for students. Game on! Mia and I have had phone conferences and google hangouts to work together on our specific task. My goal for next week is to start the game design process and get the ball rolling. I will add information to the planning document, keep working with my peers and create our MOOC for the 6 -12th graders.

How has your team approached and documented the design of your game?

As I start to answer this question I’m puzzled as how to answer this question. My team no longer exists, we are now all one big team working towards creating our MOOC. While this is frustrating, confusing and stressful, I found this weeks reading to be very insightful in how to help design, organize and create our successful MOOC.

After reading a lot of strategies to help us design a successful game, the most important strategy is the learning objective and assessment. What is the learning outcome going to be? (Kapp, 2012) What do we want our students to learn? How are we going to assess and understand if our students are learning?

Where this week has been stressful for many other peers and after talking with Mia about our new game plan, I wanted to find strategies that we could put into place to help us create a successful game.

I started to research project management and found many strategies that will be beneficial to our team. (Ury) 1. Fully scope the project before you start. 2. Assemble a project team and assign tasks according to strengths. We have completed this with the MOOC document and assigning tasks by strengths. 3.  Prepare a reverse timeline, (identify when each critical step in the project needs to be completed).We haven’t done this yet I don’t think. I think we need to do this before we start getting to close to the deadline and launch date. 4. Perform as many functions as you can simultaneously. Before we can build, we need to know exactly what the design is supposed to look like and the objective 5. Have regular update meetings to share information and last focus on what matters most (Ury). I think for us to design a successful game we need to have strong communication with each other.  Our team needs to clearly define work tasks, and properly assign them (Geland, 2011). This is critical to success. We also need to decide as a group what our objective is. What we want our students to learn and how we are going to guide them to this outcome.

As we create our MOOC, we need to think of the equipment the students will have and make sure the game will work on their computer. We also need to have a document that is user friendly (Longman) to any teachers who have questions or need to give students extra support. We have a lot of these strategies outlined and created for our MOOC. I think we need to decide on one objective, define our standards and start designing our game.

Resources

Kapp, K. M. (2012). The Gamification of Learning and Instruction : Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

 Longman,A. (2004). Project management: key tool for implementing strategy. Retrieved October 1, 2014, from http://www.kepnertregoe.com/PDFs/Articles/JofBusinessStrategyPM.pdf

Ury, A (2014). 7 Essential Strategies of Successful Project Management Retrieved October 2, 2014, from http://business.everestcollege.edu/articles/7-essential-strategies-of-successful-project-management

Geland, B. (2011). 5 strategies for successful project management. Retrieved October 3, 2014, from http://www.bradegeland.com/blog/5-strategies-for-successful-project-management

Week 4 Reflection

This week has by far been the busiest. First I have had many parent conferences, google hangouts and regular meetings. Then my husband and I received news that we could move into our new house this weekend! So, many hours this weekend has been put to moving boxes, furniture and settling into our new home!

I found this week that I have become more familiar with using Minecraft. I am starting to learn about the privileges in teacher mode. I think it’s important when creating our MOOC to know sides, student and teacher. This will help us understand how to create our MOOC to better suite our students. I am starting to build a lot quicker and find strategies that help me in Minecraft. I have found there are a lot of tools to observe if learning is occurring. The most important tool is ENGAGEMENT. Our district has announced that this year they are only looking for student engagement with teachers evaluations. Our principal will evaluate us on all domains, but pay close attention to student engagement. If students’ are not engaged, then what was the point to the lesson?

This is the same for Minecraft and Minecraftedu, if students are not engaged, will they want to build or play Minecraft? Will they want to explore and learn new strategies or work with other peers? The answer is, no. Students need to be engaged. When students are engaged, learning will occur. The other tool I found most important is assessments. Assessments can be tests, observations of students learning, questions to students and rubrics. Thomas had a great idea of having students be assessed by levels. Students who achieve a certain level will be graded on the following. Every student learns differently. It’s important we assess our students from their ability. Mia had a suggestion of giving a dedicated area in Minecraft for students. This lets students work with their peers, focus on a certain task or goal and allow the teacher to observe the students.

I’m looking forward to discussing with my group this week on what we want our students to focus on. I think once we decide on an objective it will be easy to have standards and goals for our students to focus on when playing in Minecraft.

Essential Question Week 4

What tools can we use both in and out of Minecraft, to create a convincing case that learning occurred? 

The first tool we can use in and out of Minecraft to show learning occurred is by observation. When a student performs a task or skill correctly, then we know the student has learned (Kapp, 2012). This can be also by assessments, but the best way is to observe the student. During minecraft, I had a difficult time building the first time. After practicing I started to get better. While in Minecraft this week, I observed myself understanding how to access my supplies more practical, flying, learning how to build quicker and being more efficient. I also observed and watched my peers demonstrate how to build quickly. This helped me learn how to use the tools I had to build and answer any questions I had. 
Another tool is encouragement this gives “positive feedback that focuses primarily on effort or improvement rather than outcomes” (Evans, 1997). It’s shown that if a “person can be encouraged to perform an important act that is counter to the person’s own attitudes, a change in the person’s attitude can occur. My attitude when I first started playing minecraft was pretty negative and being very frustrated. While having the opportunity to play in Minecraft each week and have peers that schedule times to play, and give assistance while playing has been helpful in learning the game. It’s important to give feedback to students on their progress, how they did and what they can improve on. It’s important to encourage students, set goals and help them achieve their goals.

