It's okay to fail!

It's a busy time right now as we have Open House, trying to recruit new students to next autumn. Today there will come like 600 students from high school to have a look at our school and our educations. Yesterday when we was promoting our Business Information Technican education (datanom/datanomi) one colleague surprised me talking very warm of Minecraft and ComputerCraft (I'm still not welcome at his lessons btw) as a good introduction to what this profession really is about as you have to be a troubleshooter, either you're IT support or a programmer.

As I thought it's better to actually show what we're doing, or more precisely how I use MinecraftEDU during my courses, I made a videoclip. Of course that was something doomed to fail according to my dear colleagues. Really? A clip? No, you should use a PowerPoint...

Have in mind, this is my "PowerPoint", my words, thoughts and opinions about the education when I try to talk about it and promote it, not my school.

Yesterday there was some groups only with girls and they were a bit afraid of the computers so I told them a story, when I started with my course with ComputerCraftEDU, programming basics, and there was this guy telling me it was too hard. At that lesson also my daughter AquaVera 6 yo attended, and she showed the guys how to use MinecraftEDU and ComputerCraftEDU. And I saw the girls smiled as they understood, it's all about the mindset. She, my daughter, was working as a good example to get the high school girls interested in the education.

My daughter also happen to unfortunately be a perfectionist, failure is not an option! Therefor she surprised me this morning when I told her about this, using Minecraft to learn and she told me:

"Dad, it's okay to fail but you have to try!"

Strange don't you think? It's okay to fail when it comes to games... so why do we not use games in education more???

My on going ComputerCraftEDU course has been very funny. Half the group has been running home as fast as possible and the other half I have had to kick out... Even if the server have had lots of lag, they still sit there. The day before yesterday, Wednesday evening, we couldn't even move around on the server, did it mind this young men? Not at all. It was some delay on the code but he refused to give up.

"The course ends 19:00, it's now 18:49, I still have 11 minutes to go!" And 19:10 I have to drag him out...