Week 9 Reflection – Gamification

Minecraft Education

Our Week 9 class started with a presentation from Kara Dawson who is a District Information Technology Support Teacher for SD71 and Microsoft Innovative Expert Educator, about how Minecraft can be used as an educational resource in schools.

During her presentation Kara spoke about how Minecraft Education gives teachers the ability to make learning any of the subjects engaging for their students, while being provided with all of the information they’d need in order to create lesson plans to help them do this. This technology not only provides the lesson to the students in a game format that engages students and fosters creativity that is great for visual and hands-on learning, but it also provides teachers with curriculum aligned lessons.

Lightbot | Scratch

After Kara’s presentation, Mike Silverton spoke to our class about two programs that can be used to teach students about coding called Lightbot and Scratch.

Lightbot is a game that teaches students the basics of coding. Students have to learn and then use a series of commands in order to get the character from one square to another in a structured manner and along a pre-determined path.

Scratch is a program that takes coding for students to the next level where they create their own code to make the Scratch move around, speak, and even change costumes.

I like these coding programs better than the programs I was exposed to in elementary school such as the Plants vs. Zombies coding program was difficult to learn and navigate whereas something like Lightbot is very straightforward and easy to navigate. For example, when playing Lightbot rather than having to guess how many spots forward you have to make your character move (as you did in Plant vs. Zombies), there is a grid so all you have to do is count how many squares there are, and when using Scratch rather than using a set of rules to learn about the capabilities of code, you could use your own creativity.

Click here to watch a short video demonstration that I created of how to use Scratch (enter passcode: nKH0C^qw).

Clearly this shows how the educational use of technology has evolved when it comes to game-based learning and how the student’s needs are being focused on and programs are being designed for this purpose.

I look forward to exploring these more myself and using game-based learning in my future classrooms.