#computercraftedu

It’s almost time for holidays but before we close the shop for a brief moment before the spring semester, we have one more community highlight to share with you. 

Jason Wilmot is a K-5 Computer Science teacher from Lincoln, NE who together with his students won the Code.org $10,000 prize in 2014 using MinecraftEdu & ComputerCraftEdu. Without further ado, let’s hear it from Jason!

Introduction 

My name is Jason Wilmot. I am a teacher, writer, traveler and an all around believer in good. I have enjoyed eight amazing years in elementary education, first as a 4th grader teacher and most recently as K-5 Computer Science educator. I am an Apple Distinguished Educator (Class of 2015), a $10,000 recipient from Code.org, a founding board member of The Bay and try to be an overall good neighbor. I have traveled the world, met beautiful people, and have seen the many ways education impacts the heart of communities.I was an early adopter of using Minecraft in the classroom and started using with it in 2013 with the partnership of the University of Nebraska. Since that time, I have used MinecraftEdu with over 800+ K-5 students. All the while, I made a point to write, post and share the stories, thoughts and student creations along the way. Some notable creations were our school-wide Thank You to Code.org, Kindergarten Vines, and a heart-wrenching memorial. I have however, recently taken a leave of absence from the world of education in order to make time for my wife and for our first little Wilmot arriving in January. In the meantime however, I’m still very much a MinecraftEdu fanboy and continue to advocate for its presence in learning environments.

What was your relationship to Minecraft before MinecraftEdu?

Minecraft was first introduced to me in my last year as a 4th grade teacher by Tre-Vawn, a bright-eyed genius who had an imagination too great for anyone his age. He had a knack for thinking things through in a “who’s the teacher, now?” sort of way. He and three of his classmates persuaded me to give it a shot. I downloaded it, put it on the iPads and oh my, the fire spread quickly. Within days, my original Minecrafters were awarded with the uphill task of teaching the next person how to play. And as the school year rolled on, almost every student was vying for time on the iPad, just to play Minecraft.As my last days of that season came to a close, my Minecraft crew talked me into having a BYOD Minecraft Party. We got a hold of as many iPads as we could – which, was not many – and connected over the same servers. And on that fine day, I played Minecraft for the first time. Actually, what I experienced was nothing too impressive to be honest. I initially found Minecraft to be a bit underwhelming. It was blocky. It looked outdated; retro. I didn’t understand why kids – in this day and age - would like something so profoundly simple. But for some reason they did; They loved it. So, I decided that I wanted to know why - and over the next two years I definitely discovered a love for the game firsthand.

How do you use Minecraft or MinecraftEdu in the classroom? 

One of my primary motivations for the using MinecraftEdu was to learn how to further embedded technology into education. However, it was a splash deeper than that – I didn’t just want to sprinkle in techy gadgets or electronic worksheets – I wanted to find where curriculum, creativity and student desires could meet. Maybe I’m old skool, new school, or something in the realm of other – but as an educator, what I hold onto more than anything else is this: learning must be meaningful, and it must be relevant. That means content must be presented in real world ways. It should make sense and whenever possible it should be simulated, not just presented in information-only forms.Minecraft was the vehicle for this. We have learned about digital citizenship, computational thinking and connected everyday classroom curriculum into student creations. Kids have solved math problems, created digital dioramas, and have built projects like the Great Wall of China, the Orphan Train, our solar system, water conservation tutorials, and everything in between. We have simulated learning goals from Language Arts, Junior Achievement and extracurricular activities. Really, I could keep going, but I think you get point: with MinecraftEdu the possibilities are endless.

What were some of the challenges in getting started?

