Mining English: Student Journal Example (Verbatim)

July 9th

-----Minecraft World-----

We were in the small island.

Today, We were going to built our house in here.

Before we started, I had explored around the island to find a nice place for our house.

Finally, I found a really nice plain, it's next to a mountain, many animals live in there.

It would be an useful farm.

We suggested each ideas to design our house.

Finally, we decided as follows.

*The house is a two story house. The range of each floor is 16*16*8(actually, I don't remember each numbers clearly...).

*Use wooden planks to construct the standard of our house.

*Make a double door.

*Set windows on each walls.

*Place torches on each floor.

We started building our house.

I put wooden planks on the plain to make the floorboard.

It was hard work to correct stuffs.

Finally, We finished building the first floor.

Next week, We will built the second floor and fight monsters.

I'm looking forward to do it.

July 16th

We continued building our house.

We didn't have much time, so we had to do it as soon as possible.

click... click... click......

We had spend a lot of wooden planks quickly.

Finally, We had done it!

As I wrote, the range of our house is 16*16*(8+8). Our house looks like a big square.

However, it may save us from monster's attack.

Then, monsters had appeared.

Zombies... Skeletons... Creepers...

I know how to beat animals, but I didn't know how to kill monsters.

We swung swords to kill monsters.

Some players was died, and revived.

Suddenly a creeper exploded, Sadly our house was broken.

After we repaired our house, we explored the cave.

I paired with York to find the diamond.

Everyone were digging the cave.

We found a lot of golds, however we couldn't find a diamond...

It was a grateful challenge.

July 30th 

We were going to play HungerGame.

We learned what it is.

We made each idea, how to alive from HungerGame.

I choosed 3 stuffs to alive.

*Shovel

*Flask

*Lighter

I may use the shovel to dig and hide something, and fight and protect myself.

To fill water, I'll use the flask.

Lighter can burn foods and make me keep warm.

Unfortunately, we couldn't play HungerGame on Minecraft.

So we enjoyed Nether world.

We fought with pig zombies first.

Suddenly, Ghast appeared and attacked us, it caused us confuse!

I shot Ghast an allow, and Ghast died.

Nether is mysterious and horrible...

After we enjoyed Nether, we walled around the minecraft world...

We had enjoyed Minecraft a lot.

Extra

What is FPS?

What is virtual world?

What is Minecraft?

In Minecraft,

we can do any choice just we want,

we can choose our way by myself.

The WORLD has been created by amazing originality.

Dream inside the virtual world, This is what I see on the Minecraft world.

Video Game Lesson: Scribblenauts

I have been reading a lot of literature on educational games, and games in education recently (as they are not necessarily the same thing!). My particular interest in this subject is the reason why they often fail. One of the main reasons for the lack of engagement is that educational games are a culmination of disparate, often diametrically opposed elements. On one hand they are designed to teach a certain subject matter, but the way they go about it is through an unconnected game mechanic. In other words, the gaming context and the learning content do not match up. A good(?) example of this mismatch of game and learning subject can be seen in Financial Soccer, a promotional game by Visa to raise awareness of … Players engage in a football match controlling their team, but just as you are about to shoot… BAM! The game stops and there is a multiple choice question related to finance to answer before the game continues. This is what a lot of "education" games feel like: "OK, OK, that's enough fun, now you have to do some learning if you want to continue." I just downloaded an app on my iPhone to learn French which is essentially the same. A thin, sugar-sweet veneer of a game hiding a darker ulterior motive. Of course, the game doesn't mean to be malicious, but the fact that the game mechanics and learning contents do not match up, any student is going to figure out pretty quickly that we are trying to make them learn something they are probably not really interested in with something like: "You can't trick me with flashing lights and bonus points. This is just a rote memorization of math formulas exercise!"

The literature on this subject of mismatching game mechanics and learning goals talks about integration. The integration of game mechanics and learning goals. But not just that, it goes on to mention a concept known as intrinsic integration, essentially: The learning goal should be the main game mechanic. Quite a revelation for me just recently as I have been scratching my head something frantic thinking of reasons why my students are not speaking more English when playing Minecraft in my digital game based learning (DGBL) class. The reason is that English is not required for students to clear the levels that I have set up for them. This post is not about my Minecraft class though, so I will leave that for another time.

What I have been looking for recently are games that have the use of English as their main game mechanic. I didn't have to look far. The Nintendo DS (and now iOS) game Scribblenauts fits the description perfectly. Rather than having English tacked on as a supplement to game play, levels cannot be cleared without the use of English. The game concept is amazingly simple with clear goals to complete each level. However, how players achieve these goals is completely open to their interpretations and imagination. Take the first level of the iOS version (Scribblenauts Remix) as an example:

The goal is to cut down the tree in order to get the "starite" in the upper branches. 

Now, to cut down a tree, what do you use? A saw? A chainsaw? An axe? Or, what about a sword, or even more specific: a katana?! All of these options will work. But how do you get one of these items? Using the notepad in the top right corner of the screen, we can write a word and just like that, we have it! Once we have possession of the item, the goal of the task is easily achieved:

Open dictionary.

Maxwell with his chainsaw.

Maxwell with the starite.

