Digital game based learning

Minecraft English kicks off!

Yesterday I finished the first lesson of Minecraft english with a group of enthusiastic young lads. Here’s a brief description of the lesson and some reflections on how it went.

The class is comprised of 10 young guys, 17-20 years of age. Several have actual learning disabilities and most of them, if not all, have had  motivational issues when it comes to learning certain subjects. But by using minecraft as a learning environment, I hope that their predjudices against learning will be sat aside and that their focus will be on the challenges I set for them.

As a special bonus we had journalist Anders Høeg Nissen from Harddisken (public radio tech programme) visiting the class. So come Wednesday (9.Nov) we’ll hear his perspective on how it went…
After getting the students’ google acounts up and running, I started the lesson by sharing a spreadsheet with them that they would be updating every lesson during this course. Here they will be sharing information with me on game modes,  map types, what they did and what they learnt. I’ve also made a column for myself to fill in when I evaluate them.
My agenda for the lesson was simply to let the students play and for me to observe how they went about playing the game. I expected the students to start opening the minecraft wiki and using youtube and google to search for solutions for what they wanted to to. Some were doing this , others had started building projects and others had discovered the uses of TNT in creative mode…
During the lesson I presented some of the possibilities for our lessons - among other things exploring different worlds, such as scenic worlds, adventure/ quest worlds etc.
There was a fair amount of english being spoken in the classroom - something I’ll conciously have to encourage the students to do, otherwise they’ll switch over to danish.
Towards the end of the lesson I asked the students to return to the google spreadsheet and evaluate their session - also adding their ideas on what they would like to do in future lessons.
For my next lesson I’m aiming at getting the school server up and running. I’m trying to conjure up a scenario in which the students have to collaborate in a building project - of course where english is the working language.
Generally I can see the need for someone to orchestrate the activities in a certain direction. Just letting the students play and waiting for something fantastic to happen isn’t enough.
What will be interesting to see is, if I, as a newbie teacher, can give the (minecraft) experts a framework in which they can excel! 
 My final thoughts are on the amount of time and energy I have spent getting an overview of the world of minecraft and how this game can be made more accessable to a wider group of educators. More on this in coming posts.