At the time, getting started with MinecraftEdu held a huge learning curve. I learned about servers, mods, installation - all unfamiliar territory. Additionally, there was the all import aspect of weaving in pedagogy, outcomes and student voice. On top of all that, there were parents to convince, peer educators to persuade, and the overall pressure that comes with pioneering anything new. All in all, It was a perfect storm of discovery, opportunity, and a real-world learning problem solving.Yet the most challenging aspect of getting started was pushing past the traditional mindset of what learning environments can look like. Maybe I’m old skool, new school, or something in the realm of other – but as an educator, what I hold onto more than anything else is this: learning must be meaningful, and it must be relevant. That means content must be presented in real world ways. It should make sense and whenever possible it should be simulated, not just presented in information-only forms.Our job as educators is not to provide the dots, but to facilitate the connecting of dots. This means taking student experiences and building into that specific knowledge base. It means getting to know the students on an individual basis. It’s discovering what they find interesting, what they believe about the world, and where they find significance. And for all these things – for this affinity space – the best place to start was Minecraft.

How have your students responded? Do you have a specific success story? 

Out of all the success stories, my favorite memory was our Hour of Code last November. Weeks prior to the Hour of Code, we shifted our focus to discuss programs, loops and repeat features built within coding languages. We had some unplugged coding activities like using x and y coordinates to program movements, and we conjured up some pretty crazy whole-class dances with custom moves (our algorithms) and loops. By the time the weeklong Hour of Code rolled around, the students were ready to take all that we had learned and use it within MinecraftEdu. For our Hour of Code, we used a Minecraft mod called ComputerCraft. With this Logo Turtle-based mod (ComputerCraft), students programed their own ideas and even recorded them on a sheet of paper - making the learning more concrete and enabling them to program at home without a computer. Students used drag and drop movements and actions so that the turtles mined into the earth, built stairways into the sky, and dug a series of holes only to have the turtle turn around and fill them back in. One student programed a hide-and-go seek turtle, another had the turtle build a rectangular house foundation, while another even synced up their turtle to drop materials onto a pressure plate which activated a redstone circuit with fireworks. On top of all of that, at the end of the of the week I got to surprise our entire staff and students with a $10,000 check from Code.org - allocated to be spent on even more computer science goodies and iPads for the regular classroom teachers. It was a phenomenal moment in my mind and a moment I’ll cherish far into the future.  

What is the future of Minecraft in your classroom? 

As I mentioned earlier, I have recently take a leave of absence from my classroom, nonetheless I’ve stayed involved in side projects like helping lead a Minecraft summer club. Additionally, I recently finished writing a chapter contribution on Minecraft for a soon-to-be published piece on Gamificaiton. Lastly, I’ve have gotten to help connect some pretty cool individuals who are currently developing a mod with loads of potential.  

Do you have any advice for teachers starting out, or who are already working with  MinecraftEdu?

My advice to any teacher is to share what your kids are creating in class! Let’s face it: there is an uphill battle when it comes to convincing others of the educational benefits of MinecraftEdu - merely because it’s a ‘game.’ Nonetheless, my favorite way to overcome this mindset is simply by sharing what the kids are doing and creating to demonstrate their understanding.  So what are the best ways to share? I’ve thoroughly enjoyed using Vine, Twitter and the hashtag #minecraftedu. However, there are also kid-friendly hubs like Creatubbles.com where students can store screenshots and share them in a kid-friendly community. Additionally, you could use Google Classroom or Edmodo, but most importantly it’s all about showcasing what kids are doing and learning..

Would you like other educators to contact you about your experiences? 

I love connecting with other educators and talking Minecraft. I’ve spent a lot of time blogging my experiences, creating videos tutorials and writing out processes to help more educators hop on board the MinecraftEdu train. If you want to check out my blog, it can be found at JasonWilmot.com/minecraft. There you can see our classroom creations, view our Vines, videos and learn more about how I’ve used MinecraftEdu in the classroom. You can also reach me on Twitter at @mrjasonwilmot.

This week’s editorial post comes from our CEO, Santeri Koivisto

Europe Code Week and Hour of Code are fast approaching - we are preparing some things to share!

Coding has become a focus in schools over the past two years, but it is needless to say that in many places, teaching coding is a complex problem. It is not simple here at TeacherGaming either, but we are testing new kinds of approaches to teaching computational thinking, and we’d like to invite our community to try them too.

