7020 Views (as of 05/2023)
  1. Nick Lux
  2. Associate Professor
  3. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  4. Montana State University
  1. Barrett Frank
  2. GTA
  3. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  4. Montana State University
  1. Bryce Hughes
  2. http://www.montana.edu/education/directory/1793286/bryce-hughes
  3. Assistant Professor
  4. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS

Designing a Middle Grades Spatial Skills Curriculum

NSF Awards: 1720801

2020 (see original presentation & discussion)

Grades K-6, Grades 6-8, Informal / multi-age

The ability to make spatial judgements and visualize objects in one’s mind has been shown to be a strong indicator of students' future success in STEM-related courses. Further, research indicates that a gap exists between boys’ and girls’ spatial abilities and skill development. Even when their academic grades are similar, spatial visualization skills can be less developed in middle school girls than in boys. In an effort to address this gap, a portable training system based in the Minecraft gaming platform was developed for upper elementary and middle school (4th – 7th grade) students for increasing their spatial reasoning skills. The project detailed in this video provides a glimpse into the design of the Minecraft activities and research on the influence on those activities on learners’ spatial skills. More specifically, students are immersed in Minecraft-based world where they must solve a series of spatial skill-based puzzles and design challenges, earning armor along the way that will be necessary for them to defeat a dragon and ultimately winning the game. Students work collaboratively and on their own to solve these puzzles. Through a series of summer camps, collaborations with spatial skills and Minecraft/digital game-based learning experts, along with partner teachers, preservice teachers, and STEM undergraduate and graduate students, the research team developed the interventions and continues to collect data about how participants are using the platform to build those critical spatial skills and examining possible gender differences among those skills.

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Discussion from the 2020 STEM For All Video Showcase (52 posts)
  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 4, 2020 | 02:19 p.m.

    Welcome! We are so excited to have you join us here for the showcase video documenting our journey exploring how we might build middle grade learners’ spatial skills through Minecraft video game play. We have had so much fun with this project and as a result, we are thrilled to share it with you.

     We have learned a lot about using a tool like Minecraft to strategically target spatial skills development. And as I am sure you can all appreciate, this has resulted in new questions and curiosities. As we move forward, we are so eager to continue exploring those questions and curiosities!

    Our team will be checking in routinely over the course of the week. During that time, we are really looking forward to discussing the project with you, hearing your ideas, and answering any questions you might have about our research.

     
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    Kristin Flaming
  • Icon for: Alan Peterfreund

    Alan Peterfreund

    Facilitator
    Executive Director
    May 4, 2020 | 05:48 p.m.

    The intervention looks very interesting.  Do you have a sense of what amount of engagement over time is need to achieve the longer term outcome goals you aspire to (i.e greater STEM participation at higher grade levels for girls)?

     
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    Perrin Teal Sullivan
    Kirsten Wood
  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 5, 2020 | 01:56 p.m.

    Alan - this is a great question and one we hope to explore in the next iteration of the study. Our intent is to continue to refine both the intervention and the spatial skill measurements to ensure validity and reliability, and then begin to look at the influence of the gameplay and spatial skill development on those longer term goals like greater STEM engagement for girls later in high school and beyond.

  • Icon for: Kirsten Wood

    Kirsten Wood

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 7, 2020 | 05:17 p.m.

    As a researcher and a parent, I'm also interested in how your project relates to the broader project of increasing girls' STEM engagement, especially in the middle and HS years.

  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 8, 2020 | 10:34 a.m.

    Hi Kristin! We too are really looking forward to exploring those more broader impacts like STEM interest in MS and HS. I am a parent of a middle school female who is reluctant at times with certain STEM disciplines - so this is of great interest to me too on the personal level.

  • Icon for: H Chad Lane

    H Chad Lane

    Associate Professor
    May 5, 2020 | 01:49 p.m.

    Wonderful project, so happy to see Minecraft-based content being the focus of more educational research. I'm curious how you are measuring spatial skills?  Are you looking at in-game behaviors to see growth over time?  Transfer tasks?  Standard measurements?  

    Also, in my work, we are confronting ways in which Minecraft does and does not support our educational goals (e.g., it's easy to modify a lot of the content, but water behaviors are limited and have been a challenge). I'm curious how Minecraft has both promoted and hindered your efforts. Thanks!

  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 5, 2020 | 02:25 p.m.

