Escape to Reality

I have been lucky in my life to have been persistently able to find creative outlets to channel my energy (Trickey thoughts obviously being one). Through primary school, I used to spend time making pick a path adventure books and writing short stories about Snotlings to the point the primary school teacher banded Snotlings from all writing. When asked to design a way of crossing the channel (pre chunnel pre Brexit) while others had complicated bridges and boats I chose to ride on a whale. In secondary school, I immersed myself in writing rip off Irvine Welsh books, being a singer-songwriter with my band and developing rich worlds for wargaming and Roleplaying with my mates (Now D&D is back in vogue some of them might even admit it don’t hold your breath).

Nowadays (potentially a midlife crisis the whānau may hope) I have suddenly found a new lease of life to this world-building with an exciting group of friends up and down these deserted Isles. Through this escapism from reality, I have taught myself some basic coding, built websites, created digital art, developed strategies, introduced new players to the game and meta-analysed statistics and strategy (You can make anything sound good if you try). How could this possibly relate to my teaching practice?

Well, one of the things I have been overly pleased with this year is my use of Minecraft Education Edition. Mircosoft has done a great job in making this software freely available to New Zealand students and with the school having allowed space in the curriculum for a free choice option I relished the chance of running a Minecraft club. I had to cut the club off at 41 students. The ākonga loved the club I ironed out any problems slowly and we had lots of fun. The fact that the students could get Minecraft free was awesome. So after the trail in term 2 term 3 was my chance to launch a Minecraft as a part of the Social studies curriculum.

In the year 9 programme students look at tourism and sustainability. The assessment for this sees the students create a pacific resort and traditionally the students had been building islands and this would see teams of student use no end of paper mache and hot glue to create a model. The sustainability of the project itself wasn’t there in my mind also I am pretty hopeless at managing the resources involved and marking the islands was difficult at times. Though some ākonga relished this. So I supplanted the task with a Minecraft challenge. Taking the students to the computer room allowed me to get all the students on the software and not exclude those on Chromebooks. Though I couldn’t quite facilitate the multiplayer options through the students own devices (I learnt a lot about ports firewalls and other system options) the majority of the ākonga got lost in the project and found it joyous. Some went on to code, some groups chased Dolphins before making an aquarium for them, others struggled. Either way, many ākonga got so lost in the project they had completely escaped reality.

The joy many ākonga took from this project was a big win for me at a time when the senior school were snowed under with academic work it was nice to see the students lose themselves in play.

Well heaps more to report on throughout the term but I also want to go back and escape for a while before getting my head back on the game for what is bound to be an exciting final term. Catch you soon in real life or where ever you are hanging out to escape reality.