This past June, TeacherGaming launched our own Minecraft / MinecraftEdu coding project called ComputerCraftEdu based on the highly popular ComputerCraft mod made by Dan200. It’s available for free to all Minecraft users, and also included in the newest builds of MinecraftEdu (so your school may already have it installed). More info about what ComputerCraftEdu (CCEdu) is can be found by visiting: www.computercraftedu.com.

The focus on how TG wants to introduce coding has from the start been about making coding useful in places where young people already spend time, like Minecraft. Also we want to make sure it is available and compelling outside of just school.

This autumn the first major ’coding event’ is the Europe Code Week. If you haven’t heard of it, visit http://codeweek.eu. Between the 10th and the 16th of October, all throughout Europe small events are happening where people, regardless of their age, background or skill level, can come together and try coding. Of course it is important for us to contribute something! We are a company known for doing a few unorthodox things, like our workshop tours.

For #codeEU week we are setting up a pop-up shop in Tampere, Finland with the local youth department. Everyone can participate, but couple of days during the week are dedicated for a younger audience. We are also working with a local school called Lamminpään koulu to pilot our workshops and see if resonates with students.

But our #codeEu week offering is not only for the people that have access to our fair city, we are putting all kinds of things online starting from the mod and map itself we are using. So please visit computercraftedu.com to see what we’ve been up to!  for more targeted #codeEU information and resources visit codeweek.computercraftedu.com.

One of the coolest things coming up there is a printable ComputerCraftEdu based BOARD GAME that will be available to all. It is meant to work as a standalone game for people who are not interested in Minecraft or just don’t have access to CCEdu itself, but it also serves as a warmup for using the core CCEdu and ’digging’ into programming the turtles themselves.

All of this won’t stop at #codeEU week, but will carry on for Hour of Code later this year. The plan is that all good ideas gathered during #codeEu week will be available for all people around the world for Hour of Code activities. There will also be a more ’advanced’ version of our board game available for older players.

The #codeEU site will transform into Hour of Code site after the coding week and will once more hold all the information and activities we offer. Plan is to offer online seminars, free of charge, before the Hour of Code week to introduce you (teacher, parent, educator and / or person interested in coding and / or teaching coding) to how you can approach CCEdu yourself or with your group of learners. These will most likely be offered over Twitch. More info soon!

How about taking this into even more ’grand’ scale? Why not? Let’s lean forward and build a network that creates similar pop-up events that we can replicate this year in Finland. So here’s the plan:

Code Week - One prototype pop-up shop in Tampere

Hour of Code week - Prototype network around Finland with strong concept and structure

Code Week + Hour of Code 2016 - A global network of passionate people sharing coding + Minecraft love around the world with a well tested concept

Are you with us? Let’s do it!

Now back to the concept building table. Board game proto was just tested with the TG play test group and they found it a lot of fun. Great news!

More info soon! Please follow #CCEdu hashtag for most frequent updates and as always, keep sharing your own ideas with #MinecraftEdu.

Parhain terveisin (=Best regards)

The tour arrangements have been going on behind the scenes for quite a while now and last week we properly announced the plans at a few events and on the Internet (#tgtour2015). As a result yesterday morning we woke up to a ton of contacts from people who offered to host us or were interested in taking part. A huge thanks for the support! 

We are now contacting everyone who reached out to us and working on setting up more workshops - these will be announced and open for signing up on the tour website (tour.teachergaming.com) as soon as they get confirmed. We’ll tweet about any updates too (@MinecraftEdu, #tgtour2015). 

Hope to see you in one of the events!

-Jannika (the one who makes the arrangements)

The first week of November. Finally back in Finland. The last leg of tour outside Finland behind us it was time to focus on Finnish schools and libraries. While both Santeri and Mikael were feeling the battle-stress by then, there was no time to rest!

