Festival2012/Submit/Digging for Pedagogy in a Virtual Sandbox with MinecraftEdu

From MozillaWiki
Jump to: navigation, search
  • Title of session: Digging for Pedagogy in a Virtual Sandbox - MinecraftEdu
  • Your name and affiliation: Santeri Koivisto - TeacherGaming LLC
  • Session format: Learning Lab

What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

The session is made for teachers and fans who are interested in how to get going with a sandbox game in your very own classroom. There will be a short "fundamentals" section that covers dos and don'ts and also ways how to ruin the whole experience with students. The main point, however, is to get you comfortable in using the software itself and get few ideas for you to get you going with your own class.

How do you see that working?

We need a computer with mouse for every participant. We'll start with short hellos and then we'll jump straight into the game to see how it's like. After a short familiarization it's time to go through couple lesson ideas / scripts and get used to the student guiding and managing the virtual world itself. Near the end comes the "rant" about the few mistakes you can do when using games and how to easily avoid them. If we have time, it's also possible to take a look at the content creation tools.

How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?

Everything under 15 will be fine just me trying to keep everyone at the same pace, but if the participant amount goes over 15, I'd greatly appreciate more Minecraft savvy people to help the others to tame the Minecraft's interface, movement and interactions.

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

The most fundamental things will be introduced very straight forward and I'll bring few ready made lesson plans that were in use during the workshop so every participant get something to bring back to their classroom or home.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

I see that there is a group of people that feels confident about facing their first class session inside MinecraftEdu's virtual sandbox.

Retrieved from "https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Festival2012/Submit/Digging_for_Pedagogy_in_a_Virtual_Sandbox_with_MinecraftEdu&oldid=474786"