Mrs Robot: Intro to Programming using Sandwiches

Term 4! The windy and wild term here at Bridge House School. A few weeks ago, my Grade 1 classes had a very special visitor: the one and only Mrs Robot!

Yes, it's me wearing a tinfoil hat.

I was inspired to try this crazy idea by a discussion on the CS Unplugged website about introducing programming concepts to young students. It lead me to this great video by Phillip Bagge showing his portrayal of a sandwich-making robot. I loved his use of a 'robotic' voice and totally hammed it up when I did my version.

Why did I pretend to be a robot?

We had a discussion at the start of the lesson about robots and what they are. They are machines that are programmed by people to do jobs for them. They have computer brains and they need very clear instructions so that they can do their job. My Grade 1s assured me that they all knew how to make a sandwich, so I asked them to go and write down their steps for making a sandwich. These steps, I explained, would be called an algorithm - a special list of instructions that a computer follows. 

Testing out our sandwich code

After the children had written down their instructions, I said that we needed a robot to test the instructions out to see if they would work. At this point I produced my tinfoil hat and became Mrs Robot. Tiny robot earrings, a keyboard bracelet and a Comic-Con robot t-shirt completed the look. As Mrs Robot, I had to follow the students' steps exactly as written. This was a very creative, and messy, exercise as most of my students hadn't been very detailed. There was lots of spreading jam, bread and butter on all sorts of places as we didn't include steps like opening lids, picking up knifes and putting bread onto the plate. Here are some photos of the algorithmic mayhem.

"Put the butter and jam on top" - on top of where?

"Pick up the bread" - before the packet was even open

"Spread the jam on the bread" - without picking up the knife!

My own favourite moment came near the start where one of my children told me to cut the bread, which was still in the bread-bag. He had already told me to pick up the knife so I bravely carved through the bread-bag with the knife, and then my bare hands. I admit that I gave a robot-roar of triumph when I managed to break the bag in two. That stunt set the tone for the day. As I'm sure you can guess, my students had an absolute ball. The teachers who were taking pictures captured so many pictures of the kids laughing. One class had a string of 3 students who accidentally asked me to spread butter or jam without a knife, by the third time they were on the floor laughing.

The lesson was a hit and many children were able to go back and refine their instructions to make them more clear. As the IT teacher I don't often get the chance to goof around and be silly, and I think my students really enjoyed seeing that side of me. I've already been asked to bring out Mrs Robot again next year!

Learning with Minetest Part 3: Impact on the Students

This blog post is part of a series of posts exploring the concept of using the Minetest game as a learning platform in a primary school. Click below to access the other posts:

Learning with Minetest Part 1: Rolling out Minetest in Pre-Primary
Learning with Minetest Part 2: Activities and Aims
Learning with Minetest Part 3: Impact on the Students

Our Minetest experiment has ended for the moment. During the last month my Pre-Primary and Junior Primary students have been exploring the game Minetest in their IT time. This post will discuss the impact that Minetest had on the students.

Spatial awareness:
Students have had to learn how to use both the keyboard and mouse independently. Minetest has been an enormous motivator for children to become comfortable with manipulating the controls with both hands working independently of each other. I have been surprised by how quickly the reluctant children became able to move around the game world. Every child that played was able to complete the basic movement training within half an hour, even those who had never played Minecraft.

Social and emotional development:

Many discussions were had about in-game appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. Children asked permission when working in another person’s building space, collaborated together on activities and also dealt with situations that were not positive. Every class used a ruleset which emphasised appropriate behaviour and we used that as a framework to structure how we played the game. Multiplayer games are extremely common in this age range and much as we model correct choices and behaviour in the classroom, Minetest was a great space to model appropriate choices and behaviour in an online space.

Opportunities for social modelling and development.

Problem solving and logical thinking:

Students navigated a 3D world space and created structures in it. They had to design what they wanted to build, gather resources for it, work out the different properties and mechanics of the game world and adjust their plans based on other builders. Some children began to investigate deeper mechanics such as creating tools to increase complexity of what could be built.

