Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Learning from students and others

Members of the MAMS ITeam shared their interest, engagement and creativity using Minecraft. But when I ask them to connect their work in Minecraft, with learning in school, they don't provide compelling examples or analysis. I tried to illustrate last week with the high school students' example of creating a model of a cell in Minecraft as a high school biology assignment. I don't know how effective that was.

Paul Soares, Jr. posted this link to a video (that showed up in Joel Levin's blog) of Minecraft project that illustrates more compelling connections to desired learning outcomes:



Does this exemplar help students to understand what we are trying to develop? Last year ITeam members tried to use Alice to meet Mr. Hale's social studies assignment to create a town. They used the libraries of available objects to create responses but the medium seemed to lead them away from his assignment and toward something that it could support. Does Minecraft provide more generic materials that can be used to meet assignments to represent various time-periods and cultures?

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