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LEGO invested millions designing and running ["well-loved but economically unsustainable"] LEGO Universe, a state-of-the-art MMOG for young players based on the story of saving creativity. Mojang [the company Persson founded after creating Minecraft], on the other hand, built a simplified world that relied on emergent [player-driven] gameplay rather than on a large team of designers dictating what the experience would be. Think about it Mojangs virtual world of blocks allows players to build simply build, anything they imagine! LEGO Universe contains a beautifully designed building component but unfortunately is confined to an individual play mode that does not allow for collaboration. She explains that, though both games allow players to play together, only Minecraft allows players to create and build together. And Minecraft has no predetermined story or script. Mariannes conclusion: We have become a culture that is overtly pre-packaged and prescribed. You see it in our toy stores. You see it in our standardized schools. Play is relegated to pre-determined playdates, and recess has all but disappeared from the school day. What we are observing with the phenomenon of Minecraft is that kids are starved for a place to simply play. They want their bricks! They want their friends! And they want a space to play and exercise their own creativity with their friends! Do you, as I, see a lesson, here, for educators as well as game developers? Boiling it down just a little further: Mojangs game wins in the classroom and the marketplace because it actually does save imagination (gives players infinite space to use theirs), while LEGOs game lost in both cases because it saved imagination only in the storyline, confining players to the script. Next week: What Marianne Malmstrom and John Seely Brown are teaching me about online safety Related links As for learning with media in high school, see Albany, N.Y. teacher Johnathan Chases assignment for his 12th-grade Participation in Government class to create their own (video) PSAs that raise awareness of a societal problem and/or promote a positive action. Talk about teachers learning on the fly! First there was WoW in School in North Carolina; now theres also Minecraft in School there too. Watch the first video on that page to get a feel for the creative powers of North Carolina 5th-graders! Meanwhile, PhD student Alex Leavitt at USC is working on his dissertation about Minecraft . And heres The Minecraft Teacher blog by New York City teacher Joel Levin, co-owner of MinecraftEdu, a collaboration of a group educators and programmers in the US and Finland and the games creators Mojang AB in Sweden. Mariannes article Game to Learn and open letter to Lego on what she learned from working in LEGO Universe and Mincraft The news that had From the GeekDad column at Wired: Lego Minecraft is Coming Lego seems to be learning too see Fast Company Youve now heard John Seely Brown on the future. Heres the view from kids: No Future Left Behind, co-produced by Marianne, tech educator Peggy Sheehy at Suffern Middle School, and their students. (The link will take you to her YouTube page, which is also that of her virtual world avatar, Knowclue Kidd, and has links to lots of students own machinima, or video shot in virtual worlds and games.) Sidebar: Digital media projects at the Morrow School To give me a feel for the kinds of assignments her students get, Marianne gave me three examples: 5th graders Build a Shelter challenge: If you click on the links on the assignment page here, youll see concrete examples of how imaginative these young Minecraft builder/architects were. They were given multiple objectives for creating and collaborating in virtual space but also paired with teaching basic movie
editing skills with an eye on being persuasive, Marianne emailed me. We looked at real estate videos and how they point out the best features of the house they are trying to sell. 2nd graders did a two week lesson just to experience moving through 3D spaces with their friends. Their only assignment was to build their initials, but no instruction was given as to how it should be done. It was fascinating to see how they chose to do it. Most built up (which surprised us because we thought that was harder). A few built on the ground. One student inlaid their blocks into the grass. Very cool. New Jersey actually has a state standard stating that 2nd graders should be introduced to 3D virtual environments. 8th graders taking the tech elective are required to generate their own projects that are interesting to them personally and that challenge them to learn something new in order to construct them. They document their progress weekly via a Google Doc. Projects have ranged from learning to create a playable hockey game to creating a music course that plays a popular tune as avatars walk across the note blocks. Please note: This article was originally published March 13, 2012, then my services server crashed. So reposting 9/2/12.
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Permalink Post a comment Trackback URI RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Sunday, September 2, 2012, at 9:18 pm by Anne. Filed in curriculum, digital citizenship, digital literacy, digital media, Digital Tech, education technology, learning, School & Tech, Social Media and tagged digital citizenship, Elisabeth Morrow School, Gaming, learning with games, Lego Universe, Marianne Malmstrom, media literacy, MineCraft, MMOGs, new media literacy, Virtual Worlds.
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1. What Net safety can learn from digital game design | NetFamilyNews.org on 12-Sep-12 at 1:03 am [...] citizenship, media literacy and many other skills at the elementary and middle grade level (see this).] Permalink Post a comment Trackback URI RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry [...] 2. Today's Net, kids & COPPA: Our comment to the FTC | NetFamilyNews.org on 25-Sep-12 at 3:13
pm [...] already an example of how the latter didnt happen for the now-defunct LEGO Universe (see this). As for parents, weve already seen that, when they arent seeing the benefits of such [...]