I don't want to do homework!

What homework do you have?

NONE!

C'mon...

OK, reading and writing...

Have you done it?

I'm finished!

Show me!

Gah!

So how fooling her to practice writing and reading?

LEGO...

What are you doing?

Building.

Building what?

A play field.

What???

But I got her interest.

Our own Lego monopoly.

When she understood she started to invent rules.

One dot = one step.

Two dices so you have to walk at least 2 dots but maximum 12 dots. You can buy a plot in different size from where you get.

• 1 x 6 dots = 1€
• 2 x 6 dots = 2€
• 4 x 6 dots = 3€ (also what needed to build a party house)

The rent of a plot when an opposite player visit was half the dots of the dice you've rolled.

To build a house you need 1 door (2€), 1 wall (1€) and 1 roof (2€). To buy a plot and build a house cost 8€ and she counted first in the head and then tallied with notes (doing math as she didn't want in the beginning).

It started to be complicated.
Since she was the first to go around once, she was also the first to receive pay. As she was broke she needed some extra money and therefor come up with a new rule: if you're broke for an additional contribution and your salary is 8€ instead of 5€. 

Yeah right.
I'm serious dad!
Write that rule down too.

Rent

• One floor building, roll one dice and pay as many euro as dots.
• Two floor building, roll two dices and pay as many euro as dots.

Lucky for me she wanted more houses rather than skyscrapers!

Learning outcomes:

• Languages (as usual she combines Swedish, Finnish and English)
• Writing & Spelling Finnish
• Math (mental arithmetic)

Pseudocode and the new languages L++ and M++

This fall semester has just started. I kept my plan to use the "I Wonder..."-lesson as some kind of soft start and I've had one class two days struggle with pseudocode. It was harder than they thought. Much harder!

My plan was to have them blindly do a simple task and afterwards reveal the big secret: what they actually practiced and learned.

I understood 

during the first sub-task (the building phase) when they looked at me as question marks I have to make them understand what is going on. All has now built houses, either in Minecraft or my old architect-LEGO. 

This is something useful to know, understand and learn. Besides, if this construct code is too hard you might should have a second thought about your education. Pseudocode is still much easier to write than "real" code.

But I had to enlighten my students the purpose of the task so they could put their souls into the task. LEGO when you're adult? 17-21 years old? Are you nuts??

Their challenge?

Break something easy (but still a final product) into small steps of actions that someone who doesn't have any background knowledge both can understand as execute. Harder than it seems, that's for sure!

To make it even more difficult, another group of students (practical nurses) has also a course on disability. These practical nurses students, have  often difficults to put into that role not to understand everyday instructions. These students will debug the Business Information Technican students pseudocode (written instructions).

Coding is basically a step-by-step guide for computer to accomplish a task. Now the computer will be a human being, another student with some knowledge of Lego and most certain no knowledge of computers or videogames. Worst of all, it will most certain be a pretty girl... Our own version beauty and the geek haha!

Some of the example (pseudo)code which we've been doing together look like this:

M++ (Minecraft OOP)

L++ (Lego OOP)

What kind of learning takes place?

• Pseudocode
• Understanding of object-oriented programming
• Documentation
• ICT Helpdesk

As it gives so much learning I will continue with my other classes (all Datanom / Datanomi / Business Information Technican students) and do the same concept as I start to believe it's a useful exercise.

I wonder...

Today I got the very exciting news with zero foresight. For some months I will be a replacement teacher for my colleague (a dad!) who will be on paternity leave. But unfortunately, foresight and planning could have been better. On Thursday, I will launch two courses on the topic "Implementation of a prototype for the software" where students will understand the point of planning and documenting projects. 

We will for example be using UML (the Unified Modeling Language), Gantt charts and Entity Relationship Models. Also flowcharts and pseudocode as it will help our students both in this course as when they start with object oriented programming.

I WONDER...

...what if I have them start in a completely different end...!?

What if I make them build something with LEGO (or Minecraft), have them to documenting their creations with camera, hand in that first task. And what if I make them to write an instruction how to build their creation? And that instruction needs to be detail in absurdity.

OKAY, MY PURPOSE?

A LEGO creation (rather than Minecraft) would be something easy to build but advanced enough to write an instruction to, targetting group someone who has never built LEGO (or played Minecraft) before. The build phase itself is something you repeat or loop, will they figure that out?

