Gaming in Education- Observing Minecraft in the Classroom

In the last couple of weeks I have observed a few classrooms from Kindergarten to middle school using Minecraft EDU to support 21st century learning. To be completely honest I have not played Minecraft before this week, although I have watched my kids play it on the iPad and computer. I understood the theoretical affordances but for the first time I actually saw it in action in classrooms.

My first visit was to a fourth grade classroom facilitated by Jason Wilmot. As we walked into the classroom you could immediately sense the buzz of activity. As Matt Gordon shared later: "the first thing you get is engagement". All students were engaged moving around (the virtual world), asking for peer help, showing each other how to accomplish specific task. We (Jason, Ji and I) decided to start students with unstructured time seeing what patterns emerge. Jason is weaving in specific skills required by district and state standards making sure that students are receiving all the skills necessary.

I settled next to two students building houses one right next to each other. They were discovering functions and clearly helping each other produce the outline for their respective creations making sure that they each have enough space. This simultaneous communication off and on line is something we have observed across all grades. This is a fantastic illustration of the 21st century skills of Communication and Collaboration.

Moving to a different group I saw a student avatar in what seemed to be a vast underground cavern creating bales of wool and setting them on fire in large quantity. As I watched I could see no real reason for his actions. I casually asked: "I see that you are lighting a lot on fire". "Yes" he answered eagerly, "you see I am lost and can't find my way out. My friend is in the area", here he tapped the shoulder of his friend on the adjacent computer "he knows where he is. I hope that if the fire is strong enough he can see it and help me get out." I smiled. What I initially saw as a mindless activity, turned to be Critical Thinking and Problem Solving.

Two students were introduced to me as the "resident experts" since they have been playing at home for a few months. These two were mindlessly building, it seemed as if their position as experts was actually stopping them from exploring and innovating. I asked "What are building?"
"a house" they both answered almost in unison.
"can you make doors or windows in Minecraft?" I asked. One started showing me how you can make windows and seemed invigorated by the more structured task. Later I challenged him to create a second story with stairs leading up. He seemed somewhat disinterested but before I left he proudly showed me his new house with a roof garden and stairs that actually worked. His friend switched to creating a water area, a challenge to create a pool with a slide sent him on a creative bend as well.

On a visit to Matt Gordon's class in Horizon Middle School in Kearny we saw a real "Digital Making Space". His classroom hosted a variety of students working in Minecraft (set of tasks), creating video with iPads, editing work and probably a few other tasks that I failed to catch.

Both Matt's and Jason's spaces showed that the interaction of virtual world and a challenge led to Creativity and Innovation.

The biggest challenge that I observed across settings is the power of students to damage each others creation. While this problem can be managed with the tools embedded in Minecraft EDU, we would like to challenge students to create a civil society and foster democratic principles in which students set the norms and explore implication of personal and community boundaries. In this way we can address not just digital citizenship but citizenship in it's broadest sense.

Video Game like Thinking

Years ago I remember Sarah and I observed our boys playing when suddenly one of them called 'pause' then proceeded a discussion about the nature of pressing the 'X button'. This was not a video game but rather a game they were playing outside borrowing the rules of video games they were playing at the time.

Fast forward a decade or so. Two weeks ago we were in Breckenridge for a family vacation. We sat for lunch in a small pizza/italian place. It's one of these places with paper and crayons so everyone was busy creating in one form or another. Oren who is 8 was busy creating mazes. Now Oren has been a maze fanatic since he was 5 or so. Usually he creates very elaborate designs that can be challenging. He often uses what appears to be mishaps in drawing (e.g. what appears to be accidentally incomplete lines are actually openings) to make the mazes harder.

This time he hands me a this puzzle with a smug look on his face.

Patiently he explains: S is for start F is for finish. I stare at him blankly, he smiles and encourages: "Just do it Abba". I draw a straight line from S to F and he responds smiling: "yes that's it". Then he proceeds to draw this one:

My first instinct is to see if any of the corners just appear to be connected or have tiny gates in them. No the boxes are all closed. "Can I go around?" I ask suspecting a trick. "No" he answers smiling. I know something is going on but I honestly cannot figure out where he is going with this. "I give up" I finally say. Oren then explains patiently. The thicker lines are doors and when you step on the lower case 'f'

they open. "How am I supposed to know that?" I ask incredulously. He looks at me not sure what I mean: "you try it out. You move until you step on the 'f' and see what happens."