Digital skills (online safety):

All students discussed the difference between playing on the internet at home and playing Minetest in a school environment. We talked about safety when playing on the internet and the differences in the rules due to Minetest being played with a teacher. Much of the online safety discussion intersected with the social and emotional development aspects, as we talked about our behaviour in a game-space and how we could work together in a positive way. The Grade 3 classes talked about ‘trolling’ and ‘griefing’ (destructive/abusive behaviour) in online games and what we could do about it.

Summary:

Even though we have only ran Minetest as a pilot for 1 or 2 sessions per class, I the students developed a lot of key skills. Some of these were deliberate aims, such as digital skills and online safety, but many developed that I hadn’t considered before running the game:

Areas of the JP Technology Skills Checklist 2016 (Grade 3) that were developed using Minetest:

• Interface
• Mouse - 
• Left, right and double click
• Scrolling
• Using hand/wrist to move mouse instead of entire arm
• Keyboard - 
• Functions of enter key and spacebar
• Improving typing and keyboard fluency
• Internet and research
• Collaboration using technology
• Digital skills (online safety)
• Safe browsing: inappropriate websites, advert and pop-up navigation
• Personal information safety, nicknames and login names - who needs to know?
• Collaborating productively in an online space, how to handle conflict in a shared space
• Cyber-bullying, appropriate behaviour online

Minetest is a highly engaging platform for student learning.

Minetest is a learning tool that is highly motivating for children because it mimics many gameplay elements of the popular Minecraft game. Minetest is appealing as a teacher because much of the uncertainty of online play has been removed, we only run our game within the computer lab. Because of this, it allows Minetest to be available to use to pursue learning goals. A 3D world space where the students can create their own structures makes it an ideal place to explore perimeter and area. The cube-shaped blocks allow for construction challenges or counting games. Schools around the world have used Minecraft in all areas of their curriculum and Minetest can work in a similar role.

If Minetest was used again in the computer labs I think that I would see it’s value as a learning tool increase now that most children that I teach are comfortable with the basics of playing the game.

I hope that you enjoyed this series on using Minetest. Please feel free to contact me on Twitter (@moniquefranzsen) to chat about using games for learning.

Previous - Learning with Minetest Part 2: Activities and Aims

Grade 2: Wow Day Invitations

Just a quick one today, in between Minetest updates.

Next week is our Wow Day at school. Our Wow Day is similar to a parent showcase, the children have their classwork and artwork ready to show to their visiting families. We had been asked to create an invitation for Wow Day and it was a great excuse to polish up our MS Word skills. I had provided the Grade 2s with a very standard template for an invitation to our Wow Day. It looked something like this:

Yawn.

Functional, but not very exciting. Within an hour lesson, they managed to transform their bland templates into these!

Jazzy underwater invitations.

Skills that we worked on:

• Inserting picture - This is a tricky one for my students since it involves navigating through the file directory which they are still getting used to. 

• Formatting picture - The only way we could get our invitations the way we wanted them was to use the wrap picture - tight option. This is a new skill for us.

• Adding page border - Brand new skill. At least this option is easy to locate. They were excited about the large range of borders on offer and I think we'll be adding a border to every piece of work from now on!

• Formatting font - We do this often but students still needed reminder about where the font style options were. Many children went all out and changed font colour, style and size.

• Adding adjectives - We jazzed up the boring sentences by adding our own adjectives to describe our artwork and the Wow Day.

Learning with Minetest Part 2: Activities and Aims

This blog post is part of a series of posts exploring the concept of using the Minetest game as a learning platform in a primary school. Click below to access the other posts:

Learning with Minetest Part 1: Rolling out Minetest in Pre-Primary
Learning with Minetest Part 2: Activities and Aims
Learning with Minetest Part 3: Impact on the Students

It's been 3 weeks since I set up Minetest in the computer lab at school. I wrote more about the installation in my previous blog post here. In this post I want to discuss the various activities that I organised, the worlds that I hosted and what aims I gave my students.

Rules

Before we started, each class and I formulated rules about our Minetest experience. It was important to spend the time having conversations about appropriate and inappropriate behaviour, and for the guidelines to come from the players themselves. This all helped to facilitate student buy-in to the rules agreement. All of my classes settled on something similar to the following:

Genuine IT Teacher handwriting, folks.

Use your real name was a rule that I added, we had a great discussion was had about nicknames and personal information but since I do already know their names as their teacher this was for practicality more than anything else. If someone broke the rules, they were not allowed to play any more of Minetest that session. Most classes brought up the idea of accidents. We discussed about how something was accidental or on purpose, and what to do if you accidentally broke a rule.

The Training Centre

All of my students aged 5 - 9 started off Minetest life in a custom-built obstacle course which I called the Training Centre. Taking ideas from what I've seen of the MinecraftEdu tutorial online, the students had to follow the blue line through tutorials on movement and interacting with the world. Signs were littered everywhere so that students who wanted more information could read them as they went along. About a third of my students were able to race through the training in record speeds, as they were avid Minecraft players. For the rest, the Training Centre was a valuable slow transition that gave them time to get used to moving with the mouse and keyboard at the same time.  Out of all my +/- 190 students, only 2 or 3 struggled with the controls by the end of the first session. All students were able to complete the training course within half an hour, with most kids finishing well before that. The Training Centre world was just a randomly generated world, and outside the structure that I built the students were free to explore the world proper.

An area of the Training Centre.

Building in the Desert

For my Grade 1 students, their next lesson started in the middle of a desert. I had built a blue rectangular path around the area for guidance and as a landmark. The aim of the lesson was to build structures primarily using sand. The students already knew about the unusual property of a sand block, that it will fall down without another block underneath it. We talked about strategies to solve this problem. Many students took it upon themselves to explore further and find other blocks to decorate their structures with. What was important about this session was that with each class I was able to have a discussion about appropriate online behaviour in a shared space, which I will talk more about later in the next post. Each group of children managed their task in a different way, and it was fascinating to see how some formed group structures and some built their structure away from the shared area.

Top: before students. Below: Three different classes, three different creations.

Building in Groups

With my Grade 3 students, I flattened a rectangular area in the middle of a forest. I split this area up into 4 numbered areas and split my students into small teams. As they had recently started with the concept of perimeter in their classrooms, on the suggestion of their classroom teachers I worked it into the lesson. Each team had to work together to build a structure on their area of land, and I gave them a basic perimeter guide for it - with one class, for example, I said their structure had to be 6x6. We talked about how we could check our measurements, whether the 6x6 would look rectangular or square and so on.

I prepped this grade for the group work, I gave each group 5 minutes of planning time off of the computers (in the 'real world') to discuss how they were going to tackle the challenge. I pointed out that everyone on the team would have different skill levels and it was up to the stronger players to help the new players with the job. Quite a few students got hung up on the idea of digging down to get better resources so I nudged them in the direction of building with dirt and wood then upgrading their structures when they were finished.

Arial view of the 4 build areas and the variety of structures.

The speed of their builds was impressive. Even though these were young children, they strategised their plans and built up their areas rapidly. Each group tackled the challenge in a different way. I loved the communication that I could hear within the groups: asking permission, suggesting plans and ideas, asking for help. Each team built a very different structure and when the time came to an end every class wanted me to keep their world safe so that they could continue building another time. Some classroom teachers suggested we keep Minetest installed as a reward activity which I think is a great idea given the high motivation of the students.

Team 2 used a variety of materials to build their gravity-defying house.

My students simply didn't want to stop playing Minetest. A number of them have asked how to get the game at home, even though they already play Minecraft. They are enthusiastic about the idea of using Minetest in a class to complete a common goal, and get deflated when I explain that our Minetest game can only be run locally, in the computer lab. Their next question is when the next time to play Minetest will be!

In the next post, I will be discussing the impact of using Minetest in the lab. I noticed many different areas of learning that I hadn't even anticipated so I'm looking forward to sharing those with you.

Next - Learning with Minetest Part 3: Impact on the Students
Previous - Learning with Minetest Part 1: Rolling out Minetest in Pre-Primary

Learning with Minetest Part 1: Rolling out Minetest in Pre-Primary

This blog post is part of a series of posts exploring the concept of using the Minetest game as a learning platform in a primary school. Click below to access the other posts:

Learning with Minetest Part 1: Rolling out Minetest in Pre-Primary
Learning with Minetest Part 2: Activities and Aims
Learning with Minetest Part 3: Impact on the Students

As a person who is an educator and has also played Minecraft, it's been obvious to me that the idea of mixing the two concepts together would be hugely successful. A 3D world focused on building is a very suitable game-space to develop many areas of learning. The creation of MinecraftEDU, which has recently been bought and re-released by Microsoft/Mojang, seemed inevitable. The US dollar price-tag for MinecraftEDU wasn't ideal, though I have always been interested in the possibility of bringing Minecraft into my computer lab.