First week of workshops was hosted by the wonderful library of Tapiola in Espoo. The library already promotes the joy of discovery and tries to spark curiosity in their customers. For example, they are early adopters of 3D-printing and teaching programming. It is no surprise then that all our Tour-games received a warm welcome. Mikael hosted three ComputerCraftEdu-workshops and a Kerbal-workshop and latter half of the week saw Santeri with the whole set: Gamestar Mechanic, KerbalEdu and ComputerCraftEdu.

(picture from: https://www.facebook.com/tapiolankirjasto)

Awesome shirt btw!

The workshop space and computers were limited, so we were working in pairs. This familiar “restriction” can either be taken as a boon or a bane. We choose the former. Instead of complaining about the lack of hardware, you can turn the situation into a learning possibility. You can pair experts with novices and make them share their expertise, make them talk. Many times the difference between playing at home and playing at school is the sense of companionship you get from playing with your friends. You might get the same feeling at home but many times the company you keep in multiplayer games is anonymous and the focus is on the tension between the players. We are trying to set a different tone when playing in class and starting of by helping a friend goes a long way. Another option is to match the student by skill: learning the game together can be helpful and having two pairs of eyes and hands can lower the threshold tremendously. Visa versa, having someone who plays as much as you do can open up new perspectives to the game.

  Pelitaitoviikko

TeacherGaming was the guardian of the National Gameday in Finland this year. Again, this sent us around the country once more to host workshops. Many of the locations were in the southern part of Finland but we also made sure our northern compatriots were not left out. For them, we hosted a webinar to get them up to speed so they would be able to run their own workshops as well.

We also partnered with IlonaIT and Metaverstas to offer a MinecraftEdu webinar for Finnish teachers. A great show to watch if you know any Finnish :)

The workshops themselves were aimed to promote gaming as a cultural phenomenon and to expand the meanings we attach to games. Maybe we can highlight different sides of gaming; in addition to being interactive and great fun, they offer a broad range of experiences in addition to being entertaining. We met hundreds of students and tens of teachers during the week and passed on the game challenge to them: the idea was to challenge someone they know to experience games in a new way. Maybe sit your parents down to play with you, explore a new genre (Mikael is really afraid of horror games!) or try different media (many of us are boardgame geeks, too).

    PD

In the meanwhile Santeri was running around Helsinki doing CPD (professional development) for local teachers. Our model is rather robust. We take only a few keen teacher per session and train them in their own computer suite in the morning and then invite their classes to take part in the training in the afternoon. This way we ensure that the teacher get past the first few thresholds. Free free to try it at your school!

We have noticed that while mass lectures can ‘convert’ people in larger quantities, pinpoint in-depth sessions for teachers that really want to get going are better for the overall penetration and for creating small pockets of expertise around the country. This way teachers can more easily share the knowledge. It’s a fact that our small company can’t run training for the whole world, so we need to focus on creating high concentration of skill where ever we go that can be spread locally.

One special training we ran.. actually it was a workshop for the executive board of education department of Helsinki. For those of you who don’t know, Helsinki is our nation’s capital and the biggest city in the country. We had a group of kids from a local school Siltamäki playing with the board. Every board member had their own student tutor helping them with the controls and with the turtle robots. By the time we moved from learning Minecraft to learn how to program some turtles, the board members took a step back and just wow’ed at students coding a whole bunch of bridge building, house building, mining and other turtles.

It was probably the easiest workshop ever for us ‘trainers’ and really showed how the next generation of learners can adapt to things like coding much more naturally.

Uuuuuhhhhh…. after 50 days on the road our team is tired, but very happy. We still have the final stretch ahead of us and the FINALE: National Game Day! Like said, our fair company TeacherGaming is the protector of the National Game Day in Finland on 15th of November.

But first, let’s jump back to Tuesday last week. We went to GameCity, a event we have a long history with! It was 2012 when TG headed out to do some STEAM (add Art to STEM) school activities for local youth, schools and event attendees. This year was no difference and we ran seven workshops for over 150 people who attended!

