Digital game based learning

Minecraft English session 4 & 5

Until now I have continued letting my students play a minecraft survival game. Most important here is still letting the students speak english to each other while playing. At the beginning of the 4th session I was happy to notice that students automatically started speaking english once they logged on to the server. Whats more is that most of them also used english when writing in the ingame chat.

For this session I had planned a period of 5 minutes of verbal silence to see if this would encourage them to write some english. Some found this unnatural because talking out loud to each other was a part of what made this experience meaningful to them. Nevertheless silence did cause some to write some more and the more I joined in, the more they would respond. In retrospect I think this experiment was too staged and caused more disruption to the flow of the game. I think a better alternative will be simply beginning to write with the students - something that will engage them; a quest for a hidden food supply maybe…?

One thing I also noticed about the period of silence, was that there was an intense common focus on the info being shared through the chat. This shows me that even if they’re not writing they are definately reading whats being written.

At the beginning of the 5th session I took a brief evaluation of the gameplay with the class. I suggested two ways we could expand on the game and we ended up deciding to split the class into two teams to create some more competition. I don’t know where this will bring us, but we’ll see soon.