Why Minecraft?

This is the second extension to my session prezi on using Minecraft in Bratislava, 1st SKA International EFL Conference:

You might want to know who I am and why you would want to listen to me. I’m a freelance EFL teacher, an edupreneur, if you like, in a very small town in Hungary. Freelancing means that I help anywhere I’m needed (for money). Sometimes I’m needed in the local high school, sometimes I’m needed as a teacher-clown to entertain a group of two-year-olds in English, sometimes I’m needed as a blogger, but who need me really badly are parents whose children don’t do very well at school. What they want me to do is to help struggling children to get better grades in English. And if don’t do well enough, I lose clients.

I wrote ‘struggling’. Perhaps you visualize poor, tired kids who work hard, do their best, spend all their free time hunching over English Grammar in Use, but no use... You may visualize little pale-faced skinny creatures trying to climb the tall ladder of EFL. Well, not really.

Kids who have better sub-skills, natural acquirers don’t struggle. Those whose ability to abstract develops earlier don’t struggle either. They seem to be good ‘learners’, but I would propose it is not the case.

My struggling ones are those who don’t find English progress tests easy, they can’t find meaning in their foreign language instruction a school at all. They can’t see how they might have agency or control over their progress or at least their progress test results. They find their school lessons boring, they see no clear goals (other than better test results). The worst thing is that they don’t see English as a means of communication that will one day open doors for them.

Part of the problem is an imbalanced approach to language instruction in terms of language content, skills development and testing. Teachers follow syllabuses. The syllabuses seem to be tailored to certain coursebooks, coursebooks are chosen by teachers. Teachers choose books that make sense to them, also that provide materials easy to test. What is the easiest thing to test? Grammar, vocabulary.

So What do we have? Syllabuses, outcomes or progress measured by comfy tests, some learners not doing well. What do teachers do? They choose coursebooks that look even simpler, with even clearer grammar and further reduced vocabulary, they focus even more on grammar because that is testable. And guess what? As a result, these typical delinquents do even worse!

Let’s take a closer look at these ‘strugglers’. No, they are not the skinny, pale, fellows who do their best all the time. They are often the cool guys, the ones who can’t sit still, who can’t concentrate, who need constant entertainment, the so called multitaskers, the ones who are often labelled (and often falsely) ADHD. The ones who have been brought up with 100 TV channels and touch-screen devices, the ones who attend after-school classes that range from sailing to hip-hop dance, all organized by for-profit units who compete for the target age group and offer super-fun time.

Do you know what these kids’ problem really is? That syllabus! Seemingly built on CEFR descriptors, but somehow reduced to a grammar-vocab skeleton, which is BOOOOOORING!

Moreover, they see no point, no smart goal, no peer recognition, no agency. They can’t just concentrate and after a time they don’t want to. They are the ones who can’t wait 5 seconds for the video to buffer. Who can’t do only one thing. One of my colleagues has recently said that she lets her students play with the Rubik’s Cube in lessons, in this way they can listen to her. Otherwise they tend to find something  more ‘meaningful’. And let me go back to the word ‘meaningful’ a bit later.

So, for these guys, what they learn in English lessons is not interesting, not inspiring, irrelevant, meaningless, random, annoying. That English has absolutely nothing to do with their own life. Their life is Violetta (a popular soap opera currently on TV) and GTA San Andreas, it’s funny fail videos on YouTube, football, water polo, the Rubik’s Cube, clever magnetic putty, pizza, Lamborghinis and iPhones.

But it makes no difference to the fact that I (the small-town edupreneur) am hired to do something to them that will improve their English GRADES. (My intention to facilitate their becoming competent users of English is often seen as my own hobbyhorse, just my eccentricity.)

So when I meet them in the afternoon, after their 6-7 lessons, the first of which usually starts at 7.45 (this is just to say that I have tired learners and I’d better be entertaining and serve them something cool), I don’t really have the traditional carrot and stick motivation tools, on top of all that I have this personality which means they are everything but in awe of me.

So my strategy is to get that freaking hidden syllabus of merely grammar and vocabulary and put something interesting behind it. Sometimes it’s magic tricks, video projects, cooking, throwing things, in this case it is a game they are familiar with and usually enjoy, something that has meaning and something that might make them want to use English: Minecraft.

Minecraft is enhanced lego :P

This is the first extension to my session prezi on using Minecraft in Bratislava, 1st SKA International EFL Conference:

Minecraft is basically the same as Lego.

Lego makes it possible for you to build existing structures following a graphic manual, you can build your own creation, previously designed or not. With the finished structures and figures you can play role games. You can show your creations to your friends (peer recognition bang bang bang), you can cooperate when building something new. You can build anything, the limit is only the number and type of blocks you possess.

Imagine a building game that has even more types of blocks, the certain blocks have certain features, one of the little figures is actually you, some of the others may be your friends, and there are also independent figures who are friendly or hostile.

You can play 'survival' mode: you have to acquire and craft all the things you build from, plus there are adversities you have to cope with, there are mobs that want to kill or hurt you, you can die of hunger, etc. The other mode is 'creative', where mobs can't hurt you, you cannot really die, you have unlimited access to building blocks, you can fly, and a factor not to forget is that your parents don't have to spend a fortune on your passion.

Unlike other digital games games, there are no scores, badges or leaderboards, but there is peer recognition, cooperation among several members of the (international) gamer society, there are stories and achievements (very mich like in real life), there is a sense of agency over what you do, also there is always a smarter, achievable goal. And there are hundreds of YouTubers who are willing to share their knowledge about the how and the what.

By now Lego has made its way to being a generally accepted 'meaningful' game, Minecraft is very similar in this sense. The only negative thing I can note is the fact that it sticks kids to the screen. (Just like Lego sticks them to the carpet, but never mind.) There must be a sensible amount of time spent on anything in life. Including sitting in a classroom and chewing your pencil, looking out of the window and thinking about funny gym ball fail videos.

Another thing that comes along with Minecraft is the community and the subculture.

Gamers cooperate worldwide, what is important for us is the community built around the YouTubers, videobloggers who create gameplay videos.

Minecraft has inspired music, stories, books, visual art, all sorts of videos, a mythology, anything that language teachers can ever build on and squeeze the last drop out of.

What I perceive is that my students, regardless of their age or gender, want to belong to the Minecrafter community. What is more, if you, as a teacher appear to them as one of this community, it may mean trust and sometimes even respect.

My English could be better. I don’t fully understand the word ‘dignity’, that is.

Who deserves our Christian compassion?

My father died as an alcoholic. He was the son of a man I never knew, soldiers in soviet army uniforms just popped in one day (when my dad was a toddler), they took my grandpa. My dad grew up with a working mom (no 8-hour workday, no grandmas, no babysitters) and 3 siblings. His little sister cooked when she was 5 (yes, she cooked, my 5 year old grandson is capable of this and more, luckily not out of necessity, but because of a super great mom), until she died at the age of 7. When I was a kid we would visit her grave in a nearby town, but somehow it disappeared.

So my dad grew up in the fields, on the hills, playing football and drawing.

He was a gentle human being, having a huge dosage of talent and creativity, lacking a secure background or an ample amount of family warmth.

He lead the life of a semi-mawerick, would have been a proper hippie if he had been born somewhere else.

But no, he was a small-town sign painter, struggling with the realities of life in the socialist part of Europe, Hungary. I don’t really know why he found peace in alcohol, I was too much of a kindergartener to detect and understand it.

He chose a lifestyle that slowly killed him.

He was an alcoholic, it was Christmas, he had just been through the procedure when they withdrew alcohol from him, after the 4 weeks of the psychiatric ward, and a couple of weeks of rehab. He was at home for Christmas, because my mom insisted, even though it was risky. Christmas is Christmas.

He was not himself. He was sober but he had those minutes of ‘pause’. He froze up, like a computer.

Once there was this sound from the room he was supposed to have an after-lunch nap, the room I’m writing this right now, he was on the floor.

I went with him in the ambulance The staff were really nice, 25th December, amazing people.

We arrived at the hospital, no one around, a noob on duty.