It is common to hear "grown ups" criticize video games and the way they seem to engross kids. Here in a different way you can both see what video game thinking is and its impact on learning and thinking.
Oren created a basic level that demonstrated some of the basic rules. Then he proceeded to the real challenge. He also assumed a level of interactivity that is a part of all such games. The static paper and pencil game rules are too simple interactive/ experimental rules are so much more interesting and challenging- mostly because you have to experiment before you know the solution for sure.

I could go on for a while analyzing what appears to be his thought process but I would like to suggest that this video game thinking is analogous in many ways to learning in new domains, especially science and the arts. Instead of repeating known solution to familiar questions, what scientists and artists seek are new ways to respond to problems. They have to interact with ideas, materials and symbols to solve the problems. Video games fostered the right way opens our children to a new creative and thoughtful world of discovery and creation.

What Tech Startups can Teach Educational Reform

Photo from: yoursmallbusinessgrowth.com

Let me start by saying that I have never been part of a tech startup so my view may very well be skewed. I recently read that many venture capitalists prefer investing in entrepreneurs that have already failed once. Actually in a phone conversation with my father he quoted the late Uri Menashe who told him once that he likes hiring retired IDF officers after they had failed their first civilian position. The main lesson for me is that to be successful you need to fail a few times, sometimes many times.

The problem is as Sir Ken Robinson likes to point out repeatedly is that we are building educational systems that seem to converge on the exact opposite direction. High stakes tests that constantly push one answer and the notion that failure is not an option.

So what are the lessons of startups?

1. Collaboration: most if not all startups are based on a group of individuals with different capacities and skills working together to accomplish something that hasn't been done yet. Relationships and the ability to work with others are crucial.
2. Failure must be an option: while the long term must be successful the road to success must include many short term failures.
3. High expectations: startups are successful only if they do something new, or something old considerably more efficiently that it essentially becomes something new.
4. Continued innovation: Once you do succeed you must work to improve and work on the next problem.

There might more and different ones for those who are inside startups but these are my takeaways. What does that mean in education? I believe that points to a very different system than the one we have now. Instead of a high stakes low expectation system I advocate a low-stakes high-expectation system. That is true in the classroom and in the school, for students, teachers, and administrators.

The fear of high-stakes is driving administrators, teachers and students to focus on the most direct route to a known answer- the exact opposite of a startup. Low stakes allow honest discussion and the option to fail occasionally so you can succeed in the long run. If every failure has high stakes we who are a risk averse species (see Arieli) shy away and stop innovating and taking risks. For education to match the needs and fast paced changes in modern society we must make room for low stakes so educators can experiment and provide room for short term failures leading to subsequent spectacular successes. We do not need to give up on high expectations instead we need to be patient for long term gains while short term fluctuations occur. In essence its what your investment advisor told you- don't pay attention to short term. In essence it makes all the leaders managing our educational systems akin to day traders instead of high-tech entrepreneurs.

Thinking Fast and Slow in Education- Part 1

I am currently reading Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel prize winner Kahneman (see a book review here). I am still processing some of the information (or thinking slowly...) but I see some obvious implications for teaching and technology. The first is the positive bias- we almost always underestimate the challenge and overestimate our capacity, the second is our lack of ability to intuitively understand statistical properties of the world around us.
In  1999 I saw this first hand in a classroom. In a summer school based on Bob Calfee's WordWork we had one kindergarten teacher who claimed to have gone through the eight-week program in three weeks. We were surprised but she claimed that all of her students have a solid grasp of all short vowel CVC words and are ready to advance beyond it. How do you know? we inquired, she replied that she has been observing her students being successful in making words. Since we assessed students in every classroom on a biweekly rotation we soon had some results from the classroom. Only four out of 18 students could actually produce the patterns reliably without repeated teacher cues. In essence the teacher saw her best students succeed and conjectured that all of her students could.
This is the reason that we should have an emphasis on formal assessment points in which we can get an honest estimate of what our students can do- not what we believe or want them to. Often I hear teachers saying - I know this student can do a lot better - yet they didn't. Now, sometimes it is true and due to some setting event, then a retest is in order. But if a student is consistently under-performing in a well designed assessment opportunity- then we have simply overestimated their capacity based on effort, our support for their work etc.

In technology and especially project based learning that is emerging as a major component in the (welcome) push for 21st century skills we need to make sure that we have a solid way to assess achievement that circumvents our biases and gains a real windows to what students can do.