Week 7 – Minecraft and Coding in Education

This week’s Friday meeting was joined by a special guest, Kara Dawson, who shared with us the world of Minecraft Education. I, myself, have never been fond of video games; in fact, I vividly remember playing Minecraft and immediately quitting when zombies started to crawl out after nightfall. But I grew up in a generation crazed by desktop and mobile games, including games like Roblox and Fortnite.

For me, I can’t imagine video games being both fun and educational (an opinion that is closely connected to my pod group project). However, I remember the days I was allowed to log on to coolmathgames and experience video games that incorporated school skills and problem-solving with fun, user-friendly play. Minecraft education seems engaging, seeing it drops students into different worlds, each offering an educational understanding through visuals and online exploration. I do question whether learning online is the best way for retention and their general cognitive development, but I can see benefits to using this resource occasionally.

To conclude class, we explored the world of block coding using Scratch. I have been coding since the age of 11, and my oldest brother has been a Software Developer since 2020. I have previously touched on my secondary schooling in a digital immersion program, but what I have not mentioned is that I did a lot of block coding. I have used Scratch, but it is a very basic format, so my preferred platform would be Snap!. Through block coding, I have made video games, guessing games and a lot of interesting types of code. Now, do not get me wrong, I hate coding. I think it’s tedious, boring and too much for my personal taste…But I can admit that I am very proficient in the early stages of learning and teaching it. In high school, I eventually moved on to Python code, but at that point, I had developed my own passions, so Python code was not my priority to learn.

To support my reflection, I decided to take a step in a different direction and actually showcase my work on Snap, as someone who has not used Snap in about 4-5 years. It is not my best work, but I felt it would display my ability better than Scratch, which has fewer simplified block options.

Here is my project:

https://snap.berkeley.edu/project?username=priya%2echauhan%2e5&projectname=Dancing%20Clock

Here is a photo of my code screen, and the code I wrote: