You've done mystery location, now what?

I've had the lucky opportunity to plan and coordinate Mystery Location calls for all of our sixth grade social studies teachers in my school. It is so fun to help arrange their line ups and to co-teach the lessons as often as I can. I love watching the students try to solve the puzzle of where the other school can be from and the level of collaboration that is necessary for success. If you haven't done a Mystery Location call yet - definitely try it out. You'll be hooked. Want to know more? Check out Who Doesn't Love a Mystery?

Because of our success with sixth grade social studies, I had a few other teachers approach me and ask what kinds of global connections they could make. We also had a lot of fun with some Mystery Calls and wanted an excuse to call those same classes back. So I poked around and read about Mystery Number.

Mystery Number follows the same premise as a Mystery Location call. This time each class picks a number. The range of numbers can match the level of students. For very young classes you might limit it to 0 through 20. For our self-contained Special Education class we did whole numbers between 1 and 100. This year we are hoping to do 1 through 100 but to the hundredths decimal place.

Once each class has picked their number, each side asks a yes or no question. We tried questions like "Is the number even?" "Is the number prime?" "Is the number greater than 50?" We practiced the day ahead by having small groups pick numbers and ask each other questions. It was a great way to review academic vocabulary like even/odd, greater than/less than, and prime. Some of our students even tried using multiples and factors which was excellent. I'm looking forward to the questions our decimals class will ask.

Our students found it very helpful to have number charts that they could mark up. The classroom teacher I worked with had clear folders that we could slide the number chart into and then mark up with dry erase markers. This was definitely ideal.

I also found it helpful to have one class ask questions until they guessed and then switch and have the other class ask until they guessed. When we do Mystery Location we always alternate questions but with Mystery Number that transition seemed harder for the students. Play around with it to find a format that works for your students.

There are several reasons to try out a Mystery Number call. First of all, it is so important for students to have the ability to reach beyond their classroom. There is something about communicating with a class in a different part of the country that slowly opens their eyes to the world beyond them. Mystery call have sparked political, social, cultural, and economic conversations in our classes. Secondly, it is an authentic opportunity to put into practice something they've been learning. Suddenly there is a reason to know which numbers are prime beyond that "it will be on the test." Now knowing which numbers are prime helps you narrow down your choices, plan your next question and accurately answer questions from the other class. Thirdly, Mystery Calls give all students a place in the classroom. Students that I've never seen speak up in class have a chance to get in front of the web cam and ask a question to a class across state boundaries. Students that are careful note takers become invaluable because their number chart is the reference point. Each time I do a call there is a least one student who surprises the classroom teachers with their interest and level of participation. So, give Mystery Number a try. And if you are looking for a partner class please leave a comment below so we can get in touch!

5 reasons we are playing MinecraftEdu at our school

We are finally doing it! Playing MinecraftEdu in school! Like many things in my life, I can't remember when I first heard about Minecraft. I think I just began absorbing thoughts about it when reading game based learning articles or hearing educational technology gurus giving talks. I know I introduced my kids to it about three years ago when they were 5 and 8 and our home has never been the same. They quickly surpassed my skill with building, exploring and creating. I quickly learned that this was a powerful game that empowered kids and gave them a world to shape unlike any other. (I also quickly learned to set the timer when they were playing so that their little eyes didn't turn into grass blocks). And while I loved watching them play, I wasn't sure how to bring it into the classroom.

Just in case you haven't hear of Minecraft or seen it being played, it is a virtual world where students can use virtual blocks to build stuff. In many ways, it is like playing with building blocks, plastic animals, and dolls in your basement, except because it is digital, you have endless choices of blocks, plastic animals and dolls. And the animals and dolls move. And you can fly. And you can dig underground. And a hundred other things that you can't do in your basement with blocks, animals and dolls. (For a more detailed description, check our "What is Minecraft All About?" by MineMum)

While I was holding back from a school implementation and just watching my kids play, loads of other educators took the plunge. As Minecraft rose in popularity in the lives of my children and their friends, it also was embraced by innovative teachers that came up with brilliant ways to teach content using Minecraft. Therefore, when I signed up for a MOOC this fall on teaching with MinecraftEdu, I realized that there were tons of materials to support me and that teachers far more talented than I had already created wonderful lesson plans that the teachers and students at my school could try. For some great stuff check out: EduCrew YouTube Tutorial Series, Joel Levin's lesson plan on EduCade, and the MinecraftEDU Wiki.