Last week, I stumbled across Minetest. Minetest is a free, open source game which takes it's inspiration heavily from Minecraft. Minecraft itself was first inspired by a game called Infiniminer, we are the sum of our influences, etc. Nobody involved with Minetest makes a profit, the entire game framework is designed so that anyone can create mods for the game and the community shares the development. I wrote a proposal for my school administration which outlines the differences between the two games, which is available here.

Minecraft versus Minetest

In brief, when I brought Minecraft in to test in the lab it behaved sluggishly. The IT technicians had been concerned about setting it up on LAN as they had run into issues before. Modding Minecraft was a tricky thing as it had never been designed for modding. As I mentioned, the fact that it was a paid product also put a damper on the possibility of using it for learning.

Minetest was surprisingly easily for me to set up, in comparison. Even though there is less documentation out there for Minetest (they do have a wiki), I managed to get a server running in very little time at all. The student computers have the IP address saved so that when the server is running on my teacher station they can just enter their username and press Connect. Minetest performs incredibly smoothly, especially compared to Minecraft. A few days after finding it, I still marvel when I open up a world and there's so little lag.

Day 0 - Setting Up

After installing Minetest on a couple of machines to test the local server idea, I invited a dozen kids in to see how the concept would work. It was an after-school hour of utter joy, for them and for me. I was soon shown how much I need to learn about how hosting a server works, but it was also immediately clear how much potential Minetest could have. Something that proved crucial was modifying the config file so that the public lobby of servers was disabled for our students. I want them to only use Minetest locally, that way it is safer, we aren't bogged down by external mods, and they will be less distracted from the learning objectives. I learned how to do that here.

Day 1 - Grade R gets a sneak peek

Today I ran my first few classes through Minetest. I had wanted more time to prepare, but one of the Grade R teachers had mentioned that I had got 'Minecraft' working in the computer lab and the first class was beside itself with excitement. I decided to dive in with explaining how the W key was used for moving forwards, the spacebar for jumping, and the mouse for looking around. Many children had never used the keyboard and mouse in this way so it was a learning curve for them. As I hadn't thought to establish a strict ruleset to enforce digital citizenship, I used the golden rule of treating each other kindly. Next time I will definitely start with a rules and consequences discussion as I have seen on many Minecraft teaching blogs out there.

Helping our friend dig out a block.

The Grade R (age 5-6) children responded really well to the experiment. All of the children were soon able to navigate around the landscape, jump over obstacles and follow their friends around the map. Some children were comfortable with beginning to dig and place blocks, which will be the foundations of the building we will do later. All of the children wanted to play again, immediately asking me if we were going to play in their next lesson. This afternoon, a parent came to find me to tell me that her son had already explained about Minetest and how much fun he had in Computers today. It's always great to hear that my ideas are helping students become enthusiastic about their learning.

Exploring our desert world.

Next on the agenda is introducing Minetest to each of my classes, beginning each one with a discussion about the rules. I'm expecting something along the following lines:

• Use your real name to log in.
• Leave other people's buildings alone.
• Treat each other kindly.

I will be using the huge realm of information that has been written for using Minecraft in an educational context, many of the lessons and guides can easily be applied to the Minetest environment even though it isn't as sophisticated. I also want to get my classroom teachers in for a Minetest lesson so that they can let go of their reservations about using such a popular game for learning. If we can harness the platforms that the children are naturally drawn to for the power of good, then I think we'll have done something great.

H finds a warthog.

In the next part of this series, I will be discussing how I went about setting up Minetest for my various classes. This includes the worlds that I used and the activities that I planned. Click below to access part 2:

Learning with Minetest Part 2: Activities and Aims

Hero Kids - Tomb of the Lost King

Midnight at the graveyard, the heroes are on the job.

