The New Year Has Brought Work!

Okay, so I set Wednesday aside to work on my Personal Project and I'm happy to say that I got a lot done. I got home at around 14:15 and finished working at around 20:30. I have another MinecraftEdu lesson on Tuesday and I have the world fully ready for that lesson. The new unit is Addition and Subtraction (bridging 10 and 20). The groups will be the same as last time and I will try to keep it this way until the end of the project, so that the groups are familiar to the kids and they will start to build relationships with different people in their class - which is always important at this stage in school.

Now, usually to get to the areas where the kids do their tasks, they use teleporters, however, this time to try something fun and new, they will be going there by minecart.

They will go into these small tunnels according to which one has their name on it from the spawn-area and then see this. I will teach them how to use the minecarts (i.e. right-clicking to get in it and pressing the buttons etc.) and then, as you can just see in the distance, they will be taken to the place where the magic happens!

From the outside, this area looks like this: 

I think it looks pretty cool actually with all the different tracks coming out and I hope the kids will enjoy it too.

Once they get to the next area, the first task is pretty easy. There will be a simple addition question depending on their mathematical ability like so:

... and all they have to do is walk through the right door to answer the question. If they get the answer right, they will be taken to the next area, where the whole group will be together again and in that area they will have to solve an addition problem by placing blocks in tens. When they have finished all five problems in that area, we will teleport the group to the next area where they will have to do the same kind of thing, but in reverse for subtraction. The groups that found the secret diamond in the last lesson, will get diamond pickaxes and those that didn't, will get iron.

If someone gets the first question wrong, they will sadly be taken to the "detention centre" to try again.

When they get the very easy question from this area correct, we will teleport them back to their group. 

As for other news on my project, I have just submitted the first draft of the first section of my Personal Project Report, which is about "The Goal". My supervisor and I will meet on Tuesday - in the break after the lesson - to discuss this and, hopefully, he will have some nice suggestions on how to make that better.

Other than that, not much has happened. Things are definitely getting more serious with this project but at least I have a definite plan ready for the upcoming months. I'll probably update this more on Tuesday/Wednesday evening after both the lesson and the meeting, to get some more news in this journal. Besides that, bye for now!