Monday 4 April 2011

Striking Gold

Since March 17th 2011, Joel Levin, a lower school teacher in New York City, has been blogging about his experiences using Minecraft to teach his students computing.

A teacher and his class: cute as you like. Courtesy of http://minecraftteacher.tumblr.com/
I can't help but be impressed at how much momentum he seems to have gathered in the fortnight since then, and at the imagination with which he's worked the game into his lesson plans since January of this year.  For anyone who doubts the benefit of something like this in a lower school computing class, the man himself says:

"While the kids are playing, they are getting practice typing commands, manipulating little boxes with the mouse, and visualizing spatial relationships.  All general skills which translate well to other computing tasks.  At seven years old, most kids really need this type of practice drilled regularly.  Minecraft makes it fun for them."

He also features a particularly heart-warming missive from an IT professional called Bart who started playing Minecraft with his son, only for the 11-year-old to turn around one day and ask: 'What is the password for the system admin panel of our network? I need to open a port’, as he wanted to host his own server for himself and some buddies. That's straight out of dorkyearbook and I think it's bloody brilliant, though a doubt does linger in my mind as to how the boy wonder is going to turn out in 5 years or so.

As a tool to introduce children to basic IT concepts, Minecraft is doubtless an effective carrot on a stick.  It's a fun game, you want to play it well; you have a direct and powerful incentive to familiarise yourself with basic important and transferable skills which otherwise might have been stultifying, dull and irrelevant.  This in itself is a wonderful thing. But what really blows my mind is how this teacher seems to be successfully combining that sort of learning with much broader themes like co-operation, planning and an understanding of one's place in a community. Nowhere is this better illustrated than the brief account of a project where students were let loose on a pre-made pyramid he had built in the game.  After applying themselves to finding a way in, and to exploring without disturbing the contents, students were invited to discuss the topic of preserving history and respecting other cultures:

"Three out of four groups decided to build a museum for the objects in the pyramid.  The fourth group voted to preserve the pyramid as they found in, encasing the contents in glass."

A lesson where 7-year-olds break into a pyramid,  reflect upon what to do about it, then decide to preserve it for posterity and build a museum as a result? At the risk of losing my cool, I'll admit that's left me pretty amazed.

But, as fun as creativity is, there's always a particular kick that we get out of destruction, and so I'll leave you with a video of someone accidentally burning his virtual house down.



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