This term, I have gone back to running my Hero Kids club for the Grade 2 and 3 children. I've got a rambunctious group of 6 boys, and we had our first proper session today. I'm running the Tomb of the Lost King module and so far we've had a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to this module as it throws a variety of different themed challenges at the heroes.

I went to the extra effort this time around and cut and glued the paper little minion standees - and even coloured them in! It actually made it much easier to tell the enemy mobs apart, which helped keep track of the HP values. I hope to keep this going through this module, and have already cut and glued the skeleton warriors for later on.

The more that I run RPGs for kids, the more that they impress me. Once they learned to stop fiddling with the GM models and paperwork, this group listened uncharacteristically carefully to the rules and brought forth really original solutions. I soon modeled for them how they could add creative descriptions for what happened to their dice rolls, and they delighted at giving each other ideas for the skeleton-smashing. I once saw a child's face light up when he realised that he could choose to make his character do something cool. The agency that role-playing games give players is something truly special.  

The benefits of RPGs that are easily seen are the creative thinking and problem solving skills. The kids show such utter joy that they can influence a story as it is happening. The collaboration between the players and I becomes stronger as they go on with the games. 

Here is our party line-up:

• Ugolas the Elf Ranger - he wanted to call his character Legolas but since that's a character already he settled on a similar name
• Max the Reptile Bladedancer - this child has already talked more in this club than he has the rest of the year... entirely worth it
• Gluchi the Healer - only character with magic, a challenging child already shining in this club
• Shadow the Acrobat - youngest child, first one to buy into the method of describing attacks creatively
• Roben the Archer - the only child who has played before, running same character as last time
• Scar the Wolf Child - first child that I've run for who has successfully used a special attack without any prompting from me

I foresee great things for this party.

Hero Kids - The Hero Kids Strike Back

Experimental: Shared Google Slides with Grade 1s

Our Grade 1s were lucky enough to be my new guinea pigs - we created class Number Books using Google Slides! The exciting thing about this activity was that we were able to work in a collaborative environment, our Grade 1s have never done this before. Google Slides was a great first step for them into shared workspaces.

Preparation:

I set the activity up in the following way:

Before the classes happened I created a template Slides for each class, with a front cover and around 20 slides, each numbered clearly. I made all of the slideshows public, so that anyone with the link could access them. I then added the links to our grade Symbaloo so that the students were able to access it. The Symbaloo portal is a bookmark on all of their desktops and they are used to using it to navigate the web.

When the classes arrived, we first of all looked at the Google Slides UI displayed on my projector and talked about parts of it that we recognised from MS Office, such as inserting shapes and the text formatting options. They happily pointed out icons they had remembered from our previous activities. I explained that we would be creating a book together all about numbers.

A selection of pages from our number books.

The next thing that we talked about was the concept of a shared work environment. I gave each slide a number and then assigned a number to each student. Their first instruction was to go to their slide and put their name in the lower text box. We talked about how even though you could see other people working, you needed to be respectful. Assigning a slide to each student worked out really well, we had very little dabbling in other people's spaces and the students were excited but respectful.

My students were incredibly excited to see their classmates' work happening on the left of their screens while they worked in the main part. Most of them got used to the idea of shared space quickly and used this function to share ideas and compliment each other 's work.

Even though the subject material was simple, the number books turned out very well as a test run. The clear allocation of work space was perfect for this age group, just enough collaboration to get them excited but not an overload of new experiences.

The shared slides on the left with their own work in the middle of the screen showed my Gr 1s the value of shared workspaces.

Drawbacks

The primary drawback was incredibly long loading times. Despite my plan for the students to use Symbaloo to access the Slides links, I ended up pre-loading the Google Slides in open browsers on each desktop station. Even with this forethought, it took at least 15 minutes for the slideshows to be ready and loaded. This problem was not caused by the platform but by our school's limited connectivity. Once the browsers were loaded, there were one or two cases of disconnection but they were relatively rare. It was easy to get a student back into the action since it was all hosted online.

Summary

Our students were not able to use the chat or other collaboration functions that are features of the Google platform because we do not yet have individual Google accounts for our students. When this feature is rolled out, the possibilities for future projects become even more popular. I look forward to doing a similar shared slides project but

I am super proud of my Grade 1 students and what they have achieved in their first experience of Google Slides. Below is one of the completed class books.