CCEdu and bridgebuilding

A class of 16 students, 7 went home so I only had 9 left. The replacement before me probably was a bit boring. Even though I had Minecraft and they knew it, they left early :(

Ok, so I had 9 students left to challenge with bridge building, MinecraftEDU and ComputerCraftEDU. Suddenly there was 3 groups: 4, 4 and 1 (!). The single one you can't call a group, but he is a couple of years older and if I remember correctly, has dysphasia; blue, red and green team.

Red team

Immediately the red team turned out to be the group with less collaboration and none existing communication. They were more concentrated to build a wall against the other groups than to actually do the bridge building mission.

First one, later two students found a way out of the test area and started to build a bridge. Not a nice one but a working one.

The other two suddenly realized they could leave after completing the bridge so they run away building something similar as a forth team, yellow, just to be able to leave 1 hour before time. The carrot turned out to be leave early :P

Blue Team

The other two teams took the challenge more seriously and followed the steps, tried their best to do a nice bridge (just for fun!) and the one man army continued.

While blue team was testing they ran into some problem which they tried to correct, as a never ending loop (picture below). Second try the guy had connected his remote to the turtle and could stop it before it had went away too long. One of the team members is the one with ADD I've talked about before and this way of making code suits him perfectly, he was as equal as the other members contributed code.

Green team

One man army

Well, he's a bit stubborn and a bit older. He said he would learn more if he could, would be allowed, to do it himself. So I let him to do that. It took a lot of time, the final code had some mistakes but he will continue from home. 

Funny thing with these two students with diagnose, this was the right way to teach them make codes. Both of them turned out to be brilliant programmers just because of the drag & drop in combination you could test all the time what happened.

Today's mindmap

When communication and collaboration works, everything goes (black boxes). When it don't work it creates stubbornness and I, the teacher, has failed. And this last try, teach through a game is not working. On the other hand, nothing works and the problem is more individual, they have no interest what so ever to participate in an education.

I do have lots of experience to the next course in the same area, introduction to codes but with the first years students.