Playing the game "as is" is a great tool for vocabulary review and even learning, but so much more can be done in a classroom setting.

A simple way I improved the learning potential for my communication class was to make students write down their solutions to levels and compare and contrast these solutions with other groups. In this way, the students are learning how to use the words in context, learn collocations, and expand their vocabulary and interlanguage by trying to out do the other groups with more and more outlandish and unique ways to clear each level.

Additionally, I had students write down any new words they either found in the game hints or from words that they used themselves and told them to write example sentences with them for their "class review" homework.

Mining English Week 5

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Some pics from this weeks session.

The focus of this week's lesson was the use of prepositions. Something that comes very naturally and is essential in the Minecraft world. Before we got in game we went through prepositions one by one and then we practised building simple objects with Lego. This prepared students for using prepositions in the game.

I built a world for students to work in pairs where the activity required them to explain to their partner how to construct increasingly complex shapes out of various wool blocks. The final task had students working pairs to build a house together. Students paired up, logged in, and went to their relevant station.

Students were also told today about their test that they will be having at the end of the semester. The test will be comprised of two parts. The first part they will have to tell a native speaker how to build an object, and the second part of the test, the native speaker will tell them how to build an object. Students will be graded on how well they build each object, or in other words: how well they were able to communicate their ideas in English.

Mining English Week 4

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Just a few pics of my fourth 'Mining English' class.

Today students completed an information gap exercise which had them explaining to a partner how to craft certain objects (with reference to the Minecraft wiki of course).

All in all a good lesson.

This week's class reviews

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Turning the class into an RPG (Part 2)

So, the time has come. Last week our brave heroes set out to kit themselves out in the best gear, sharpened their axes, restrung their bows and filled their inventories with maester's potions and foods. Today is the day they put their strategies to the test as they face off against the other groups in a one on one battle to the death!

Well, maybe not that dramatic, but still, there was a lot of tensions in the class today as groups were paired up for their tabletop style RPG battle against other groups. Below describes how I went about teaching this lesson.

1. Show them the battle video

This serves two purposes, one is to refresh their memories of the battle system, the other is for them to mine it for vocabulary and phrases to use themselves when they do their own battles. Students are thus told to take notes as they watch the video and then compare their notes with their group members afterwards. Once they have done this, I had students come up to the whiteboard to write down anything that they heard as me and my colleague played. The board then acts as a cheat sheet for when students do their own battles, allowing them to refer to it when they can't think of what to say.

 

2. Write questions to ask your opponents

 

The rules of the battle state that once a character has been reduced to zero armor, they must answer a question. If the group answers the question correctly, they do not lose a life and can continue. However, if they answer a question incorrectly, they lose a life. Once a group has lost three lives, they have lost. At this point then, I had students think of questions to put to their opponents. I created 10 sample questions for each group to show what kind of questions were considered suitable and as a model. Below are a few of my sample questions.

Question 1

What is the capital of Scotland?

• London
• Edinburgh
• Florence
• Dublin

 

Question 2

What is the largest continent in the world?

• Asia
• North America
• Europe
• Africa

 

Question 3

What is the highest mountain on earth?

• Mt. Fuji
• Mt. McKinley
• Mt. Everest
• Mt. Ararat

 

Question 4

If a woman gives birth to triplets, how many babies does she have?

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4

Students thought up similar question based on their major, the presentation they had given a few weeks before, and other general knowledge subjects such as capital cities and animals etc.

3. Battle Time!

Following this, the groups were paired up and put to battle. They were instructed that they were to speak to the other group in English only. If they spoke Japanese to their opponents, their turn was over. I did however allow some Japanese during within-group strategic speech. Below are some pictures of the battles.

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4. Improvements

One thing that could be improved with this activity is moving the question making activity out of the classroom time and getting students to do this for homework. The reason is that some groups didn't make a lot of questions and actually ran out of questions to ask their opponents. This led to them trying to make up questions on the spot which made the battle drag on and become uninteresting. 

So, for the final class which has not done this activity yet, I have told them that if they run out of questions during the battle stage, they will have to forfeit the game. This class has also been instructed to make five questions each (20~25 per group) at home before they come to class next week (the battle lesson for this class). I'm hoping this should keep the action high and as a result, games possibly finishing quicker. If this happens, I would like to run the battles in a tournament style where we can see which group is the strongest! Of course, they will be the strongest based on their character development, strategy and general knowledge! 

 

The Multiplayer Classroom

Long time no post. (sorry)

I had a nice long summer but am back to work now. Over the summer I started following news on the current(?) hype fuelled 'gamification'.

As part of my reaserch on this phenomenon, I found an interesting book by Lee Sheldon who seemed to have applied RPG-like game mechanics to his classroom. I was intruiged and decided to see if I could do something similar in my own context.

What I have come up with so far is a new way to evaluate my students over the course of this semester based much more on autonomous learning and the amount of effort they put into each lesson. There is also a large focus on teamwork and working as a group. Although the majority of detail regarding this whole project resides in Evernote notes, I am slowly piecing it together online as a reference to my students, but also to any that may be interested.

Here is a link to the presentation I gave my students at the start of this semester.

And here is a link to the wikispaces page outlining the project in more detail (work in progress).