Weekly Reflection 7

This week we talked about coding and gamification. We had Kara Dawson from district 71 come in to guest lecture; she talked about teaching the curriculum with Minecraft Education (https://education.minecraft.net/en-us). Minecraft Education helps build creativity, strengthens solving problem solving skills, support collaboration, and brings learning to life. Minecraft Education has pre built worlds which contain experiences like the “pacific northwest coast experience” where students can explore pacific northwest areas and talk to elders and knowledge keepers, write in there books and quills. Teachers have access to lesson libraries and are encouraged to co-create guidelines for Minecraft education in order for the game to be safe and educational for the students. There are even Minecraft challenges put on by the school districts, the students are tasked to design things like eco-friendly resorts and the groups must record a three minute video tour explaining their design. We then discussed a different app called Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tutorial=getStarted). Scratch is a child friendly coding app and it helps teach students about coding and how coding can look visually. Both Minecraft education and Scratch are great ways to introduce ideas of coding and gamification while still allowing for some fun and play. I am excited to try these out in my future classrooms. I think these are great apps to integrate into cross-curricular lesson plans like social studies! Minecraft education provides students with the opportunity to explore and learn about cultures, geography, and histories; which makes it a good addition for social study lessons. 

Take a look below for an example of scratch in action: (Unfortunately this did not let me post a screen recording, so I have a couple of screenshots instead)