But just because the resources are there and other teachers are doing it, isn't enough of a reason to start. So, why did I decide that our kids should be playing MinecraftEdu in school?

1. It is active. Sometimes when I am visiting classrooms, I realize that students are spending a lot of time listening or passively completing worksheets. When you see students playing Minecraft, they are busy. They are leaning forward, they are intent, they are engaged in the actions they are taking. Using a game like MinecraftEdu in the classroom takes students out of the" sit back and soak it in" mode and into a create, experiment and take risks mode.

2. Kids become the experts. In every classroom, there is a student who is a phenomenal Minecraft player who is not a phenomenal student. When you introduce Minecraft in these classrooms, this student comes alive. They are able to explain how to play to other students, they suggest new lesson plans to the teacher, they take on leadership roles in the classroom. I believe that when students are able to be experts in the classroom, they become better learners. They come into class believing they are valued there and are more open to learning.

3. Tinkering. In Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager's Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering and Engineering in the Classroom, they define tinkering as "a way of controlling the environment and a vehicle for intellectual development" and advocate that "children should engage in tinkering and making because they are powerful ways to learn." This becomes evident when watching students play MinecraftEDU. Instead of finding the only right answer to put in the blank, MinecraftEdu has lots of right answers. In the Genetics lesson I watched, there were hundreds of choices for students, from what color to dye your sheep to what shape your fence was to how you named your sheep and your ranch. When we can tinker, experiment and take risks, we learn by doing.

4. Content connections. I work in a school that has to meet state standards on testing. We can not afford to ignore our required curriculum or assume it will be taught another year, in another course. Minecraft is so open-ended that you can easily teach your content while letting the students play. Teachers and students can and should be able to tell what new content or skills they learned while using Minecraft in schools. The math, science, social students, world language, language arts standards can should be carefully considered and directly relate to the Minecraft activity the students do.

5. Simulated worlds. The lesson I watched gave students a way to apply what they were learning about genetics. They could certainly never actually breed sheep and complete Punnett squares, but in Minecraft, they could simulate this in a class period. Student generated questions arise during simulations that can lead to deeper understanding of the content being taught. For instance, in every class I observed, some student noticed that pink and purple sheep made pinkish-purplish sheep. This lead to a spontaneous lesson on partial dominance, which never came up during the direct instruction part of the lesson.

I would be interested to collect more quantitative data on Minecraft in the classroom and I wouldn't want to see students playing every day or all day, I do believe that Minecraft should be added to the learning toolbox as a innovative, creative way to get students to interact with content in a meaningful way.

Games + Global + Math = Excited Students!

My school just had the wonderful opportunity to participate in World Maths Day. World Maths Day is part of the World Education Games which is "an annual global online challenge to get all students (4-18 years of age) excited about learning, and to give the top students in all schools an opportunity to see how they measure up against the best in the world."

Basically, for free, you can enroll your students at http://www.worldeducationgames.com/. Then the fun begins. Students log on and play one minute games with other students in their age group from around the world.

As students play, they see an avatar and the name of the country of the student they are playing. As students answer questions correctly, a bar moves across the screen showing their success. Students can also watch as their competitor's bar moves across the screen. Each game is only a minute so students stay motivated as they try to keep up with their competitors.

After one day of play, I got the following email from a math teacher:

OH MY GOODNESS! The kids are SO hyped about World Math Games!

Yesterday another teacher said to me.

If we could play World Maths Games everyday, my kids would know their math facts perfectly.

When I went into a classroom to watch students play during the live event (which runs from March 5th to March 6th), it didn't look (or sound) like a typical math class. Kids were partially standing at their computers, talking excitedly across the room, and were deeply focused on achievement. I have written before about the power of games to engage students (see Videos Games Could Save Schools and Running to Get to Math Class) and these games were no different.

While I had been attracted to the World Maths Game for its potential for students to make global connections, I was fascinated by the different ways students were engaged with the games. One student really want to compete against her peers. She would call out "One, two, three" and students would all start a game together. They loved competing against the other students in the room. Others were intrigued by where other students were from. I heard many students commenting on the countries of their opponents and occasionally a student would just call out the name of a country. Other students really wanted to know how they measured up to students around the world and continually check the Hall of Fame board set up in the game.

