Minecraft Education Edition

[darsparx]

I mean if they use it especially in elementary to introduce some subjects earlier and make students love learning at that age it is definitely a great piece of software depending on how it works(I wish I could play around with it somehow). The ironic thing about it is, this pops up right as I'm starting on a research paper for my English class and tying in technological infrastructure issues in reference to finding qualified educated applicants who can come up with the solutions innovative enough to fix the issues. There's just so many subjects and such they harp on the importance but we don't learn them until middle school in most cases and for me that's too late to start getting students interested in them...

I'm just at the point where I know now fully what i want to do but there's a lot of minor specializations that would be nice to have. I want to game dev as my first priority with a fall back of mobile and web. But I also want some education stuff because I'd love to when I get done with schooling to help in some manner with education and improving it because a lot of the ways we're taught are dated and very narrow ways of teaching things. It just doesn't work, especially not for people like me that are very hands on...

[J T]

I used to teach a few different courses at the university: Intro to Research Methods, Clinical Psychology, and a course on teaching. The education edition of Portal came out when I was teaching Research Methods. I really wanted to find a way to use it because I thought it would be fun, but it just wasn't worth all the effort. It takes a lot of extra work in the gaming program to craft not just a lesson plan, but one that can also be played out in the game world. It was also the case that I would need to really adjust my lessons to fit inside the limitations of what Portal was capable of. It felt like trying to stick a square peg into a round hole, and I was not willing to cut important content from my instruction just to make it more fun. My job was to be a teacher, not an entertainer. I want my students engaged, and I try to make things fun if possible, but I was not willing to devote hours of extra (unpaid) prep time to make my lessons a game. A lot of my students had no interest in videogames anyway. And a game takes a long time to play, whereas I can cover a lot more content by quickly running through it in a lecture or by having students read. Activities are really best for training skills rather than knowledge anyway, and if I want to use activities to train skills, it's better that the activities closely fit the skill set, which likely isn't playing Portal or Minecraft. I had students conduct small psychology experiments in my Research Methods course, but trying to force that into Portal, which is even a game that loves science, just wasn't the best way to do that.

The one way that it seemed feasible to use Portal's education edition was by finding an appropriate lesson from the pool of lessons people have made available online. Then you get around the problem of needing to spend hours of extra time in prep work to craft an in-game lesson. But even then, you still have the fact that a portion of students are not into videogames, and are maybe missing information because they are bad at Portal (or Minecraft or whatever), not necessarily bad at learning.

This brings up a larger education issue, which is coming up more with the increasing popularity of online digital teaching materials. They often have some repository of submitted lessons. They may have some incentive system where if your lesson plan gets used, you get a small royalty fee everytime other teachers use it. The plans get rated by users, and the highest rated bump to the top of the search engine. If you extrapolate from this, you see a strong possibility that they create a winner-take-all system where a few teaching tools (particularly well produced and fun lessons) become popular, then they just become what everyone always uses and everyone across the country is taught from the exact same online material, so our collective nation loses out on a diversity of ideas and instruction methods as they are all taught by the exact same source. If school boards start to mandate the use of these online teaching utilities, then real world teachers stop really being teachers and become more like facilitators of online instruction. Then the expertise comes from the online material, rather than the instructor in the room. Hiring people with expertise wouldn't be worth the cost of investment since the online materials are good enough, and teachers become a shell of what they once were. Again, I'm extrapolating and embellishing to make a point, but I do see there being a real detriment to the overuse of online teaching repositories. This issue goes beyond Portal and Minecraft, though they are examples of these kinds of online teaching systems.

[darsparx]

I mean you bring up a interesting point but my thing is it seem like education is and always will be a cookie cutter experience. Especially when you have people like me that are hands on and love the theory behind learning with games or gamification of things, which means I hate when teachers go straight from a book/curriculum in a robot like state which we have the issue of now. Along with the fact there is nothing to foster and grow specialized interests at a young age. I already knew I was somewhat interested in computers in elementary school mostly because that was my favorite class but in the late 90's early 00's there was nothing that focused on that. You also have the problem where everytime we find a problem we introduce a new program instead of fixing the issue and definitely don't devote enough money and resources to education to the ends that really need help...