My dad was wearing his fav clothes. You know, this man, once a thriving talent, someone who used to be a ladies’ man, this creative human, now his favourite clothes were really worn off, paint-stained, bad quality, shabby, grey, smelly rugs. His face (all the ladies in the offices as well as my kindergarten teacher used to be in love with him) was thin, he had a beard. His eyebrows were bushy, only his brown eyes were the same, the eyes of that big child I’d grown up with.

Years before this happened I gave up on them, him and my mom. As a kid I couldn’t convince them, as a teen I begged them to stop, in my early twenties I sometimes shouted, broke the glasses and the vodka bottles, then I gave up.

The doctor didn’t send him to that expensive brain scan. He made us wait in the corridor for hours. He wasn’t really certain about it. My father was only an alcoholic in cheap, old clothes. For him. Sure, every day he meets these people whose choice is to kill themselves slowly, slowly, glass by glass, drop by drop. He said there is nothing he can see, he should be taken to another hospital. He couldn’t clearly put my dad in the homeless category. The ambulance doctors and paramedics were different, it was dignity. This is not that they were kind or smiley. They were treating him as a human. The other hospital was very busy, they didn’t have the equipment, they wanted to send him back to the first one for that scan, the previous doctor said it was not serious enough, the young ambulance doctor was shouting with anger but  well... Then we were sent back to the rehab hospital in our car. My dad wanted to talk to me, he started a sentence but then there was a block, he couldn’t finish what he wanted to say. I had learned about aphasia, I thought it was some sort of a stroke, but I wasn’t a doctor and ...

On the next morning he was taken back to the first hospital. It had been a stroke, and I freaked out at the doctor who was on duty then, the one who was not to blame. She did everything for my dad, no matter his clothes or his addiction. She did it with dignity, after all my shouting at her, losing temper, like an idiot. She cried then, she shouted back. But she treated my dad (and me) as humans.

Then one night there was this phone call, this African neurologist called me to tell me my dad had just passed away.

Now in Hungary we have people who just don’t look good to us. Their skin is dark, the women wear hijabs. Some of the Hungarians are afraid, out of mere ignorance. Some think that these refugees don’t score as high as Europeans. When Hungarian people were refugees in other countries, it was a different story, they say. They share a common culture with the accepting countries. Yeah sure.  So you mean, if they look European, they deserve dignity?  If they have no hijabs there is zero terrorist threat? You mean they don’t count as people? You will get no health points for compassion for them in heaven?

Hmmmmmm... Jesus was not so picky. He didn’t mind leprosis. He didn’t mind crucifixion.

I still don’t really understand the word dignity, the word  I know too well is hypocrisy.

Minecraft in my lessons before the course

My Minecraft adventure started years ago when some of my students spoke so much and passionately about this game. Honestly I thought it was a strategic game of some sort of a not-for-middle-aged-female-teacher sort of game like WoT of WoW or ... you know, that kind. I had no idea about a game, the only thing  I remember is their obsession with it.

Then I had this student one summer (one-to-one), whom I asked if she had ever played Minecraft. She showed me marvellous glass castles and a hotel she had built with her friends. I was amazed at her creativity and the amount of work she had invested in it.

It was Filip and Marijana’s #RSCON5 webinar that convinced me to buy a MC Pocket Edition.

I immediately saw some potential in it, I thought it could be used in reading and listening comprehension tasks (I dictate or write down what kind of house or farm learners have to make) and well, that was all I could think of back then.

As it turned out, there was far more in it.

Speaking of engagement, you don’t even need the game to be present in the lesson. Just say “creeper”, “enderman” of “Minecraft”, and tadamm, like a magic spell! Ice is broken, doors open, walls fall down. You gain credentials instantly in the eyes of your students, you get immediate respect and just everything smoothens. It was clear when I taught those two boys (12 and 13) who had English lessons with me in their summer holiday (a month with their granny in my small town), and they didn’t mind the 8 am (!!!!!!!) lessons, their little brothers also claimed their own English lessons, they booked me for next summer and I had lessons with them in the autumn holiday and right after Christmas.

I’m lucky with my clientele of mostly one-to-one learners, I can just hand them over the device for, let’s say five minutes (one ninth of a 45-min lesson, mind you), and see what happens.