    Thanks so much for the positive feedback. And our team couldn't agree more - the potential of Minecraft is super exciting! In reviewing past STEM For All video showcases, our team came across your 2018 submission focused on Minecraft as a tool to explore astronomy. It seems we have quite an intersection of research interests!

    Fantastic set of questions. For this phase of the research, we have been using a standard pre-test post-test design to measure growth in spatial skills. But we also recently piloted collecting more qualitative data including gesturing and vocabulary use. And in our camp last summer, we explored possible transfer task assessments outside of game play using real-world manipulatives. These measurement approaches were promising and really exciting.

    And lastly, your question about the alignment of Minecraft to our educational goals certainly resonated with me! We have largely been quite happy with the platform - it lends itself so well to spatial skill development. But we have found that it is resource-intensive. The time required to build the in-game "check system" to confirm if the students had correctly manipulated the objects within the spatial skills puzzles took enormous effort. And our current intervention structure requires many adults in the room with the kids facilitating their game play. We were lucky to have a great crew of innovative and enthusiastic preservice teachers and grad research assistants lending their help, but we recognize future efforts will require us to consider how to inject some efficiencies, streamline the intervention, and reduce the load on the teachers if we want this to be a truly feasible and practical formal or informal learning experience. 

    Thanks again for the feedback and questions!

     
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    H Chad Lane
  • Icon for: Barrett Frank

    Barrett Frank

    Co-Presenter
    GTA
    May 5, 2020 | 03:04 p.m.

    Designing these puzzles is very time consuming and requires the use of third-party ad-ons.  There is not a straight forward way of copying regions which the ad-ons verify and as a result we have been forced to have students work in groups.

    The largest drawback to Minecraft is that students have too much fun in free-build so it is hard to get them to do the puzzles instead. 

     
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    patrick honner
    H Chad Lane
  • Icon for: H Chad Lane

    H Chad Lane

    Associate Professor
    May 5, 2020 | 05:15 p.m.

    I feel your pain

     
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    Nick Lux
  • Icon for: Lorna Quandt

    Lorna Quandt

    Researcher
    May 5, 2020 | 02:05 p.m.

    This is wonderful and creative work. I wish I had been able to play Minecraft in elementary school! Congrats on this project. 

     
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    H Chad Lane
  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 5, 2020 | 02:26 p.m.

    Thanks Lorna! I agree - I wish I had been able to play it in elementary school too!

  • Icon for: Patrick Honner

    Patrick Honner

    Facilitator
    Teacher
    May 5, 2020 | 02:10 p.m.

    This sounds like an innovative application of Minecraft. Are you using Minecraft exclusively as an assessment platform, or are you developing Minecraft-based learning tools as well? In the video students were working with snap cubes, so I was wondering if the model was task/instruction using physical blocks, and then assessment with the virtual blocks.

    Also, have you encountered in your research any credible theories as to why the gender gap in spatial reasoning skills exists?

  • Icon for: Barrett Frank

    Barrett Frank

    Co-Presenter
    GTA
    May 5, 2020 | 02:55 p.m.

    We designed a series of puzzles and tasks in Minecraft that mimic typical assessment questions for certain visual spatial skills.  So far the focus has been on mental rotations and the ability to port information between two-dimensions and three-dimensions.  We found that the students preferred having the blocks to help with the puzzles.  Students were also provided several paper maps to help them navigate through mazes in-game  In order to assess learning growth we had students answer questions which were based on previously validated instruments.

    I'll let Nick take your final question.

     
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    patrick honner
  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 5, 2020 | 03:24 p.m.

    In response to your last question, Patrick: Although the research is conflicted and inconsistent, some working theories we have encountered that might explain the gender gap include differences in visuospatial short-term memory, as well as differences between males and females in the cognitive strategies used when solving spatial tasks. Others explanations include possible differences in biology, previous experience (boys might get more practice that girls with spatial skills through game play), the affective state of the individual, or even test administration condition differences between boys and girls. I'd be happy to pass along the references to this research if you are interested!

     
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    patrick honner
  • Icon for: Patrick Honner

    Patrick Honner

    Facilitator
    Teacher
    May 5, 2020 | 05:02 p.m.

    Thanks to you both for your answers. All very interesting!

  • Helen Wauck

    Graduate Student
    May 5, 2020 | 05:03 p.m.

