There's a lot of talk about gamification in education. That's cool with me. I was a child in the 80's and was spoon-fed video games. Mario & Luigi were my best friends. But I'm pretty sure that all I learned from my Nintendo Entertainment System was that eating mushrooms makes you bigger, and the quickest way to financial independence was to absorb as many floating coins as possible. And the Power Pad accessory? Please!
Do I think its possible to for a game to teach a lesson? Absolutely! However, I don't think it's a good idea for a game to teach a lesson. Huh?
In the first sentence, I used "a lesson" to mean a concept or collection of knowledge to be transferred. Games are a good vessel to help carry some of that knowledge. In my second usage, "a lesson" referred to a block of time used for transferring knowledge. Games can fill up that time pretty well, but the results may not be as expected.
Over the last few weeks, I've been meeting with a small group of 4th and 5th graders who are quite passionate about Minecraft. If you haven't heard of Minecraft, it's a MMORPG, which stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. Unlike other RPGs, Minecraft doesn't have any specific goals. You collect resources in the form of 3D blocks and build (craft) things with them. The world is virtually limitless. These 3 students began their first project day with me by stating, "we want to build Minecraft!" It took some channelling and coaxing, and eventually they decided that they wanted to make a school Minecraft server. This seemed like a valuable path to travel and some good learning could come out of this.
Our first few meetings focused around what they thought Minecraft could bring to the students of Allendale Columbia. In other words, why build a Minecraft server? Soon we began to drill down to more specific details - would the server run in creative or survival mode? What plug-ins would we install? I knew my budding sysadmins were ready to start crafting - a server, that is.
Our next three lessons actually had very little to do with the gameplay of Minecraft, much to the chagrin of my would-be game ops. Instead, we learned things like what a server is, and what an operating system is and why you need one. Each student took turns in the driver's seat, while the others journaled the activities. These journals eventually became a sitebook for the server, a set of documentation for them to look back on and to share with fellow sysadmins. Since they were all learning these skills for the very first time, it seemed natural to me for them to learn the importance of documentation right from the beginning.
The next important lesson for these budding server operators was serving your users. In their haste and rush to upgrade to Minecraft 1.4 last month, they neglected to check if their server software, CraftBukkit, was compatible. At the time, it wasn't. Panic ensued, until they all learned the lesson of disaster recovery. We restored their client software from backup and suddenly they were ready sign on again.
This afternoon we completed our most recent meeting by upgrading to the 1.45 server software. This lesson focused on the collaborative tools in Google Docs. The three young boys each worked on a section of the documentation - downloading the software, backing up the server and installing the update - at the same time. By working together, they were able to teach each other how to use Google Docs. I sat back and watched as they helped each other with formatting and accuracy.
At the end of each meeting, we do actually log on and explore the Minecraft world. That's never been the goal of any lesson, but I'm not telling them that! Instead, Minecraft is the carrot that has helped us to cover topics which to any less motivated person would be dry and uninteresting. But in the context of operating your very own server, they are not only interested, they are engaged.
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