Math Educator
Working through the Minecraft Exercise today, I was reminded of the work I did as a young person with BASIC:
And also some memories of LOGO programming that I worked on in Elementary school:
This is all making me quite inspired to continue my SCRATCH journey with my sons.
My wife and I were chatting with my son this morning. She bought him a book on genetics that she used when she was young, which we’ve all been working through together.
We were trying to explain how DNA coding works, and he mentioned, offhand, “you mean, like SCRATCH?” It was a really satisfying moment as a parent to make those connections for him. I am excited to continue working with both of boys through their coding adventures.
We had a good conversation today about data privacy using the EdCamp framework. It was helpful to get a chance to articulate the scope of the inquiry project.
I had a chance to articulate the new concept of the spectrum of consequence, along with the spectrum of action. I think all we can do at this point is to provide people with the realities of what can happen with their data privacy and leave the choice with the individual.
Adding to that spectrum of consequence, is this matrix of information which Edward Snowden shared with Joe Rogan:
I decided to do something different with my personal inquiry project. I just couldn’t get into the Minecraft. So, I’ve started documenting a little project I started with my son. We are working together through the programming platform called “Scratch”:
https://scratch.mit.edu/
It is a programming platform designed to teach children some of the basics of programming, including, if/then statements and a number of other really satisfying outcomes.
Already, after a couple of weeks, my son can follow a tutorial and get something together. This weekend, he made a pong game.
Plus we get to hang out together.
Today we worked on video Editing, and screen casting. I’ve seen a lot of this in the past with Math Education and Khan Academy, and I am excited to begin developing skills with these new technologies. Here is a (very poor) little video exercise using Screencastify:
Last night, I asked my son Lee why he loved playing Minecraft:
In this project, I learned that I can use Microsoft Photos to edit a movie clip which I downloaded to my computer off my phone.
Then I used the same clip to extract a second video, with my younger son Adam giving his opinion of Minecraft:
Today I started up Minecraft EDU on the school’s website. It was frustrating as many of the features were not available. I will have to set up some time in the future to chat with someone who knows what to do. That being said, my sons are very excited to share some of their experiences with Minecraft and I will be setting up an interview session with them so they can tell everyone why they love Minecraft so much. For what its worth, there are all kinds of Minecraft music videos out there which we often “enjoy” on the Google speaker set up in our kitchen:
One remarkable thing I’ve noticed with kid’s video in general is the insane number of views. Getting over one million views is a significant accomplishment for any independent content creator, but some of these children’s videos are in the hundreds of millions:
Or, in this case, BILLIONS…
In an effort to begin our Educational Technology Guided Inquiry, we started with watching “The Great Hack”, a documentary about the influence of Cambridge Analytica on both the 2016 American Elections and the Brexit Referendum:
Although I never thought we had privacy “online”, it was concerning how Facebook was used to extract users profile and preference information. I am interested in learning more about social media and privacy concerns students particularly, and citizens more generally.
My children LOVE Minecraft:
… and so, for my free inquiry project, I’ve decided to learn a bit more about the software and what it is all about. I have had tremendous resistance to playing video games with my kids. As a young person, growing up in the golden age of Nintendo and Sega Genesis, I played A LOT of video games and eventually gave it all up in grade 9. Now when I look at video games, I have ZERO interest in them. However, I am curious about the possibilities present and am curious to explore a bit more about my own resistance, especially since the game is so important to my children. I have also heard a lot of educational opportunities through Minecraft applications and other softwares more generally. The future of education is unlikely to be something as traditional as a classroom, and I know there are tremendous opportunities available to educators to enhance what education is and looks like. I am reminded of a podcast I listened to where Joe Rogan is speaking with Evolutionary Biologist Geoffrey Miller about the video game Civilisation:
Through gameplay, users are introduced to the various stages of human technological innovations; this is similar to the world that users are presented with in the early stages of Minecraft before there was “creative” mode.
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