    Hey, this is super exciting work! I just recently defended my dissertation on a very similar topic - my team and I developed a game-based spatial skill training platform for elementary school/middle school students and then later for high school and college-age students. Like your team, we were very interested in the navigation-based and object manipulation-based aspects of spatial skill and so we built our game around this (and we were very much inspired by Minecraft!). So it's very exciting to see someone is researching spatial skill development with Minecraft!

    Given the number of different tasks you've been analyzing in terms of spatial skill development, are you able to notice which tasks are more effective at tapping into spatial skills than others and why? This is a major direction of our research - we have been testing out different variants of navigation and object construction tasks and noticing some interesting patterns in terms of seeing how different features in these tasks cause them to tap into spatial skills (or not) in different ways. I'm curious if you have observed any patterns in task type in your work with Minecraft?

     
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    H Chad Lane
  • Icon for: Bryce Hughes

    Bryce Hughes

    Co-Presenter
    Assistant Professor
    May 5, 2020 | 05:35 p.m.

    Nice to hear some about your work as well.

    We measured different forms of spatial intelligence in a pre/posttest fashion, so one test before the camp and a follow-up after; I don't think we can directly tie any change in those skills to a particular activity. But you raise a very interesting (and important) question, especially since one direction we've considered is breaking these activities down into smaller "bite-size" chunks that can be easily incorporated into a middle school classroom setting. Nick and/or Barrett may have more insight from an observational perspective as to which tasks might have been more effective, but I think what you are asking is important because it would help produce modules that a) would implement easy in a classroom setting and b) would effectively promote spatial intelligence.

  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 5, 2020 | 05:58 p.m.

    And congrats on defending your dissertation Helen!

  • Icon for: Jonathan Beck

    Jonathan Beck

    Higher Ed Administrator
    May 5, 2020 | 06:39 p.m.

    My daughter who is in third grade created a robotic arm last week because she started looking into hydraulics for a class choice research project 3 weeks ago.  I had no push and barely had to do a thing, just pick up her list from Fleet Farm and found a cardboard box so she could cut out the structural parts.  I believe one of the biggest barriers for students in education is being inspired.  Once inspired learning no longer becomes something you have to do, it's about what you want to do.  It just happens to be more fun when we create an environment that naturally fosters curiosity.  It also has more meaning and drives better understanding as a result of the desire to learn.  Bravo on engagement techniques to get the gears turning and excite students about spatial skill concepts.

     
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    Perrin Teal Sullivan
  • Icon for: Ryan Lindsay

    Ryan Lindsay

    K-12 Teacher
    May 6, 2020 | 12:31 p.m.

    I concur on the inspiration thoughts. My middle school students are also inspired by Minecraft and are piloting using it for learning for the end of the year. They had the principal and curriculum director contacting me a day after I asked if they thought it could be a good end of year project. I plan to show them this project video. 

     
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    Perrin Teal Sullivan
  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 8, 2020 | 10:45 a.m.

    Thank you to both of you so much for you encouragement! 

    Jonathan - your remarks about curiosity and the need for our kids to simply be inspired so align with our team's thoughts. Recruiting their interests and building relevance is such a powerful force when it comes to inspiring them.  So far, Minecraft has been a reliable tool in that department!

    And Ryan - so cool to hear that your kids have a supportive administration excited to explore the Minecraft potential. In full disclosure, at the onset of this project, we were a bit concerned that teachers and their admins would be reluctant to give it a whirl given that it is a game without any direct and concrete educational connection. But we very quickly learned that educators are fast to see the potential for it in the classroom. They seem to most enthusiastic about it because of how excited kids are about the game, as well as the flexibility and latitude the game provides in terms of connecting so easily to different content areas.

     

  • Icon for: Lisa Flores

    Lisa Flores

    Researcher
    May 6, 2020 | 07:45 a.m.

    The potential impact of the intervention you are developing is significant given the popularity of Minecraft with elementary school kids. I love the analogy of putting vegetables into the Mac and cheese. Great work

     
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    patrick honner
  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 8, 2020 | 10:05 a.m.

    Hi Lisa! Thanks so much for the positive feedback. We too agree that leveraging the excitement around Minecraft has helped us realize the potential impact. Throughout our journey, we've met some really exciting educators and researchers using it as a platform to address so many different content areas and disciplines. The blank canvas nature of it seems to encourage not only the kids using it for learning to be creative, but the educators designing the learning itself!

