Learning2gether Episode 400

https://youtu.be/DQzH8iaWMW4

On Tuesday, February 5 in Europe and points east of there, but still February 4 in the USA, Kim Harrison a.k.a. K4sons invited EVO (Electronic Village Online) Minecraft MOOC  participants to visit VSTE’s Minecraft Monday, a regular monthly event hosted by the Virginia Society for Technology in Education. Dakotah_Redstone and Beth O’Connell helped plan it with her. The VSTE events are held on the first Monday of each month from 8 to 9 PM EST (New York time).

Today they were visiting East Coast Miners, a building guild for under-16s patterned on the work of Jo Kay’s Jokaydia, http://www.jokaydia.com/. East Coast Miners provided a tour of what that the teachers are doing with kids after hours.

After settling into the environment, we started recording at a turtle farm where one of the kids was raising turtles. The new release of Minecraft 1.13.2 contains an underwater environment that spawns corals and a variety of sea creatures, so after swimming with the turtles, we moved to a coral reef where we swam with dolphins and other creatures, and visited an underwater shipwreck. There DarkKnight tossed some treasure maps into the water and you can see on the video where your map shows your location and allows you to use your F3 coordinates to navigate to X-marks-the-spot, where there was buried treasure. We all went there and eventually uncovered a treasure chest full of goodies.

We then lapsed into a reflection of how this might work for learners of a variety of topics, including learning languages. Jane in Taipei related how her son Mattie was interacting with the East Coast Miners and developing his English and problem solving skills.

Here is Jane’s reflection

Thank you, +Kim Harrison for inviting us on the East Coast Miners server. Treasure hunting was a lot of fun! The coral reef and tropical fish are so beautiful! I think that kids can learn far more by collaborating and communicating with players in Minecraft than they can by taking online synchronous language lessons (Online language tutoring/learning has been a trend lately). I see a lot of creativity, problem-solving, and peer-teaching with patience in Minecraft. I was taught by Cats, a teenage east coast miner, how to fly. She gave me lots of tips and feedback to my repeated failing attempts, and with her help, I re-learned how to fly in survival mode in Minecraft!

===Info on East Coast Miners from the website: http://www.eastcoastminers.org/====
The East Coast Miners Minecraft Community is operated by two educators and one geek (engineer) in the hopes to enrich STEAM skills science, technology, engineering, art and math as well as communication and collaboration skills.

 

How to join the VSTE server?

You need the latest release 1.13.2
connect to server.eastcoastminers.org

VSTE is the Virginia Society for Technology in Education, https://vste.org/about-vste/. VSTE Minecraft Mondays occur the first Monday of every month and lead into the annual VEPLN summer of survival (for last year’s event see https://vste.org/vepln-summer-of-survival/ and https://sites.google.com/view/vstesofs17/. There is also a Google+ Community until early April,
https://plus.google.com/communities/106561495889390694090 )

We’ll all be sad to see this and so many other fruitful communities disappear from Google+, a real blow to educational collaboration when that happens.

 

Earlier events

 

Sun Jan 27 Rose Bard, Dakota Redstone, and Jane Chien host a Building Challenge on the EVO Minecraft 1.12.2 server

https://learning2gether.net/2019/01/27/rose-bard-dakota-redstone-and-jane-chien-host-building-challenge-on-evo-minecraft-1-12-2-server/

 

Fri Feb 1 Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear lead sandbox adventure trekking on EVO Minecraft 1.12.2 server

Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear led an adventure trek to some desert temples in the 21k area.

The challenge

Anyone can join us. If you need gear we’ll equip you before we set out.

We meet in the 24k area and trek north to a river. We’ll have to trailblaze to the right river system.

From there we take boats to a village full of husks and villagers who will trade emeralds for rotten flesh and coal.

The temples are near there.

On this first meeting we embarked on the journey to see what would happen. In a little over an hour we had reached the temples.

Here are two YouTube recordings

Vance’s version, sound problems

Dak’s version below, with Discord chatter

If you wanted to join us, here’s how
http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/130258521/2019_Live_Events#Howtojoinus