Despite a snow day on the second day of the event, World Maths Day was a huge success for our school. Over 52,000 correct math questions were answered, over 400 students participated, and hundreds of students had fun doing math. I look forward to expanding our involvement in the games next year, including fundraising for the UNICEF School-in-a-box program. Until then I will continue to look for opportunties for students where they:

• experience success
• have fun while learning
• make global connections

Website of the Week #2

Power My Learning is a free, web-based learning platform. It contains over 1000 educational games in a number of different content areas. Games are easy to find in grouping by subject area and grade level. And when I say games, I mean excellent, thought-provoking, content-rich learning experiences. Power My Learning isn't filled with arcade-style bouncing balls, it has simulations, movie-creation, authentic learning opportunities. They are engaging and worthwhile.

The website is free and but you do need to create an account. The account has lots of advantages including assigning games to students and saving your favorite games. The rating system also helps steer you towards the kinds of websites you are looking for and make it a breeze to find great stuff.

I can easily seeing this becoming a great first stop for teachers when lesson planning or a top recommended link for parents who know students crave screen time, but want to make it worthwhile when students are logged on.

Do you use Power My Learning? What do you see as its benefits?

We finally got to start using Quest Atlantis last week! If you have never heard of Quest Atlantis before, it is an immersive learning game. Students have avatars and enter a 3D world where they are assigned missions and quests. The missions and quests all are connected to real-world problems and have engaging story lines. Students must navigate the 3D world to find information and clues to solve a problem. Along the way they meet virtual characters who guide the students and provide information. There is also the opportunity to interact with the avatars of students from other schools. The basis of Quest Atlantis is the concept of transformative play. As the Quest Atlantis website explains:

Students who play transformationally become protagonists who use the knowledge, skills, and concepts of the educational content to first make sense of a situation and then make choices that actually transform the play space and the player.

So, I was curious, how would my students react to this 3D space? Would they experience tranformational play? Would they enjoy exploring the virtual world more than they enjoying learning in a traditional classroom?

Honestly, I wasn't sure I would ever find out. The first hurdle to tackle was getting permission slips signed. Because Quest Atlantis is funded by Indiana University and used for research about emerging technologies and learning, students were required to have parental approval before logging into the Quest Atlantis world. Unfortunately, asking parents to sign a permission slip for a class assignment was not a top priority for these students. After a little cajoling from me and some tough talk from their principal, we finally had all the permission slips in. Whew, step one complete.

The first day playing went, well, great. The students were excited. They were laughing and talking and fully engaged for the 30 minutes we let them play. It was fascinating to watch their personalities emerge online. Some went right to finding out their mission and were running off here and there without really absorbing their task or the information given them. Others spent a tremendous amount of time getting their avatar just right. Still others tested the limits of the world and immediately dove off cliffs, swam in the water and tried to get into places they shouldn't. It was all behavior I would completely expect when giving adolescents a new toy. They were experimenting: some with recklessness, some with caution and some just took it as it came.

Day two we began by showing students how to know where in the 3D world they were. Quest Atlantis uses North, South, East, and West indicators for students to know where they currently are and to locate the places they needed to get to. I was pleased that students got the directional concepts but was fascinated to watch them play and realize that they didn't really understand how to apply these concepts. Since we were playing during their social studies class time, I loved that they were absorbing directionality in a whole new way and actually applying it in a way that was meaningful to them.

My other take-away from day two was that my students need help following directions! I guess I always knew that but assumed that they were having trouble following directions because they didn't really care about the assignments or weren't listening to the directions the first time. But watching them play Quest Atlantis, I realized they actually needed help reading carefully and doing tasks in the order assigned to them. Since many of my students have struggled to achieve in traditional schools, this observation wasn't a shocker, but it was still useful to observe it in the virtual world.

The next step with Quest Atlantis will be for the students to tackle content-related missions in the 3D world. Until then I'll be excited about the following things:

• The school administrator commented that she'd never seen Student X talk so much as she did when playing  Quest Atlantis that first day
• A student that was going to be absent for Day Two asked if she could play the game at home. (Yes!)

If playing Quest Atlantis means students are excited to learn and want to work on school work outside of school, I'm ready for more!