  • Icon for: Luke West

    Luke West

    Graduate Student
    May 6, 2020 | 12:32 p.m.

    One of my high school students recently shared with me that he had struggled for a long time with the concept of volume in geometry in late elementary school. After getting into Minecraft in 7th grade, though, he found himself calculating area and volume organically in the game, and he said after that point, he never had issues with volume! Currently the majority of my male students have had extensive experience with Minecraft, so it's especially exciting to see your project opening doors for all students to benefit from this digital creative workspace!

  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 7, 2020 | 08:49 a.m.

    Luke - this is such a great real-world story about the power of Minecraft to not only engage not only the reluctant learners but all students, as well as the blank canvas nature of Minecraft to support teaching across all disciplines. Thanks for sharing!

  • Icon for: Bryce Hughes

    Bryce Hughes

    Co-Presenter
    Assistant Professor
    May 8, 2020 | 11:45 a.m.

    Luke, that was one of our initial concerns/challenges, whether Minecraft would be widely of interest, but it was nice to see our assumptions shattered when we moved forward to run the camps. We have talked about whether different kinds of storylines may appeal to different kids, but having a storyline seemed to make a significant difference over simply placing spatial reasoning tasks in the platform.

  • Icon for: Michael I. Swart

    Michael I. Swart

    Researcher
    May 6, 2020 | 01:04 p.m.

    Great work leveraging the indubitable popularity of Minecraft among this demographic.  Could you expound a bit about the various spatial skills that you are training for (visualization, rotation, orientation, transformation) and how you develop curriculuar content.  Also, do y'all administer any type of reliable, validated metrics in a pre/post or covariate manner to determine impact?

     
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    Perrin Teal Sullivan
  • Icon for: Barrett Frank

    Barrett Frank

    Co-Presenter
    GTA
    May 6, 2020 | 01:34 p.m.

    We decided to focus on mental rotation and transforming between 2 and 3 dimensions.  The interventions were in-game puzzles modeled after the The Purdue Visualization of Rotations Test and Lappen's Coded plans.  We found that these were easy to port over to Minecraft.  We also provided students with paper maps of areas that they needed to explore.  This forced students to transform between the two-dimensional map and the three-dimensional virtual world they needed to navigate.

    To assess learning gains we administered two spatial instruments both pre- and post-intervention.  These instruments made use of questions that are found on other validated instruments.  We also had students rank their confidence level for each item on these instruments.

  • Icon for: Barrett Frank

    Barrett Frank

    Co-Presenter
    GTA
    May 6, 2020 | 01:50 p.m.

    We have received the original developers permission to modify the PVST, and we recognize this mitigates the validity of the instrument. 

    In addition to the modified PVST, the second test focused on the 2d-to-3d transformation spatial skill, and was adapted from the Spatial Reasoning Instrument (Lowrie, Logan, & Ramful, 2017) and the Spatial Visualization Test (Lappen, 1981).

    These modified instruments have not gone through rigorous validity and reliability measures, and our goal is to address this limitation with future research.

     

  • Icon for: Elizabeth Phillips

    Elizabeth Phillips

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 7, 2020 | 03:53 p.m.

    Barrett, I am delighted to see your work with spatial visualization. It is a skill that is so important and highly valued until the Common Core. Visualization is non existent and even g3-D eometry plays a minor role.

    I was intrigued to see the mention of Spatial Visualization test by Lappan et. al. I am a colleague of Lappan and I helped develop the test. It was designed to test the effects of our Middle Grades Mathematics Module, Spatial Visualization. I am curious to know if you used some of the activities from the unit. How much paper and pencil work do you have students do with the cubes before or during the computer explorations? Have you tested male/female spatial abilities before or after the experiment?

     

  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 8, 2020 | 10:26 a.m.

    Elizabeth - it is wonderful to hear from someone that contributed so significantly to the work on spatial skills in middle grade. And thank you for your encouragement!

    You ask a great question about how much paper and pencil work/hands-on cube exploration we had the students do before they moved to Minecraft. We started each day with about 1 hour of non-Minecraft spatial visualization work before they transitioned to the computers, and then interspersed some exercises throughout the day. Then, while solving the puzzles, we always provided the paper/pencil activities and cubes for them to use as additional manipulatives.

    When it came to this work, we routinely found ourselves in an engagement bind though. The summer camps were marketed as "Minecraft and Spatial Skills", but as you can expect, the kids were there to play Minecraft :) We recognize and value how critical that paper/pencil and cube work is to their development, but no matter how engaging we made that component of the intervention, the kids remained focused on Minecraft. So it turned into a delicate balance each day. 

    Interestingly, we did pre-test the male/female spatial abilities, and found no detectable significant difference at the start. We recognize that our work was far from perfect as this was just a design and development project. Our goal moving forward it so build our sample size, and continue refining how and when we pre-test and post-test and integrate the spatial ability modules.

  • Icon for: Stacey Forsyth

    Stacey Forsyth

    Informal Educator
    May 6, 2020 | 04:16 p.m.

    Do you have any plans to disseminate your curriculum & puzzles more broadly? My organization offers coding classes and camps that use Minecraft, but it would be great to incorporate these types of spatial reasoning puzzles as well.

  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 7, 2020 | 08:47 a.m.

    Hi Stacey! Thanks for your question. We are currently working on ways to convert the intervention so it is more readily available and useable across a variety of learning contexts.

  • Icon for: Nathan Auck

    Nathan Auck

    Facilitator
    STEM Coordinator
    May 6, 2020 | 06:14 p.m.

    Super interesting! Thanks for sharing your work!

    The video mentions how learning objectives can be embedded in story and gameplay challenges in a way that means students don’t even know they’re learning. I wonder if there was explicit discussion with learners related to what learning objectives they had met? It seems there would be a lot of metacognitive benefits that come from knowing specifically what you’re learning.

     
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    Perrin Teal Sullivan
  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 7, 2020 | 08:46 a.m.

    Nathan - You make such an important point about the metacognitive benefits of students being aware of what they are learning. We could not agree more it encourages engagement by keeping them focused on initial goals and the relevancy of meeting those goals, not to mention encourages self-assessment and reflection. 

    Our intervention design does include considerable advanced organizers that provide students exposure to spatial skills and the role that spatial skills play in STEM learning. We front-load much of this while the kids are learning the basics of Minecraft like how to move and build in the environment, as well developing an better understanding of the social expectations needed to work in a digital-based collaborative learning environment. More specifically, with the help of our spatial skills experts, we developed a series of non-Minecraft-based activities that introduce them to the spatial skills they will be practicing during game-play, and include real-world connections to each of those spatial skills. 

    Thanks again for the feedback and great question!

  • Icon for: Bryce Hughes

    Bryce Hughes

    Co-Presenter
    Assistant Professor
    May 8, 2020 | 12:04 p.m.

    Nathan, you hit on a point that was also a delicate balance for our team. To what extent does transparency about the spatial reasoning tasks reduce student engagement (I just want to play in Minecraft, but they're making me work!), but to what extent does embedding these tasks undermine their learning in this area just for the reason you indicated? We also wanted to make sure that as students got practice with spatial reasoning tasks they weren't simply getting better at completing our spatial reasoning assessments, but that it was improving their underlying skills. You raise a really important question as we move the project forward in terms of how else we might improve lesson design. Thank you!

  • Icon for: Nathan Auck

    Nathan Auck

    Facilitator
    STEM Coordinator
    May 8, 2020 | 05:37 p.m.

    THanks for your responses Nick and Bryce! I love the potential this project has going forward to engage students in the learning! Often STEM activities focus on engagement, but are less about meeting particular learning objectives. Great to hear you’ve considered the learning here as well!

  • Icon for: Omar Ashour

    Omar Ashour

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 7, 2020 | 01:18 a.m.

    Great work! are these puzzles publicly available? 

  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 8, 2020 | 10:00 a.m.

    Thanks for the positive feedback Omar! We are currently working on ways to convert the intervention so it is more widely available.

  • Icon for: Sunni Newton

    Sunni Newton

    Researcher
    May 7, 2020 | 11:50 a.m.

    This is a great project! My son is Minecraft-obsessed, so I look forward to having him work on these puzzles when you all are ready to share them. This incredibly popular platform is a perfect "hook" to get students to willingly work on improving their spatial skills. 

  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 8, 2020 | 10:05 a.m.

    Well-said Sunni! The idea of Minecraft as the "hook" perfectly captures the engagement that Minecraft can build in learners. 

  • Icon for: Sonia Ellis

    Sonia Ellis

    Instructional Designer
    May 8, 2020 | 09:37 a.m.

    This is wonderful! The gaming element is clearly super engaging. I'd love to hear more about the storyline, how it was developed, and how students responded to that part of the activity.

