Digital game based learning

Coding with a purpose

Today I entered the world of Computercraft with my students, working with different youtube tutorials.  The good thing about this tutorial was that I didn’t have to work for a long time before I actually saw the code “doing stuff”. I got to try the If - then - else command in a securiy program that protected my house. And seeing the code do stuff is what gave the learning experience meaning. I think letting our students see that they can use code to manipulate their surroundings is the best way to learn. And what better place to do that than in Minecraft?

My students were way ahead of me, working on programming lumber turtles and making viruses to crash the virtual computer. This also underlines my role as an educator using technology: I have to accept that I most often won’t master many of the things I’m teaching with and in. But my function will be to open the door for my students and point the direction , joining them in their quests for knowledge. 

Minecraft English: Who am I?

In todays lesson I had planned the theme “Who am I?”. We worked with vocab and grammar by writing statements beginning with “I am…”. These statements were then used to further examine “to be” in 2nd and 3rd person.

Minecraft english - writing and past tense

For this days lesson I had planned to push my guys a bit harder. I asked them to place text blocks in each room in their house, and write a few sentences on what they might do in each room.

After about 25 minutes of writing, we visited each house, taking a look at the text blocks. I let students read the sentences out loud for us all. 

Then we took off into some survival gaming. I told the students that they would get about 20 minutes to play in survival, and afterwards they were going write a story based on their adventure. This story was to be written in past tense. I produced a book for them called “Adventure verbs” and placed it in their chests. The book contained verbs in the past tense, that they could use when writing.

The lesson finished with 10 minutes of writing and 5 minutes of reading aloud.

Minecraft as a tool for designing 

A student showed me these screenshots of a house he had designed. I was very impressed that he had taken his building a step up, away from the “typical” Minecraft style. 

I don’t think the actual building has taken a lot of time, but I think the process of creating this particular style has been time consuming. It shows how Minecraft also is an easily accessible tool for creating designs.

/Thanks to Toby aka Tobiasrockz.

Beginners English: Building vocab and sentence construction

We continued our english course with some repetition of words already covered, and expanded on these. Students were given time to build on their houses, providing more detail, thereby adding more words.

After this, we moved on to working with verbs, by playing in survival and writing sentences based on the session of play.

Heres the lesson plan:

1. Build: Students were given a chance to build more and add content and rooms to their houses. I asked them to label everything they built with a sign, which was to be blank. I put the flipchart from the last lesson up on the IA whiteboard, so they could get ideas for content. (30mins)

2. Visit: Students visited each others houses and filled in the blank signs as best they could.(20mins)

3. Visit together: We visited one house together where I went through and students were allowed to comment and discuss. I made some corrections and adjustments to the signs.(10min).

4. Survival: We switched to survival and played for a bit longer than I had planned. I joined the game and did some spelunking of my own. What a treat. (25mins)

5. Write: I gathered the class and pulled out my book and quill. Each student contributed a verb first, which we used in a sentence. For this lesson we kept it to simple present.(15mins)

For next lesson we will be working with their spoken language, and pronounciation.

Beginners english: Survival verbs

Today we carried on working with “building vocab”, where students improved their houses, applied more detail and added new words. To expand on their vocabulary, we moved on to a different activity: We started a session of survival play, which we used to generate a list of verbs, as seen in these screenshots.

Here’s the lesson plan from today:

1. Repeat vocab at the IA whiteboard: We went over words already covered and expanded. All students at the whiteboard, dragging, dropping and discussing words. See the flipcharts here (30mins)

2. Build: Students went into more detail, started bringing more objects and words into their houses.(45mins)

3. Survival verbs: Students played in survival mode for a Minecraft day- and night. I paused the game and asked students to tell me what they had done. I focused on the verbs that they used, and made a list with my book and quill. Afterwards, students made their own lists and signed the book. (30mins).

I intend to let my students work on with the words on our list, introducing basic conjugations, and building simple phrases and sentences.

Building vocabulary

Here are some screenshots from my beginners english lesson today. The goal of the lesson was to establish and revise basic vocab for rooms, furniture and things in a house. At the same time we started a new build on our server, where I planned the building with my students in english.

Here’s an outline of the lesson:

1. Read, pronounce and explain vocab: I took some content from a danish site, where we ran through the words that we would be using when building. Students were at the IA whiteboard dragging and dropping while discussing meanings and translating. (20mins)

2. Build location, visual style: I had already found a build location, and decided with the students to build houses inspired by custom built “Hawaii style” beach houses. Some students downloaded visual references for their own use. I gave students 20x20 plots.(20mins)

3. Building: Students were allowed to login as teachers, which gave access to the build tools. Toward the end of the session I told students to put up signs around their houses in the places where the relevant content was.(45mins)

4. Visiting each others house and labeling: Finishing off we took at tour of each house, where we gathered around the signs and filled them in, as seen in the screenshots. I asked different students to fill out specific signs.(20mins).

The building session was rather short, but long enough for us to work with some relevant vocab. There is definately potential to keep working with the build while training language skills.