Digital game based learning

Minecraft English - 2nd session

For my second session I had a number of goals, firstly I wanted to establish a classroom culture of students only speaking english to each other - hopefully this would be encouraged by the informal setting of the game.

Secondly, I hoped to challenge the students to cooperate in a building project. And finally I wanted to get the minecraftedu server running and see it function with 8 users logged in.

Again the lesson started with students opening their spreadsheets in google docs, then opening MinecraftEdu and logging on to the server I had made. The server map was generated from the seed “FireCrotch”. I just found out the night before what seeds were all about - and this seed gave me an island with a suitable size. Once all logged in I teleported all the students to my position using the ingame teachers menu. Here I could freeze all the students’ activity and give them a bit of info on what was going to happen.

The story I gave the students was a scenario where a group of builders got stranded on an island. The group decide to march off in different directions and eventually they find themselves at opposite ends of the island, where they begin their settlements.

Once the students had found a location they started their settlements. As far as collaboration went there weren’t many initiatives on the students’ part.  They were building next to each other but not coordinating their efforts to creating something consistent. There were however 2 pairs of students who went about building something together - a castle and a smaller version of the eiffel tower.

I think that I could have facilitated their cooperation better by setting up some premises for their building projects - such as limiting materials, having them talk and sketch up their ideas for building or saying that structures had to resemble real life buildings. On the other hand I suspect that it would restrict the students’ imagination and hinder their playful creativity.

As it wasnt my primary goal I didnt get too preoccupied with the actual building - I was more interested in what was happening while they were building. And this is what impressed me the most. The students were chatting while they were building. Although it was with coarse language and thick danish accents they were speaking unhindered and not contemplating correctness but more focused on making themselves understood. In my dialogues with the students they were negotiating meaning with me when they needed words. This is a key skill in second language learning when the learners vocab runs short. 
In my 10 yrs as an esl teacher I have witnessed so many students who never got past the threshold of speaking out loud in class, mainly because they were shy and didn’t like being making mistakes or being corrected publicly in front of peers.
This was something quite different.
The casual atmosphere allowed the students to become less occupied with correctness and more focused on communication.
For future lessons I think I might pick some of their minecraft expressions and phrases up, when working with grammar and pronounciation. I have to keep in mind though, that most of these students have great difficulties with writing.
As far as the minecraftedu server went there was some instability with students loosing connections but I explained to the students that they were beta testers so they would have to suck it up, which they did. The minecraftedu interface was easy to use as well as the teachers ingame menu - basically it allows you to control server settings from inside the game instead of having to control the server separately. 
So I feel quite content with what I’ve accomplished until now. A tool that I still feel I need to plan my lessons a bit better is a map generator where I can create an overview of the universe that I’m putting students into. This would help me plan construction projects with students and let me faciIitate some more coordinated assignments.