  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 8, 2020 | 10:06 a.m.

    Thanks for the encouragement Sonia! Developing the storyline was an exciting part of the project.

    We started the development process by working with a group of partner 4th and 5th grade classrooms to brainstorm ideas based on genres of literature they see as most engaging with their students.  Based on that initial pool of ideas, we surveyed 4th and 5th grade students for the concept they felt would be most compelling, arriving at the post-apocalyptic world where the students are to follow clues left by their ancestors to collect items needed to beat the final zombie boss. Those items are collected when they solve the spatial skill puzzles and complete the mazes. 

    We were particularly intent in arriving at a plot that would be equally as engaging for both males and females, and those data we collected indicated this was a universally-engaging storyline.

    Our wonderful preservice teachers preparing to be English educators and elementary educators then wrote the storyline that was stylistically-accurate and developmentally-appropriate, and compiled then it into a quasi-graphic novel format for the kids to use to guide their efforts during game play. We concluded by vetting the storylines again with our partner teachers.

    Ultimately, post-intervention data confirm that the storyline was a hit with the participants! It is certainly an exciting component of our project.

  • Icon for: Karl Kosko

    Karl Kosko

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 8, 2020 | 02:31 p.m.

    Very interesting project, and useful feedback on the questions above. I look forward to seeing more of your findings in the near future!

  • Icon for: Bryce Hughes

    Bryce Hughes

    Co-Presenter
    Assistant Professor
    May 8, 2020 | 03:08 p.m.

    Thank you! We appreciate the comment. Let us know if you have any specific questions about the project!

  • Icon for: Leanne Ketterlin Geller

    Leanne Ketterlin Geller

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 9, 2020 | 10:08 a.m.

    Thanks for your video. I enjoyed learning more about your research. I wonder which aspects of spatial reasoning you are measuring and if you are collecting data on other educational outcomes. Minecraft has so many applications, I wonder if you have found other benefits. 

  • Icon for: Barrett Frank

    Barrett Frank

    Co-Presenter
    GTA
    May 10, 2020 | 12:33 a.m.

    We decided to focus on mental rotations and transformations between two and three dimensions.  These topics were fairly straight forward to port into Minecraft and are both crucial skills for STEM related fields.

    One of my favorite aspects of Minecraft is letting the students express themselves.  We have incorporated free build into our interventions where we give students a design goal and let them loose.  This past summer we asked students to design a fort that could repel a zombie hoard.  It was incredible to see what they were able to build in such a short time.

  • Icon for: Bryce Hughes

    Bryce Hughes

    Co-Presenter
    Assistant Professor
    May 11, 2020 | 12:40 p.m.

    Adding onto Barrett's response, we are looking at some other applications for future directions of the project. There are so many opportunities for aligning these activities with different school standards that we are thinking through what we learned with this project and considering other applications that would also be of use to parents and teachers. For example, in addition to alignment with math and science standards, are there places for alignment with English Language Arts? Given how we shifted to a story-based experience for students, there appears to be opportunity for ELA alignment that may even integrate skills across standard areas.

  • Icon for: Kristin Flaming

    Kristin Flaming

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 9, 2020 | 07:57 p.m.

    I work with a STEAM 1-week residential camp in Oklahoma for rising 7th grade girls. We do 2 hour workshops. Do you have a spatial reasoning task that you would recommend we incorporate as a 2 hour or so workshop in our summer camp?

  • Icon for: Nick Lux

    Nick Lux

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Professor
    May 11, 2020 | 11:35 a.m.

    Kristin - we have found that working with mental rotation and 2d-to-3d transformation activities work well with that age. In fact, a perfect resource for you to consider are some of the activities included in the Middle Grades Mathematics Module, Spatial Visualization. One of the developers of that work, Dr. Elizabeth Phillips, commented earlier in this thread. Definitely worth exploring for your camp!

  • Icon for: Kristin Flaming

    Kristin Flaming

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 12, 2020 | 02:32 p.m.

    thank you!

  • Icon for: Viviana Vazquez

    Viviana Vazquez

    May 12, 2020 | 03:37 p.m.

    I think this is a wonderful idea! Minecraft is something that most kids enjoy, and to use it to benefit their academic skills is so smart. I know my brother loves Minecraft, so if he was to be able to use it at school, he'd be super engaged, as I'm sure all of these students are. Great video!

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