After some setbacks and starting over, my son and I are making progress on this project.
Since the last update school started up so we have been limited in our work on the project. I have found this to be a great opportunity for us to connect as father/son as well and working through ideas and skills that I blog about so often.
We had spent time working on our ancient Chinese city, but something I did not realize is that the worlds do not save automatically in MinecraftEdu. I was not aware that we had to manually save our worlds. After losing everything we built, we had to start over. This was frustrating so we actually did not build for a bit of time.
At my school we are doing a teacher exhibition where we have asked all of our teachers to actually do their project. Today during our PD all teachers will be on display much like we do twice a year with our students. Teachers will share their work and their journey. I have been working on this project for my exhibition. What I realized is that my mind once again thinks so big and non linear. I have this idea in development so I had to narrow things down to what is needed to get started.
What my son and I did was create a sample quest that we would like to see students create themselves showcasing their learning. We have this idea of a Choose Your Own Adventure concept where they will write a storyline using social studies, math, and language arts standards through the quest. Obviously, this project part comes after we actually build the city, but this is where the beauty of this project really kicks in.
We made a sample quest on how to make fireworks. Keep in my mind my son is not in 6th grade so in the classroom we would have to pick the content a bit more as we do lack some social studies, math, and language arts standards, but there is enough to give you an idea of what we are after.
What I discovered from this project is how important it is to get my son screencasting. The idea of being able to teach what you know is difficult. How do we present our ideas in a way that makes sense? How do we help understand our audience? How do we showcase our learning?
I am just scratching the surface with what I am developing here with Minecraft in the classroom. I have so many notes scribbled down. I hope to get a class involved in this project after teacher exhibition so we can really dive in and see where things end up.
So…. we have made a quest. We need to clean it up. We need to build up our city more. We need to clean a few things up. I need to complete my lesson plans a bit more so anyone can use them. I will let you know how things go in update 3.
Nice work Sky and Dad! 😉
Thank you. We have a long way to go, but the amount of learning taking place using Minecraft as a focal point is amazing!