Running to get to math class

How often do you see a student running back from a bathroom break to get into math class faster?
Or kids eating their lunch in their math class so they can do more math?
Or calling a math competition the most important thing that's ever happened to them?

I've seen it all. And I'm here to tell you the source is an educational mathematics game called Dimension M.

The Backstory

A few years ago, my director came back from an educational technology conference extremely excited about a product she saw featured by a company then called Tabula Digita. She asked me to check it out and see where we might be able to implement it in our schools. So began a very rewarding journey about letting kids play games in schools.

I first downloaded their single player game and tried it out myself. My screen became a 3D virtual world where I was on a mission and needed to understand square roots in order to reach my destination. I was clumsy and made lots of mistakes but I found it gripping, as I was sure my students would.

Sure enough when I piloted the game with a few students, they loved it. They even asked questions about the math so that they could be more successful. It was convincing enough for our school system to buy a limited number of licenses and see where this gaming thing could take us.

Letting the kids play

Then the fun really began. One of our middle schools identified a group of students that were predicted to be on the borderline of passing their state math test. We agreed that two times a week a science teacher would take them to the computer lab and play Dimension M. (The math teachers were spending this time with students that had previously failed their state math exams).

To get the kids started, I would show the game once on a large screen, mostly just to go over logon protocol and a few basics and then I'd send them off to play. The feeling in the room was electrical. Kids were focused, kids were engaged, kids hands were flying up for help with the math the game was asking them. Yes, kids hands were flying up so that they could get help with math.

Remember, these are kids that do not consider math their favorite subject.

When the first game ended (the games can be set at 5, 10, 15, and 20 minutes), there was a universal exhale. And then an immediate request to play another game.

So, are they doing any math?

Walking around the room when kids first start playing Dimension M will show you that some students are clicking on any answer to "get back to the game." But after "playing" this way a couple of times, these students quickly realize, they are not on the leaderboard, they are not winning the game. That's when the teacher gets involved.

As the kids are playing, a teacher can circulate and quietly offer assistance on the math questions that are popping up. Teachers can pause and watch how students are answering and offer different solutions, scratch paper, tip sheets. If the students believe it is math they can do, they will start trying.

Which brings up another brilliant part of this program: Dimension M games can be differentiated for every kid that is playing. Two kids sitting side by side in the classroom and play toe to toe in the virtual game world can be getting completely different math questions. One can be working on fractions and percents while the other student is practicing estimation. And they can be facing off students in the virtual world that are in a whole different school and might be working algebra questions.

So, yes. They are doing math.

Convinced yet?

We also launched Dimension M for a program that supports students that for a variety of reasons are not being successful in their home schools. In the spring of last year, Dimension U (as Tabula Digita is now called) launched a national competition where students scores were tracked as they plays and each week the top ten scorers qualified to go to a live competition in New York City.

Between students' success in the game and the motivation and dedication of their math teacher, we had two students qualify to go to New York. This was a tremendous experience for both of these boys. Neither had experienced this kind of success before in school. And neither had ever traveled for a school competition.

It was great watching them practice as the competition got closer. And to see their shy smiles as you asked about the competition. And to watch them stand a little taller when you reminded them that no other students in our school division had qualified.

The competition itself was intense and neither student did as well as he wanted to, but the experience was powerful. Both kids talked about it as the best thing that had happened to them. One is still playing Dimension M in school and was able to show off his skills during a division-wide principals' meeting. In fact, he took on one of the principals and trounced him flat. Talk about empowering.

But not every kid is going to go to a live national competition. What about other students? One time when I was visiting a class that was playing Dimension M, I asked a girl if playing the game was helping her in math class.

"Oh, yes." She said.

"Well, how do you know?" I probed.

"I got the highest score on our last math test. And it was because I've been playing Dimension M."

What's next?

I'm thrilled that we doubled the number of classes using Dimension M this year and that Dimension U has begun to offer more web-based games (check them out!). But I would love to see our division embrace this gaming approach more widely and more consistently. If we can get math teachers to see how a game like this complements their daily instruction and offers motivation in a way the best manipulatives in world can't, I think we could see tremendous changes in math achievement.

If we have a tool that engages students, differentiates, builds confidence and is supported by research, let's use it as much as possible!