Final Week – Gamification

If I’m being completely honest, this week was a tough one to stay engaged with. Parts of the content were super foreign to me especially in the realm of video games and Minecraft (also can I just take a second to appreciate that until this moment I thought it was MINDcraft not MINEcraft….). Growing up my brother and I were rarely allowed to play video games and when we did get a chance to go on it was either Tony Hawk or Super Mario galaxy (and that was 10+ years ago when I actually lived at home).

The content did focus on the key characteristics on gamification which I appreciated as someone who didn’t really understand/ hear about this idea before. I believe as a future educator games are an essential part of the learning process as it helps young kiddos grasp concepts easier and make it more accessible to digest ideas within a real world context (in some cases).

HOWEVER, growing up with the demonizing look into video games it is a bit difficult to switch the standpoint and to open my mind up to using this method frequently in a classroom. I guess as much as I’d like to be on the side of teacher as partner and equal part of the learning process I am still struggling with the balance of control and perfectionism within a classroom setting (and games kinda just throw things for a loop).

The coding part of the lecture is actually something I have seen in classrooms before when I was an EA. I remember students learning how to code and their task was to make a baseball player throw a baseball a certain way. It was a really cool thing to watch! Was I super confused? YUP. But I think now that I have had some exposure to it, coding is something I’d definitely want to incorporate in my classroom as something fun, educational AND engaging!!

A little homework I have set out for myself is HOW TO MINECRAFT !! I wanna be that COOL teacher that stays in the lingo and up to date with what the kids are up to outside of the classroom so here’s to my journey of learning how to Minecraft 🙂

m