Week 8

This week, we were fortunate enough to have a guest speaker on Minecraft Education. Minecraft Education was very interesting to hear about, especially because I had never done any program like this during my time in elementary school. I never had even played the “normal” version of Minecraft as a kid, so it would be interesting to have exposure to that, as I was never into video games as a child.  

One gamification tool I vividly remember using is Mathletics, starting at around grade 3. I remember during our computer lab time, we were often using it for Mathletics. I remember really enjoying Mathletics. It was exciting to feel like math was a game, and that you could compete in timed challenged against students around the country and the world. It was so exciting to see the Canadian wide leaderboard, especially when someone in my class was on it. I remember there being songs about the times table, and that’s how I learned my times tables and solidified it in my head.  

During my time in high school, I really enjoyed using tools such as Quizlet and Kahoot. We also got to use Gimkit a bit, and I enjoyed that one the most. Gimkit had different games the class could play as a whole online such as tag and an “Among Us” style game, where you answer the questions to get more “money”, playing time, power ups, and lives. I really found these games motivated me to get the answers write, sticking more in my memory. 

We also learned about Scratch, which was interesting. I had never learned any sort of coding before, unless learning Excel counts as a form of coding. I was very confused with Scratch, and ended up having a classmate help me out, which helped a lot to have someone walk beside me as I do it. Safe to say I need a lot of practice before I teach Scratch to a future class.  

Scratch Creation