In preparation for term three, I have been in conversations with a few of my colleagues to help facilitate a cross-curricular social studies learning opportunity through Minecraft. It is a “Pacific Northwest Coast Experience” in which students are transported back in time to a pre-contact First Nations’ village and you learn about daily life through building tasks. This Minecraft world was a collaboration between School District 43, the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) First Nation, and Microsoft. It is very rare that I get to explicitly teach with a social studies lens in my computer science course, so I am very excited to launch into this.
I have been looking for ways to integrate Minecraft into my course offerings as a way to solidify coding and other computer science concepts, so I was really excited when the district STEAM team offered this workshop on AI and Minecraft. I am already starting conversations on AI with my students, and I want to keep the ball rolling in new innovative ways.
The presenter, Nicole Cruz, is the district coding support teacher for SD43 and a frequent collaborator/mentor to support my teachings. In the past, we learned how to set up a live-stream through TEAMS so we could create a socially-distance graduation ceremony for my grade 5s in the thick of the pandemic, and she hosted a Micro:Bit contest I got my classes to participate in (and eventually win). Nicole has been one of my greatest district supporters when it comes to expanding our knowledge of STEAM and computer science. I was really looking forward to seeing what she had to share. I ended up attending the workshop with a colleague who had 0 Minecraft experience and wanted to try something new.
The session mainly focused on using the Minecraft world called “Generation AI” from their hour of code series. The goal for the workshop was to teach students to create with AI and not just consume. In this world, students were asked to help a little robot fix the problems of the modern world, such as making sure their world was inclusive, reliable, and accountable. This was done through tasks such as making sure a lunch scanner could see all patrons and give everyone the lunch they asked for, repairing tools, and building structures to keep all players safe. The game began with an incredible tutorial on the game controls such as looking, moving, building, breaking, and interacting with non-playable characters (NPCs). For my colleague, they felt so well supported before being able to set foot into a more sandbox style of learning opportunity. Once we got into the game, we enjoyed the learning tasks, but were not impressed with how students would be required to code for each objective. It was a block coding interface, which our students were very familiar with, but if the code was incorrect, your character had to physically move to a specific spot, press a “reset” button and make all of the changes. This increased the difficulty of the tasks greatly, especially when you knew that the change to the code was a simple mistake. You had to re-write everything, and remember to make the change before starting the program again. In my own teaching with block coding, I have told students that if they make mistakes it’s ok and we can reset the position of our player, make the small changes to the code, and press “run” again. They have all learned the strategy of “trial and error”. This AI world does not lend itself to that strategy, nor does it have a “test” feature in which you can see how it runs without submitting a code. My colleague and I though about our students who would be highly engaged but also have high levels of frustration. We were worried that if there was no opportunities for reassurances that we can walk through codes step by step, or make small changes on the go, we would lose a lot of our learners this way. My colleague had gone from confident in trying, to frustrated in the matter of minutes. We ended up not completing all of the tasks during the workshop time because we were stuck in the vicious cycles of write a code, under/over-estimate the parameters, go back to the reset button, and repeat.
Nicole noted that AI in Minecraft is not just restricted to an educational sphere, but researchers are using AI in Minecraft to test theories through Project Malmo. The current objective of Project Malmo is to create an AI that can direct a character to climb a hill. It was a great connection point for me, so I can show my students that Minecraft has some real world testing applications.
This was a really interesting experience on teaching students how AI works and how it is similar to writing code. I really loved the real-world applications to the activity and the initial tutorial of controls. I don’t think I will use this particular experience for its intended purpose, but that tutorial might be where I send my students who are not confident in using Minecraft. That way, when I launch my Pacific Northwest Coast Experience, the students who have had little to no prior Minecraft experience can be better supported with their navigational skills prior to being given learning tasks.
I ended up speaking with Nicole at the end of the session and directed her to Code.org’s “AI for Oceans” learning experience as another option to introduce AI to students in a bite-sized way. I also showed her Hexapawn and the unplugged version of the game I had adapted earlier to assist in my Ministry and Master’s work. We started talking about trying new things with AI, robotics, and possibly 3D printing in the classroom. I hope to get back in contact with Nicole after Spring Break to work on something new for the end of this school year, or the beginning of the next school year.
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