Oakleigh State School hosted a ‘Day of Minecraft in Learning’ PD on Friday. Tim Wicks, creator of BuddyVerse kid safe server was the facilitator and Jason Schutz contributed towards the presentation. It was a really terrific day. Teachers were given an insight into many elements of Minecraft and how it can be used in learning. Very early on Tim shared the ‘gems’ related to Minecraft:
- Students find it enormously engaging and motivating
- It can link to almost any area of the curriculum
- It can be wonderful in involving and enabling students who are on the spectrum or on the social fringe
- It is wonderful for creativity and collaboration
- It is magic in terms of the General Capabilities within the Australian Curriculum
During the day, the participants got to use both Minecraft PE and Minecraft EDU. Additionally, they got to set up servers on their own machines and to delve into how to use this side of Minecraft EDU to manage both users and the worlds. They visited the over The Wonderful World of Humanities – an amazing Minecraft world built by a History teacher to enable students to experience the wonders of Ancient Egypt and Rome. The ability to use this world demonstrates a clear benefit of using Minecraft EDU – that teachers all over the world have created worlds which can be downloaded and used by others.
One of the highlights during the day was seeing the student coaches working with teachers. These students were assisting for periods of time during the day. They had been told that in the role of coach they were not to touch anyone else’s iPad – instead they had to demonstrate they understood the significance of their ‘rank’ and coach instead of take over the controls. This reflected Tim’s amazing ability to work with both students and teachers – and to ‘gamify’ their learning – giving them ranks they could aspire to, in-game prizes and the rewarding of positive behaviour.