            Have students role-play is an important tool. We learn by experience and by doing. Students should have a role in the game. They will have higher thinking and work towards their challenge.  If a student is in a game and only playing, learning is probably not occurring. To have learning occur, students need to be focused, working with other peers incase they need assistance or extra support. Not every time should students work with peers, but most of the time teamwork is important to have learning occur. It helps students see other views on things and to have higher level of thinking. To show that learning has occurred is when students can connect what they’re learning about to every day life or to other subjects.

Kapp, K. M. (2012). The Gamification of Learning and Instruction : Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

Evans, T. (1997). THE TOOLS OF ENCOURAGEMENT. Retrieved September 25, 2014, from http://www.cyc-net.org/cyc-online/cycol-0205-encouragement.html

Breslow, L. (2008). HOW DO WE KNOW IF STUDENTS ARE LEARNING. Retrieved September 23, 2014, from http://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/203/breslow.html

Summary Week 3

This week has been quite intense. With open house at our school and quickly returning home to enter into the virtual world of Minecraft for our weekly meeting was quite stressful.  I spent hours playing Minecraft and received my badge for emerging builder. I realized this week that all of the information that I have been learning and reading about has started to change the way that I create my lessons in the classroom and explain certain situations to parents. For example, I had a parent talk about their child’s involvement in video games at home. I asked them what kind of game. I can’t remember the name, but it was a game that made the child think of different strategies, have better hand eye coordination…etc It was like a light bulb went off in my brain. I knew exactly what the child was experiencing and how to explain to the parent, that this video game was actually wonderful for their child to do at home. I did explain there’s a time and place for everything and if their child is staying up late and playing the game, well that’s probably not a good idea.

            I have enjoyed learning how to play Minecraft. While it’s frustrating at times o.k. quite a bit! It’s also a learning experience and a fantastic adventure. I have found that when I’m playing Minecraft, my whole world stops. I can’t multitask and stop playing until all of my quests are completed. I can understand how in almost every game I have ever played in my life, they are set up for different types of players. There’s always goals to achieve, exploring to be done and possibly dying or killing off (making another player go back to start, put in jail) in the game. Most of the time there is socializing, working together to figure out how to play the game or be better at the game. Unless you’re playing the card game, war then there’s no socializing involved only achieving and killing the other person to get the most cards.

            I have worked with my peers in MinecraftEdu this week. What a fun way to socialize and bond together. I connected with my team this week on deciding on how to create our game “The Giver.” We met in a Google hangout and drum roll please my hangout worked the first time! Oh, what a relief. During our meeting we talked about what standards we wanted to include in the lesson and decided to break off into groups of two. One person will dissect the chapters and explain the vision to the other partner. The other partner will take the vision and turn it into a reality while building in Minecraft. Our mission this week is to read the book and choose three sections to share with the group. I hope everyone doesn’t choose the same sections. I also read my peers thoughts on this weeks reading and essential question and gave other articles and ideas connecting to their thoughts.

Week 3 Essential Question

How can we use Minecraft to create a sound and robust learning experience for students?

As the creators, we need to make Minecraft a game that will be engaging to the students. When creating the game, we want to think of the types of interactions we want the students to have during the experience not what we think the game should be about. We want our students to be “navigating the world, building their own creations and collaborating with each other to explore and solve puzzles” (Levin). A “common mistake among novice game developers is that they think of a new game in terms of the topic they want to include in the game and not the interactions driving engagement” (Kapp, 2014).

Minecraft has all four types of games within it such as “Agon, Alea, Mimicry and Illinx” (Kapp, 2014).  With Agon there’s competition. In someways Minecraft can be competitive when playing with multiplayers. Who can build the fastest house or nicest house. When playing as a single player, it’s competitive to who can build the fastest house before dark and stay safe. Alea is chance. There is a fifty% chance your house will be built correctly, or when building it will be completed in enough time. I know when I was playing minecraft I had a difficult time building. My blocks would be placed in some other area instead of the building location. I would have to break them and retry. This would take time, so I can see how Minecraft could be challenging to students. It would definitely keep their interest and help them set goals to build a house. The other type is Mimicry. Minecraft is a virtual world. It’s a game in 3D and we are building houses with blocks. Illinx is integrated in Minecraft, we are not moving to music, but we do fly in the game and can jump and run during the game.

The other way to keep Minecraft a sound and robust learning experience for students is to make sure each different kind of player will enjoy the game. I know after playing Minecraft I’m definitely an achiever and explorer. I was somewhat socializing to get information on how to use the game and help others when needed, but mostly working to achieve my goals. The only time I was a killer was when I had to cook food.

Minecraft creates many different situations for all players to enjoy the game. There are two types of minecraft students can play. Minecraft students can be “connected to the same server and share the same world” and in MinecraftEdu the “teachers and students can connect together in the same virtual space.” To have a sound and robust learning experience we need to set goals and expectations for our students. Students need to be given “specific tasks to accomplish or puzzles to solve” (Webster, 2011). Students need to work together to achieve these goals and to make Minecraft an extraordinary learning experience in their classroom.

References

Kapp, K. M. (2012). The Gamification of Learning and Instruction : Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

Levin, J. (2011, February 2). GETTING STARTED WITH MINECRAFTEDU. Retrieved September 17, 2014, from http://educade.org/lesson_plans/getting-started-with-minecraftedu

What is MinecraftEdu. (2011, April 7). Retrieved September 16, 2014.

Andrew, W. (2011, April 3). Educational building blocks: How Minecraft is used in classrooms. Retrieved September 18, 2014, from http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/04/educational-building-blocks-how-minecraft-is-being-used-in-the-classroom/