Well, that was interesting! Or, never assume anything.

After the positive experience the students had last class, even though the situation was less than perfect, and owing to the avalanche of enthusiasm, we decided that even though the accounts were not set up, we should run the class. We thought that we could achieve a version of the class by combining Minecraft accounts from various places. I offered 2 of mine, we assumed a few students would have accounts and the tech person offered one of his.

This seemed like a good idea until it came to light that most of the students Minecraft experience was based on the iPad version. As a result only 1 student actually had a Minecraft account. This gave us a total of 4 accounts for 20 students. Eventually we put together a total of 7 accounts thanks to the support of our awesome tech guy.

The plan for the class was to pair the students with Minecraft experience with the students new to Minecraft (lovingly called noobs) and get them to teach the noobs. The challenge was that they had to teach their partner how to use the basics of Minecraft without using the keyboard and mouse themselves. It was interesting to observe the inner struggle that some went through initially when they couldn’t simply take over and show.

The goal that we gave the students was that together they had to make a house that included,

• 2 rooms
• a front door
• a door joining the 2 rooms
• a window

Given the issues we faced with accounts at the start of the lessons some students only had a brief amount of time in Minecraft but even so the enthusiasm and camaraderie was great to observe.

The conversations around the room that the staff observed were really positive and supportive. We also observed students using a broad range of Minecraft specific words terminology. On numerous occasions we observed that when the experienced student realised that their partner didn’t understand what was being said, they then had to reflect on what they wanted to say and then say it in a way that their partner could understand.

All in all the lesson was a success. We based this on the fact that the new students could apply their knowledge without assistance in minecraft, they all said they felt they learnt something and felt good about the session. The session was also a success from that staffs point of view. We learnt to never start anything until we have all the licences, and the logins have been tested.