This year GameCity had their own building for the first time and a whole bunch of game demos from local gamedevs INCLUDING our dear friend DAN200 aka Daniel Ratcliffe who was showing his puzzle / computational thinking game Redirection (check it out: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=243118705). For the ones not familiar with TG’s project with Dan200, ComputerCraftEdu (CCEdu): we made a programming suite for MinecraftEdu and that has been a key part of our tour. Now Dan200 was finally able to come and see it in action with real kids!

Our team was also very positively surprised with KerbalEdu’s (kerbaledu.com) performance. We all know that Kerbal Space Program is a hard game, but now we saw that with a good teacher you can compress the learning curve into two hours - and spending that time to learn something that complex and that potent in school is worth the investment! After that the universe of possible curriculum integrations opens!

Oh boy, we both looked terrible when we woke up near Gatwick for our final ascend towards Finland. :) But still alive! Now we have had two great days in a library in Espoo. The library organises eight workshops for local schools as a part of our tour. We also had the honour to work with a very talented group of students from Siltamäki school in Helsinki to do coding with CCEdu for the whole board of directors of the education department of Helsinki! Great fun and the students were awesome.

Now, couple days more at the library and then it’s our Game Day week with lots of PD for Helsinki’s teachers and workshops for organisations participating in the Game Day! Let’s play some more games!

Greeting from home!

Circus is moving, although now within UK only. It’s the last week outside Finland for our #tgtour2014!

Last weekend was the time for MozFest aka Mozilla Festival. Santeri visited MozFest already couple years ago when MinecraftEdu was new and exciting. Now it’s less new, but even more exciting. Our location at the event was within the Youth zone. What we heard was the Youth Zone itself was a pilot for MozFest, but now that the feedback was great and a lot of young people showed up, the rumour has it that the zone will grow. Let’s see if we get an invitation next year!

Our title for the youth zone workshops was ‘Adopt a turtle’, which was by far the most ‘awwwww’ title at the event and we get to thank Mikael for the creativity with that. Feel free to use the title if you are running your own ComputerCraftEdu workshop somewhere. For the sake of open web, and being in good terms with Mozilla, the title is open source and so are all our workshop minutes. We will ‘finalize’ them and write them more clearly when the tour is done. Feel free to use the ‘lesson plans’ however you want. (For our Finnish-speaking readers: there will be a webinar for the National Game Day in November! Stay tuned!)

Mikael went to Manchester on Monday. A classic 5am start from the hotel. Real tour spirit! The host for the two workshops was WOW Zone, WCHG’s learning centre in Wythenshawe. They were conveniently located near Manchester Airport (two pound fifty cab ride anyone?) Their lovely Mac-suite served as the venue and after initial installation scares, we got off to a smooth start (thanks Chris for thinking on his feet!)

The two groups we had for the day were very different: the first one were really a focused bunch and they worked nicely together as a group. However the second group we had were a giant burst of energy. That energy was at times difficult to focus but when it happened they got some really impressive things done. What never ceases to amaze is how quickly kids adapt to Minecraft as structured activity instead of free play. After setting the ground rules it usually takes a few students pushing the boundaries. By the end of the two hours the workshop runs, you hardly ever have to hit the fan-favourite “freeze students” button!

#LEGup is a meetup for educational games (and I also think software) developers and people interested in the topic. Santeri had a wonderful chance to talk at one of the meet-ups about how TG makes our design decisions and how we see our field of business change in the near future. You can take a look at the presentation from Santeri’s slideshare account (@Aalvisto). The feedback was good and the best feedback of all was that few devs commented that the presentation helped them ask the right questions about where their development is going. That was what we hoped!

