Kiwiana Project - final thoughts

A few jottings of thoughts, rather than anything coherent this time around. If I don't get the ideas down now, they'll be lost!

Questions I have:

1. How far to set the boundaries of what students can do or must do in such a school project.
2. Set criteria for success? But leave this open to choice, how it is approached.

Last week we didn't have a full session (most students were away at sport) so I just had the three senior students and our first job was to record their tour.

After that, I showed them the Minecraft EDU Tutorial...
OwlsRCute, D1amond and DOXINWHAT sped through what had taken me HOURS to make sense of and work through about three months ago! I thought I might have had an advantage, in that I have worked through it before, but no - they were much faster than me - in fact, they did most of it in half an hour. Talk about leaving me feeling inadequate...!

The team and I are keen to have teachers try this out in Term 4, so that'll be exciting to try - for those teachers who would like to.

We also discussed our new project and agreed on the following:

• Farming (growing) theme as is the theme for the school this term
• We generated a random world
• Survival mode
• Farming - must be crops - will specify number of crops? Variety?
• Will only have 3 weeks to do this before I go away overseas for a holiday
• Students will have a choice whether they work with others or not (some want to work with others - security? - others want to work alone)
• Students may help others or work alongside and support each other
• Form their own teams if they want to
• DOXINWHAT pointed out some risks of survival mode - eg - running away from a zombie towards someone else's house, and having the house blow up....

I feel so lacking in skills that, I will have to play in Creative mode so I can fly over and see what's going on? Perhaps one of the criteria is that they have to keep me alive - now.... there's a thought! Ha! Not this time...

Points to note - different personality types?

• DOXINWHAT prefers to work alone "I'm more of a loner"
• D1amond keen to work on own too, but not so adamant about it - might like to be near-by, and help others or get help as suits?
• OwlsRCute afraid of survival mode - agreed with me that you actually genuinely feel the fear - so this leaves me wondering about a benefit of gaming - ie - is this a good way to learn to overcome fears, and give things a go without worrying about real risk and failure? Certainly, in my younger days I was never a risk-taker, and always followed the rules. Then computers came along, and I started trying things out, exploring, trying again - I'm quite a different person now because of that.