Redefining the Bird House, Part 2

The second grade students learned more than I expected in our "Redefining the Birdhouse" challenge. Beyond making cool birdhouses, they might be able to help Congress...

Mrs. Cheung’s second grade students had spent several days brainstorming their redesigned bird habitats and now it was time to start making.  These students are familiar with using materials like Legos to build - but this project was different.  They needed to realize a three dimensional birdhouse from 2 sheets of 18 inch square cardboard. We wanted to ease the class into three-dimensional thinking and how better to do that than with Minecraft?

Three-dimensional thinking

Building in three dimensions from two dimensional sheet material isn’t intuitive - we imagined confused stares and the chorus of, “What do we do now?”  We started by printing out Minecraft blocks from PixelPaperCraft.com using card stock. Cutting, folding, and gluing a 3-D cube is challenging but the children were able to persevere because, well, Minecraft is cool. We modeled cutting and folding the paper and had a sample cube available (without adhesive) so that students could see how it turns out. Although students used glue sticks to hold the cube together, I’d recommend having some scotch tape on hand, you’ll thank me later. It took a cognitive leap for the class to turn the paper into a cube, and I’m glad we started that way.

Planning

Cube building was an important step to prime our students for three dimensional thinking. Once primed, students reconvened into teams to plan how to change their cardboard sheets into 3-D bird houses. The children used small whiteboards and dry erase markers to sketch out where they should cut and fold the cardboard. Whiteboards have a playful, impermanent feel and the teams planned with enthusiasm. Teams needed to take turns planning on the small whiteboard and negotiate the direction for the birdhouse.

Building

It became clear that inter-group communication was valuable once students started building. Students used scissors, safety cutters (I highly recommend these for any elementary maker space!), and duct tape to construct their houses. Glue guns and the drill press (for bird house doors!) were available with teacher support. Each group was doing something interesting, but in isolation from the other cool things that were happening in other groups. We needed to reinforce that the teams were not in competition with one another, and could, in fact, help other teams. We needed to regularly stop the work and discuss what was going well and what wasn’t. Students were more self-assured after each discussion. Where teams needed to practice working together during the planning phase, now they needed to work together as a class. It was strangely foreign!

What I’d do differently next time

Next time I do this project I will try to build a better scaffold for empathy from the bird’s perspective. It is difficult for a seven year old to think from the perspective of another person, much less a bird. The kids did a great job but I think it could have been even better. I think it’s great that they figured out how to make furniture, I’m just not sure it fits into the design challenge. I’d also push harder on inter-team collaboration. I cannot stress enough how valuable it was to have the teams share with one another. Our students are used to competing with one another, both individually and in teams. It took a shift to think of the design challenge as a common goal that we could work on together to solve.

Why I think Congress should try design thinking

We live during a polarized time where people are more likely to talk over one another than to one another. The design thinking process encourages students to put themselves into someone else's shoes when they problem solve. The process enables teams to work together towards a common goal, rather than against each other. Lately it seems that the skills of negotiation, collaboration, and perspective sharing are rarely practiced. I'm encouraged that this generation could buck the trend.

Minecraft Possibilities Part 3

It’s always about choices, isn’t it?  Choices are wonderful and dangerous.  They complicate things, and for a Minecraft newbie like myself, they introduce risk.  The first big choice involved with using Minecraft in instruction is choosing a server platform.  The vanilla server (from the Minecraft folks) was never an option; it just isn’t extensible enough to create an usable place for students.  From what I have seen, the options boil down to CraftBukkit, a Minecraft server with an enthusiastic community of developer support, and MinecraftEdu, a server fork developed specifically for education.  This particular choice reminds me of the difference between using a service like Edublogs and installing your own Wordpress server.  With your own server you can do anything, but you can also break your installation and make things really complicated.  Edublogs can be restrictive, but the learning curve is shorter and the knowledge that things will “just work” is comforting and important.  

I decided to install the Bukkit Server for my home LAN because it was free and I was impressed by the available plug in options.  There are actually too many, and this is further complicated by differences in plugin quality and version compatibility.  I used a combination of “Top Plugin” lists to sort through the choices and come up with four that would meet my goals:

• Multiverse - This plugin allows a server to host multiple worlds.  I envision a “creative” server where students can build without worrying about things like hunger and monsters.  That said, these are the aspects that make “survival” servers so much fun.  A simulated community would want to be built on a survival server, I think, and multiverse allows both of these things to happen.

