I love tech, but I was never much of a gamer to be honest. But, people around me are obsessed with video games and they often tried to convince me to give it a try. After all, there is such a variety that there must be a game for me! Time passed, and I never really gave it a try. So when we got the opportunity of leading an inquiry project around technology and pedagogy, I felt like I had no other choice than choosing something outside of my comfort zone : video games.
Since the beginning of the year, I have been seeing a lot of worksheets in language classes and a lot of traditional pedagogy with a teacher at the front giving a lesson. It is not so much that I don’t see value in this, but more that I truly don’t identify with this style of teaching. This is not me. I have been thinking of all the ways I could play with different projects in my class to help my student live authentic situations to practise their French and I came up with a couple of ideas like podcasting, theatre, comic book, but nothing around tech. And then… I got the opportunity to explore the world of video games in this class!
So, it made total sense for me to try to link the video games to an attempt of making French and any language classes more engaging and authentic. Lauren, who is also a language teacher and overall amazing, was also interested in this idea of bringing Minecraft in our classroom to help learn language skills. But, we were not sure if it was possible.
My little house in Minecraft with my character
why Minecraft?
Minecraft is very popular game created Markus Persson and developed by Mojand. It is categorized as a “sandbox game” which allows you to create worlds and use creativity to build with different types of boxes. You can play in different mode like creative, survival and others. What were the criteria that guided our choices?
Let’s just say that the choice of Minecraft became pretty obvious as a great first step into this universe since there are already so much work done in education. It is also :
- Beloved by students
- Easy to learn and understand
- Incredibly versatile
- Fun (so much fun!)
- Great for creativity
- Approved by educators
It just made sense!
My character in our village
Minecraft Day 1
Last week, we got some time in class to work on our Edtech inquiry and since UVIC has Minecraft in its lab, Lauren and I decided that it was the perfect time to play for the very first time. Neither one of us had played before and it was SO MUCH FUN.
We laughed, we learned pretty quickly the basic controls and we started exploring, mining, and defending ourselves. The colours are bright, the principles easy to comprehend and you can do whatever you want. However, we did not have a lot of time to really dive deep in the game.
The following weekend, knowing that I was working on this project, my friends created a server and we all started to play together. We play in survival mode and we are currently creating our little town. They thought me how to defend myself, provide for myself, survive by myself and progress in the game. We collaborate on some things and we all have our little projects. We talk to each other constantly on the chat in the game so I never feel really isolated. Even though my friend already created a railroad system while I was still learning how to mine, everything is put in common so I can enjoy it, but I also can follow my own rhythm. I am not delaying anybody. It is just the right amount of collaboration to not feel pressured!
My character in my mine
It is truly AMAZING!
So, I am pretty excited to discover how I could use Minecraft in my classroom. I know Lauren have already wrote on the research we found on the subject. I also cannot wait to talk about what others do in their classroom for other subjects.
Images are all screen capture I took.
