Minecraft Survival
Minecraft is a single or multiplayer computer, xbox, ipad, iphone, and ipod game/app. "The object of the game is to find and mine diamond and other ores," Kal Lawrence, age 8.
Things minecraft can teach you about:
*from the mind of an 8-year-old avid minecraft player
1. Landforms and bodies of water
2. How to make glass by cooking sand in a furnace
3. A lot about different ores (coal, diamond, iron, gold, redstone, lapis lazuli)
4. Not to be wasteful because you have to chop down trees to build your home
5. Planting saplings that grow into trees
6. Growing wheat and grass
7. If water hits lava it turns into obsidian
8. If lava hits water it turns into cobblestone
9. You can strike flint with metal and you will get fire
10. Diamond is extremely rare to find but sometimes found in close proximity to lava if you are lucky
11. Keeping inventory of your stuff
12. How you get leather from killing a cow (poor cow)
13. You can shear a sheep for wool instead of killing it
14. Math - you need 8 pieces of leather for a tunic
15. How to craft things out of ores you have mined
16. How to make music out of note blocks
17. How to make a mineshaft
18. What you need to bake a cake
19. How you get milk from a cow
What an awesome post! I have to admit, I was curious as to how you might approach this particular assignment because you don't strike me as the type to play video games often : ). But I really love the way you went about this and I think it's really interesting to see all that an 8-year old has gleaned from a video game! I see people playing Minecraft everywhere, and I mean everywhere! Never having played the game myself, I wasn't sure what the premise was besides that you can build stuff. After reading this blog though, it seems like there is a fair amount of science involved and it looks like it certainly might teach the player about the environment and environmental impacts. The other day, I read that a Minecraft world is more than 9 million times the size of our world! I'm not sure how that is even possible, or what it means for that matter. And considering I read it on the internet it might not even be true! (Gotta be skeptical). But it seems as though Minecraft certainly does have some educational value to it. Does it seem that way to you? Thank Kal for sharing with us!
ReplyDeleteThis is awesome! I haven't played Minecraft, so I never could have imagined that there are so many interactions of the game's elements that could be talked about in a science class. If we ever work in a school in which students could consistently have access to a computer with Minecraft installed, I bet it'd be a fun and productive unit to have students poke around in the worlds, create things, and in the process, "Talk to the Game" in the same way that they talk to the text. Then they could present their questions to the class and complete projects to explain the answers. For example, "why does lava turn into cobblestone when it hits the water?" could be a sweet starting point for inquiries about what lava is, what cobblestone is, what happens when real lava hits water, what temperature is and how it affects physical states of matter, etc.; likewise, the question of "how does a furnace turn sand into glass?" could be another fun lesson on physical states of matter, how glass is made in real life, etc. The possibilities go on.
ReplyDeleteThis is really creative and unexpected -- thank you for sharing it with us!
Matt
Your creative post was a great success in my book, Jeni, and on multiple levels. Like your readers, I appreciated your creative approach...it was enlightening to see how Kal described the experience of game play in terms of what he learned. I also found Matt's analogy between talking to the text and talking to the game to be instructive and the source of real potential power. Matt clearly suggests using the play to capture questions that can inspire research and further investigation. In that sense, the play of the game is a kind of hands-on experiment where the value comes from the authentic questions that are generated. Kal does a marvelous job responding to your prompt, ESPECIALLY for his age, but another thing I see as being of great potential value is helping kids to expand their descriptive vocabulary for unpacking and describing an experience *in educational terms* In that sense, I see in your strategy and Matt's observations the possibility of helping kids to think like a teacher does...what was the nature of this experience? Hopefully it was fun, but what else did I have to do/think about/put together/analyze in order to play more successfully? Helping kids to describe their own experiences in such terminology can be helpful to them--I believe--in many ways. What do you think? Is this argument at all compelling?
ReplyDeleteWhat a great post! I have never played minecraft and I feel like I know what it's really about after reading this post. I agree with Jeff's point about having kids describe their own experiences to learn more. I've found that this has really worked at Scarlett. Whenever I have the chance to have a student explain something, instead of me, I think it's a great way to develop metacognitive skills. I think Kal may have even learned things about Minecraft he didn't know he knew! This was a very creative way to learn about what we can learn from this game. Nice post :)
ReplyDelete__I gotta admit, I was actually a fan of the no-nonsense format for the information.
ReplyDelete__I spent maybe a month of vacation time playing this game this year, but I never thought about the things I was learning until I began to confront it in my other interests. I was learning about the significance of flint and obsidian blades in early human sites when the connection between life and the game started to make sense. I can only imagine what it's like for kids who get to understand that we get dyes by extracting from plants and things.
__I think it might also give them some confidence about how you or early humans could build surrounded by trees and rocks. Seeing how you can develop your own small house, I think that this can give students a starting place for how the world came to be without computers and why iron was such a big deal. I think you should probably not teach the birds and bees with the cows as the example though. Your son might be able to help you understand why.
Dig on,
Nate
What a creative way to gain more insight on how video games can teach kids valuable skills/information! Your son came up with a pretty great list. I wonder how long it took him to think of all this! I imagine it wasn't very difficult for him since it sounds like he's an expert on Minecraft. I'm impressed with the the wide range of facts and skills that he's learned through the game - from earth sciences to baking! This demonstrates the idea that knowledge can be constructed as we work through problem-solving to complete a task. If the task is interesting and challenging enough, the students will gather and synthesize the information they need and use strategies without even realizing it to find a solution. That's what's so great about games. You're so focused on your task that you're willing to do whatever it takes - build new knowledge, memorize facts, think through strategies, make hypotheses and test them - just to win. Maybe that's why project-based learning or the Sustainability Education model (from shari's class) can be an effective way to teach. Thanks for sharing this Jeni!
ReplyDelete