• Minecraft Essentials - Essentials provides too much to list.  The command list provides an opportunity to control the in-game environment and moderate the players.  It also creates a permissioning system which would be necessary to create levels of users, perhaps introducing an opportunity to involve students across the grades.
• World Edit - This is a super powerful plugin to modify the landscape and build structures.  It has a hefty learning curve, but introduces some opportunities to teach geometry.  As always, YouTube was quite helpful (I found it interesting, though not surprising, that most Minecraft "How-To" videos are produced by kids.)  
• Towny - This plugin creates a simulated community environment.  Towny does heaps of useful things, including granting students a plot on which they can build and providing a foundation for government.  There are mechanisms for economy, elections, taxes, towns and city states.

While installing the server and plugins weren’t too difficult, using the system as an admin takes some work.  I think I’ll wind up printing out the dozens of commands which work from the command line within the game.  This complexity does add a barrier and makes me realize why the Minecraft Edu server exits.

Minecraft Edu includes nice in game interfaces and many special features for classroom use.  I think some of the features, like the special blocks, can be reproduced with Bukkit mods but Minecraft Edu is so much simpler to use.  While I haven’t played with it yet, it appears as though the admin functions all have an interface, no command line needed.  For that alone I think the Edu server is worth exploring.  There are trade-offs. The plugins that work with Bukkit will not work with Minecraft Edu and the opportunity to create rich and immersive digital environments provided by plugins like Towny are lost.  

As a teacher, I think the simplicity of Minecraft Edu for instruction is important.  But to get everything I want would require setting up two servers and I’m not sure I can pull that off.  I am leaning towards starting with a Bukkit server because I am most likely piloting the game in a school club.  I won’t necessarily need the structure of the Edu server and I would want to have conversations about the community with club members, then build the world accordingly.  I think the flexibility of Bukkit server would lend itself better to these needs.   I should disclose that I also have experience with installing two Wordpress servers.  Both of which are broken (in fairness, my last blog was taken down by Russian hackers) and I now find myself writing a third blog using Blogger.  Hmmm.

Minecraft Possibilities Part 2

For the last few days I have been experimenting with various aspects of Minecraft.  I have discovered that the Minecraft ecosystem is a lot bigger than I thought.  The folks at Mojang have kept their platform open enough to inspire a faithful community of fans that mashup and repurpose their game.  Different server platforms have been made, hundreds of plugins have been created to change the game play, and complete worlds have been built for others to enjoy.  

I was impressed to find a wealth of fan created content, including texture packs, custom maps, even new ways of playing the game.  Some users use Hunger Games inspired maps to play their own version of this dystopian survival competition.  I was impressed that they even include Sponsors (interesting way to inspire fan fiction during English class, right? ) Other users have created maps with dueling pirate ships, complete with working cannons that have been created using the in-game machine parts.  I think building a working cannon with levers, pistons, and switches would be a nice complement to a simple machines or circuits unit.  

I was originally interested in providing a virtual environment for students where principals of government, needs and wants, community, and citizenship could be explored.  Ideally, students would have opportunities to let their imaginations run wild or explore and build places with a context, such as creating a colonial village.  When I discovered fan-created adventure games using Minecraft as a platform, I realized even more possibilities.  These games include involved storylines, puzzles, and quests.  I’m currently playing Inkstar and it is pretty amazing for fan content.  Could students write  collaborative story arcs that other students could play in Minecraft?  This could potentially take the Ant Farm idea to the next level.  

Minecraft's open-game platform has created an outlet for a dedicated fan base to repurpose the game in interesting ways.  I think this has also created opportunities for education, but I’m discovering that exploiting these opportunities will take some work.  The question I am currently wrestling with is, "Will the work be worth the return?"  Fortunately, this work feels a lot like play and I guess that's the big idea, isn't it?

Minecraft Possibilites

I have been interested in the classroom implications of Minecraft since being introduced to the open world game by Gerry Ardito.  I'm curious about the possibilities of a virtual environment in education, especially when the virtual space is already embraced by students.  I've taken informal polls of my 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades and found that about 25% of my kids play Minecraft at home.  That's pretty good for an indie game. Student buy-in isn't enough to make a game useful for teachers, but Minecraft has some features that I think make it different.

One of the things that separates Minecraft from similar sandbox-style games (such as Second Life) is the ability to host server installations.  This allows teachers to restrict participation to the school community and control permissions.  In addition, this also allows teachers to customize game servers with plugins.  These community built modifications allow administrators to set up towns, in-game economies, and even teach programming.

Having control over a school server has other advantages.  Outside of school hours can be established and game play can be restricted to those times.  Moderators can be chosen or elected from the student body, or from alumni.  Curriculum such as needs and wants, elections, community interdependence, the importance of laws, and introductory programming can all be addressed in a way that engages the learner and encourages independent exploration.

I really don't know what this would look like but I am excited about the possibilities.  I hope to experiment with the idea in an after school club and see where it goes.  Because Minecraft has an open-world approach, the possibilities are exciting.  Just check out the video below of the  Minecraft built 16-bit computer - Crazy.  I'll keep you posted.