Some types of activities I have been using:

Minecraft dictation

This is the simplest ever picture dictation kind of activity.

I make a short video I start like this: “I have a mission for you.” Then I explain the mission to build a particular object.

Why do I use a video and not tell them what to build just face to face? One reason is that they take it more seriously. (Sad but true.) They concentrate better, it’s something of more importance :)  Also when giving instructions in real life, they tend to clarify meaning by asking back in Hungarian right at the moment they don’t understand something, without trying to make the effort. I’m really bad at handling this. As for the video, they can start and stop it, they do make the effort and I see better what are the things I do have to explain (word meanings, etc.) and what are others that they can figure out by themselves.

Originally I wanted it to be a reading task but that girl was just too little to read :)

The same can be done with written instructions.

The whole thing may be homework if the parents are minecraft-friendly.

The mission:

The product:

10min rounds

There was this boy (13) who needed help with his school English. All we had to do was to do the exercises in the workbook again. To tell you the truth .... these exercises make me sick. I know they are necessary, but in this form ......... today’s kids have difficulty doing them, they can’t concentrate (no wonder, the exercises are boring as hell), they have no idea of the meaning of the sentences, they just write something really sluggishly... and that’s all. I see no point in it.

But still, we had to go through them.

So this was the deal:

We divided the lesson into 10 min. periods. Each period started with doing one or two of those exercises (paper, pencil). Once they were completed perfectly, he was allowed to play Minecraft for the rest of the 10-minute period.

During his play (in the remaining some minutes) I was narrating what he was doing in Minecraft (so that he might acquire some language), I was also taking notes.

We did it in rounds in his lessons.

I prepared a very simple written text from my notes about what he did, what he built, what mobs and animals he met, then we used it in the next lesson for a slight language work. (I hid info that was not true, I made gapped texts, I jumbled the word order or the words of some lessons, etc.)
Our subject did the exercises surprisingly quickly and accurately so that he could get back to the game. The follow-up exercise worked well too.

Just play for 15 minutes

This is the least structured and well-planned, high on DOGME one.

We agree on a time (15 minutes maximum), set the downtimer and let the student just play Minecraft.

I take notes and create a text as they play. Then this text is available for a range of things again: gapped text, banked cloze, read and draw, guess the meaning of words, with beginner readers (1st graders) follow the text and draw a tally when I beep (they find it hilarious), jigsaw reading, etc.

In a 1-2-1 lesson it is really easy to do, the (emergent) language-based exercises can as well be prepared for the following lesson.

Minecraft culture

The internet is packed with Minecraft anything. Minecraft is a subculture, so you can  search Google for the most unusual sounding search words like Minecraft sandwich, Minecraft grandmother, Minecraft unicorn, there’s an endless list of the most mind-blowing things. Some things are not appropriate for all age groups though.

Minecraft has legends that fascinate kids a lot. Do you know the story of Herobrine, for example? There are several videos about it.

Here’s one, it can be narrated for example:








There are Minecraft songs. How about a love song parody?





There are all sorts of parodies. Once I used the first part of this one with a beginner, he had to order flashcards with words and short phrases from the video.

3D to 2D

Once i had this idea to build something in 3D and then to translate it into Minecraft. We built a pine tree with sugar cubes first.

I used it with a 7-year-old girl once and then with a 8-year old, it didn’t really work the task was too difficult and they were rather focused on trying to eat some of the 3 D blocks.

Creating videos

Once one of my MC tutors (a 5th grader) showed me a screen video recorder and we started to create screen videos. He surprised me a lot. I swear I never explicitly taught him “was” or the Past Tense, I always used a lot of input thought, but I had no idea he was able to produce so much English as he did in those videos.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4morczbyyme0xwz/bandicam%202014-11-27%2018-59-42-356.avi?dl=0

Directions

When I was shown multiplayer, i immediately showed it to my next MC minded student. Guess what, we lost each other this gave me the idea to use Minecraft to use directions. I simply built roads. This project hasn't been exploited yet ;)

And the course #evomc15 has just started!

Looking forward to what is coming!