Reflection #7

This week we had a guest lecture from Kara Dawson who talked about Minecraft education and her successes using it. We also got to look at scratch, a fun intro to coding. These were two things I’d heard of but never seen much of, so it was great to learn more about them!

For minecraft education I had never realised just how much content was in it. It was really cool to see the educational possibilities for minecraft and how, even though they are playing a video game, they can learn so much because of building possibilities and exploring the real world environments that have been made in the game. My favorite location that was shared with us was the PNW experience. The idea that you can allow your student to explore so much of our own backyard sounds amazing. I feel like so often there is stuff that will have locations to other places in the world but Canada, especially the west coast gets the short end of the stick. I just love that they can play a game that looks like an environment they could easily explore someday.

I had never heard of scratch before this class and wound up spending about an hour and a half messing around with it and I can tell I only scratched the surface of the things you can do. It’s such an approachable path to coding. It takes some learning how the system works but I found the process enjoyable. Especially when trying to refine your code so that it doesn’t  just run for pages on end, there are ways to simplify it to do the same tasks without as many commands. I am including a file of my scratch command so that if you wanna check out what an hour and a half on scratch can make you can see.  You just have to load the file onto https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tutorial=getStarted 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tcqDCbjyWy3xiqtdr3vkC-agGkEYqKTz/view?usp=drive_link

You will have to download the file as a whole that is found on my drive than load onto scratch.