Weekly reflection 7

Week 8

This week we had a guest lecturer come into our classroom to talk to us about educational Minecraft. Kara Dawson gave us so much information on how to use this with students and I think this is a resource I would use in my future classroom. I loved seeing all the prebuilt worlds and knowing that exploring math topics in Minecraft was an option, as I had never previously considered it. I do think that there are some aspects of having students be in a Minecraft world that are uncontrollable, although Kara offered advice on how to approach these situations which I thought was very helpful. After the lecture I did access Minecraft education to explore some of the worlds that students and teachers have access to and a common factor is that they are not in survival mode. This is crucial for the educational environment as it forces students to work on the assigned task. This was very interesting to learn about and I would love to use it to complete more projects.

We also looked at the scratch program where students can make their character do, say and wear different things. I had personally never heard of this before and had a lot of fun experimenting with it. I do think that I wouldn’t use this as a resource until I had more experience as I was struggling with some aspects and how to make it do what I wanted. Once I have it figured out I could see myself letting students explore on this website.