[ElkinFencer10]

The problem is that both sides need to stop acting as if there's a right or wrong way to teach. I hate hands on shit. I'm old fashioned. My class consists of roughly half lecture, half independent work. That's not the wrong way to teach. A couple of people in my department are very hands on and do almost no lecture and almost exclusively teach through videos and hands-on projects. That's not the wrong way to teach, either. It's ridiculous that people (I'm talking about the state governments, not bitching at you, darsparx) are so insistent that there are different learning styles when the research is 50/50 at best on that but won't even entertain the possibility that it's just as valid to teach through lecture as it is through creative projects.

Education is not an exact science, and there's no "best" way to teach or learn. Different people do things different ways. That's not wrong or a weakness; that's part of humanity.

[J T]

I hate when teachers go straight from a book/curriculum in a robot like state which we have the issue of now.

My teaching philosophy is that I have to be better than the book, or else I don't really serve much of a function beyond telling you to read. I value reading, and I think it's a great way to have students devour a lot of content quickly. But it should just be one tool that the instructor uses, and an activity largely done outside of the classroom.

It is hard to not just teach from the book at times though because there is always a sizable portion of students who don't keep up with the reading, so it's hard for the instructor to do an activity that requires you have read beforehand. You also help solidify knowledge by highlighting the most important parts of the reading in lecture, or in group discussion.

When I teach, I use a lot of different teaching methods, and I always try to pick a method that best fits the topic.
If I want to cover lots of factual info quickly: reading or lecture
If I want students to think through a complex issue: group discussion or research/writing activity
If I want students to students to improve a skill: Role plays or relevant activities
If I want students to strengthen memory recall: pop quiz or scheduled exam

I also have to consider how these things build on each other over the course of the semester, so that they stack up and lead to some final project and/or examination that allows them to put everything they have learned together in an integrated fashion. For example, in teaching Research Methods, my students had to learn principles of the scientific method, statistics, database management, ethics etc. and the course was designed to teach each of the components in a way that by the end of the term, they had a small scientific research project proposed, analyzed, and written into a research paper. Each lesson built on the last and helped them towards their final project, but it all had to be timed in such a way that they got the lesson they needed for the next portion of their final project.

[ElkinFencer10]

When I teach, I use a lot of different teaching methods, and I always try to pick a method that best fits the topic.
If I want to cover lots of factual info quickly: reading or lecture
If I want students to think through a complex issue: group discussion or research/writing activity
If I want students to students to improve a skill: Role plays or relevant activities
If I want students to strengthen memory recall: pop quiz or scheduled exam

This is a brilliant outline. At least in North Carolina, the history standards are PACKED with tons and tons of facts that they expect the kids to know. The World History exam, for example, asks questions as specifics as "What political and economic factors motivated Phoenician expansion into the specific areas that they colonized?" That's a one semester course that covers everything from 15000 BCE until today (the exam has questions about the Arab Spring). With 18 weeks to cover that much information in even close to that kind of detail, we have to cover a lot of straight facts very quickly.

Classes like African-American Studies or Sociology, on the other hand, have much broader and less intensely tested standards, so you have a LOT more time to do things like creative projects, role playing, or "fun" activities. I don't know how it is out west, but in North Carolina, we're expected to teach so much so quickly in the way of straight facts in most classes that we literally just don't have the class time to do that AND have "activities," and one of the big disconnects with the public is that most people don't realize that. There's this demand that we make school "fun" but that we also prepare them for college (which, at least for history, is 90% lecture and research papers), make them able to regurgitate bizzarely specific facts, AND ace a test that we're not even allowed to see. You can't play four different games with only one pair of hands.