Gaming doesn’t make much sense to me. Throughout the last couple weeks I have learned some different avenues through which I can connect gaming and education. I have talked to a lot of my students (grades 7-9), and most of the girls and a few boys have said they would rather do school work in the traditional sense than play Minecraft. Since realizing this about my students, I thought that this could be true about other students, but if the teacher decides to be part of Givercraft, students don’t have any choice but to be involved also. A lot of the differentiation about competitions and such come from being inside Minecraft. To me, this didn’t seem fair to those students who don’t enjoy Minecraft or might not understand how to play it that well. If all badges are given out based on completion of tasks inside the world of Minecraft, these students may not have any motivation to do anything. Since this is the case and I would feel completely lost if I was in a class doing this, I thought of developing a badge based on their wikispaces.
In scenario 3 of Givercraft, students are supposed to write a summary of what they build and why. They are supposed to post their summary and screenshots of what they build and add it to their wikispace. This scenario also allows students to be creative in the fact that they can create a powerpoint presentation to show their alternate ending of the story. I think badges could be given out to students who decide to write their summaries based on their grammar and spelling. Whoever can write the best summary based strictly on grammar would get a badge, which means students only have to have good grammar skills, no Minecraft ability or even creative ability for that matter. Another badge could be given to the student who creates the most elaborate powerpoint. As I was thinking about this though, I realized that there are 200 students involved in this, so Thomas suggested working with one class instead of all the classes. I think that is a good route to take because I can handle twenty-five students rather than 200 students.
One of the ways we discussed integrating differentiation into the Minecraft world last night is to create a competition for the most memories collected during Scenario 2 while using a leaderboard. When a student has finds a memory, they have to recreate it, take a screenshot and upload it to their journal on the Givercraft Wikispace. As students recreate their memories and post to their wikispace, we can keep track of the amount of memories the students each have, and post these to a leaderboard. This could be a running leaderboard throughout the second week while students are working on Scenario 2. At the end of the week, the student with the most memories collected and posted to their wikispace would get a badge.
Students need to have interests in what they are learning and if Minecraft isn’t going to motivate them, maybe the writing that coincides with the experience will if they can get awards for what they are good at doing (McCarthy, 2014b). Thinking of myself and the fact that being in Minecraft during school wouldn’t motivate me in any way, even though it seems it should, I am trying to develop ways to reach these students. I know most of these students will be girls, but I also know there are boys who don’t particularly enjoy Minecraft and would rather do schoolwork instead. As I thought through this, I decided to focus my attention to these students, because while if I knew the game it would probably be easy to differentiate inside of the world, we may forget to differentiate for those students who aren’t too fond of the game.
McCarthy, J. (2014a). Students matter: 3 steps for effective differentiated instruction. http://www.edutopia.org/blog/3-steps-effective-differentiated-instruction-john-mccarthy.
McCarthy, J. (2014b). Learner interest matters: Strategies for empowering student choice. http://www.edutopia.org/blog/differentiated-instruction-learner-interest-matters-john-mccarthy.
McCarthy, J. (2015). 50 tools for differentiating instruction through social media. http://www.edutopia.org/blog/differentiated-instruction-social-media-tools-john-mccarthy.