Hey Everyone!
It’s Dr. Guthals here again from a short hiatus!
Last week Stephen, Lindsey, and I attended the 2nd Minecraft Educators Summit – this time in New York. During this summit we got the chance to explore some really great thought-experiments with other Minecraft educators and came up with some really neat ways of integrating Minecraft into the classroom!
What I found really interesting was that even though all of the attendees used Minecraft in the classroom to teach very different topics, we all had a similar, project-based approach to using it to teach! This was inspiring because it solidified one of the biggest reasons we at ThoughtSTEM use Minecraft: it provides a simple interface for kids where they can explore concepts.
One of the most exciting things was talking about how we all used some form of “unplugged” activity! I can’t wait to formalize these and share them with you!
During our week in New York, we also got to attend the Games For Change Festival! Though these aren’t about teaching coding, two games really caught our eye:
Never Alone is a game where you play a young Alaskan girl and her wolf, together you trek through the Alaskan snow and on your journey you learn about Alaskan Native American history. This game was really well made and definitely made you think about a culture you might not otherwise know about!
Bounden is a game of dance. Two people place their thumbs on a mobile device. Using the gyroscope in the device, they have to move around to make a small circle follow a certain pattern. They cannot take their thumbs off of the mobile device, making them dance! One of the really neat things about this game is that, to make it, the developer had two professional dancers perform a piece with the mobile device in hand. The mobile device tracked where they went and stored it into the game. So, if you were a professional dancer, you might look beautiful. If you’re Stephen and I, however, you might just look silly 🙂
Looking forward to some exciting times ahead!