So my students, who are they? Well, vocational students between 16-19 years old, all gamers. I need to catch their interest in a very odd way I guess, this could be it. They will all be programmers so they need to start think OOP way and I believe one important skill for coding is to break a series of actions into small steps that someone who doesn't have any background knowledge (like a computer) can both understand and execute. 

Coding is basically a step-by-step guide for computer to accomplish a task and to write a LEGO instruction of their creation might be harder than you think. And we could ask other students at our school to perform the task strictly following the instructions and I'm pretty sure there will be lots of steps missed. 

AFTERWARDS

...and only afterwards I reveal what they have practiced.

• Pseudocode
• Object oriented programming
• Documentation

They will also have an own example what to later do a flowchart or UML of. 

Am I nuts? 

:)

Technical drawing

I'm on my second week of my "Technical drawing" course, 30 lessons in total. My colleague have had his group to make a lot of blueprints on paper. Unsurprisingly I have another approach: Minecraft and Lego, more particularly architect Lego from the early 1960's. I run the course on a vanilla creative server as mods, in my experience, mix up the students proportions. They are so busy cut a block into pieces that they forget what they suppose to build. 

So why Minecraft?

Well, even though I sometimes doubt I still believe students of today learn in another way than we're used to and my goals, with this course can be summarized in three points

• scale, 
• proportion and 
• 3D models

I also want to encourage creativity, problem solving and collaboration.

We have practiced to convert 2D projections to 3D models and now practice how to scale something, like (minecraft) Steves head in 1:1, 1:5 and 2:1 and just because you're allowed to use a game it won't necessary be the best way to solve the problem. But when doing it in the sandbox it becomes more apparent when you make a mistake in your thoughts.

I have not had to moderate the server ever even though it been up for 1,5 years and even if I have had 4-5 classes there and a permanent population of teachers and their kids (all under 7 years) but with this group of students and technical drawing there have been lots of problems within a week. Why do you have to kill something? Or blow away whatever you want with TNT?

We tackle problems in different ways and we solve problems in different ways, I don't want to change that but I'd like 16-18 year old students behave mature and adult and not as they are rascals :P

So I had to have a talk with them today. I did show them a picture of a classroom from the 1950's and another one from the 21st century. I asked which one they preferred, and all wanted the future classroom. Fact: teachers don't like to step out of their comfort zone, they don't like changes, they rather want the 1950's classroom so I told my students, when I try to bring the teaching into the 21st century, try to respect my attempts to change it.

I think they understood, they stopped complaining about the vanilla server and started doing tasks. 

So, is it really the facts that teachers do not like the changes?

If we generalize, most are reluctant to leave the comfort zone.

One colleague, almost 10 years younger than me, said: 
"Games in teaching and everything like that, it's certainly good but ... what do you do if two students (of 20) ain't interested in your way of teaching???"

And that piss me off!

Just because they do not dare themselves, they do not have to shoot us down before we tried. There is only another question, which in turn are greeted by silence and teeth grinding...

"How do you resolve it yourself when you have two students who listens and 18 who play games, watch YouTube or just chill out?"

LEGO Friends in Minecraft

As I started the other day what will happen if you start play computer games together with your children you could learn of each other I will continue on that track. For an example, last year my daughter AquaVera (by then 5 yo) participated in the first project I ran with Minecraft in School. As most of the building was in the evenings and from home she could, and later also demanded to, join.

As I thought Minecraft would be a hard game to play (I was so wrong!) I told my students they had to build their school and as a creative part, build an own house. It took less than 36 hours to build a minor city and I had to have a second thought about it. During those 36 hours Aquavera also entered the game with an own account and also start build on her own house.

But as it's very fun to build together I asked her what she would like to do and she picked Olivia's house (3315) from Lego Friends.

She had just gotten the Lego kit and we had just built it, therefor she also wanted to have it inside Minecraft. I told her I'm not going to build it alone, she has to help me. We sat together and had the instruction book between us and followed the steps together.

After the house, we also built the Heartlake City Pool (41008) with the water slide, complete with the heart in the bottom of the pool. We also had some discussions about the water and the flow, that you actually can create a slide and play with it inside game.

During these building projects we had done lots of learning, from math and physics (the water slide) to technical drawing (interpret a drawing in 2D to 3D). Both had been troubleshooting where many of the solutions came from her because she wanted to have it exact as in the real LEGO model.

Later she has also been improving the pool with lots of other activities and opportunities for playtimes, like secret underwater tunnels that connect different pools...