As said before, the children's faces are one of the best things we see on this tour and the whole idea for this was to give back, work with our community and the great people involved. Sometimes though, we end up in a situation that really leaves a stamp on us for the rest of our lives. Let us tell you a story about Edwin (we wanted to protect the child’s identity and therefore we changed his name for this blog) …

We had this wonderful young gentleman join our workshop for Saturday, but he was more interested in launching rockets into space in KSP than playing Minecraft. After a few rounds of trial and error things started to really fly. A lot of other kids joined too and Edwin was helping them with their rockets. At the end of the day the plan for Sunday was clear: more KSP! OFC!

Now on Sunday morning the organisers were giving out Firefox OS phones. Nice ones actually. Santeri ran back and forth to get one because first you had to get a start or something, then group photo… and I guess after few rounds, Santeri was there, holding a phone.

Unfortunately Edwin and his father didn't come in until later and when they did, they realised all the phones were gone. We heard a rumor that sleep was tight that morning, but that’s how it should be on a Sunday morning! Nevertheless, not getting a phone was a big disappointment for Edwin. That would have been his first phone and all the other kids were running around with theirs. After seeing what was going on - one of our most active kerbonauts was letting out a few tears - we had to do something. We gave Edwin Santeri’s phone and you should have seen the boy’s face. We couldn’t tell if it was disbelief, joy or something else but after few moments the day had clearly turned out to be one of the best ever.

After a wonderful discussion with Edwin’s father, during which all of us were clearly struggling to keep in the tears, and after getting a warm email from Edwin himself we think a good way to end this lengthy blogpost is to copy paste something from the email we sent back to Edwin:

“Hope one day, when you grow up, you are standing in a similar situation with a possibility to do something really great to someone else and you go for it. +1 for the world as a better place. Your reaction after we handed you the phone really made our day.”

Germany was (and will be) AWESOME! Everything else has been great too, but now the top one in our minds is the last stay in Germany for a few days.

Before taking the last long stretch of our #tgtour2014 in the UK, which precedes our long tail in Finland, we came to two places in Germany: Neu-Isenburg and Kaiserslautern (the highest lump of Americans outside America!) and Mikael is still going to Cologne.

At Neu-Isenburg we went to a small youth center that had a big focus on gaming! There we saw game savvy adults that also like to join in the games when the youngsters are playing and a surrounding community of parents that would like to put their children’s game enthusiasm into good use. The center did both pure gaming fun (Awesome! Best gaming there is: group of friends and a multiplayer game + an interested and involved adult! ), coding, game design (not only digital) and much more. We had the chance to work with a highly motivated and a friendly group of kids that had very ‘constructive’ approach to gaming!

Neu-Isenburg was a great example of how the educators and the community can use gaming for theirs and the community’s advantage! We at TG hope to hear what you are doing in the future too!

Now we all now that Minecraft has this insane halo-effect around it, right? Santeri went to an US army garrison school at Kaiserslautern, Germany and the first thing he took part in was a morning assembly for Vogelweh school’s younger students. The person hosting the assembly made a comment before asking Santeri on the stage: ‘He is like Santa who goes around schools and gets Minecraft for them’. :)) You should have heard the crowds of young students go loud after that comment…. ‘We’re going to get Minecraft for our schoooooolllll!!!!’

Vogelweh Elementary school hosted our tour, not only for their students, but for students from two other schools too. A dear member of our community, Mr. Flores is the one to thank for this opportunity! After spending time at a local carnival, staying at the Flores’ family house for three nights, experiencing an army base lockdown, fire drill, rail strike, garrison school we-spirit atmosphere, getting a Army community ‘award’ coin for doing good for the community and, of course, not forgetting the four awesome groups of students we had the chance to work with, the Kaiserslautern excursion was an absolutely delightful addition to our memories from Germany.

Like we said, next stop is UK. #tgtour2014 is over 50% done. We have spent a long time on the road and I guess it’s ok to admit that we miss home, but at the same time we can’t wait for the rest of the great people and the experiences we are going to have from the last parts of our tour.

See you soon UK and thank you once more for all people involved so far! We do this because we think you guys are the best.

Yours from the road,

#tgtour2014 team

(Mikael, Santeri and Jannika)