Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Category: games

  • FREE Hour of Code Webinars with Wes

    This week as part of the 2013 “Hour of Code” and Computer Science Education Week I’m sharing two different FREE webinars on Wednesday and Saturday. Please mark your calendars so you can join one or both events! Introduce Students to Coding with HopScotch for iPad Wed Dec 11, 7 pm EST FREE Adobe Connect webinar…

  • MinecraftEDU Beginner Challenge: Craft 10 Basic Tools with Wood and Stone

    My 16 year old son, who is a Minecraft expert, is helping me develop several short, simple MinecraftEDU challenges to use with my 4th and 5th grade students as we continue exploring and learning with Minecraft in our STEM class. Last week I had students explore the “Tutorial World” which comes with MinecraftEDU software, running…

  • Check Out Teetsie: A GameSalad-created iPad Game

    Today at breakfast in a diner in Florida, I overheard a couple near me talking about the new iPad game the husband had coded which was just was released on the Apple App Store. The game is Teetsie, and it turns out the creator (Lee Walker) has been working on it the past six months…

  • Playing BowSpleef with a Friend in Minecraft

    We are getting ever-closer to the dream of gameplay on the holodeck of Star Trek. Last night my 10th grade son, who LOVES Minecraft, played some Minecraft mini-games on a shared server with a school friend. They audio skyped so they could talk as they played, since they were not physically together but playing from…

  • We Are The Miners of Minecraft (A Clever Queen Remix)

    My 15 year old son is a huge Minecraft fan, and loves both watching and curating creative Minecraft videos on YouTube. Periodically he shares some with me, and this evening we watched “‘We Are The Miners’ – A Minecraft Parody of Queen’s We Are The Champions (Music Video)”. As a long-time fan of Queen, I…

  • 4th Grade Virtual Tour of a California Mission in Minecraft

    In her outstanding June 8, 2013, webinar for Classroom 2.0 Live focusing on digital portfolios in the classroom, Holly Clark (@hollyedtechdiva) extolled the following four minute screencast created by a fourth grade student of his Minecraft virtual replica of Mission San Diego de Alcalá in San Diego, California. Wow! Holly wasn’t kidding, this is an…

  • More Minecraft Lessons from a 15 Year Old (March 2013)

    Friday evening my son and I played more Minecraft together, and my steep learning curve working with this 15 year old Minecraft expert continued. For part 1 see my March 3rd post, “First Lesson in Minecraft (and why I waited a year to ask my son to teach me).” I took screenshots throughout our Minecraft…

  • First Lesson in Minecraft (and why I waited a year to ask my son to teach me)

    This past week was chock-full of new learning moments for me. I attended and presented at both the 2013 Heartland eLearning Conference in Edmond, Oklahoma, and the 2013 Illinois Computer Education (ICE) Conference outside Chicago, Illinois. Since I use Twitter as a primary “information trap” for links and ideas now, my Tweet Nest archives of…

  • Amazing Minecraft Webshows, Music Videos and Parody Animation Videos

    This weekend my son, who is now 15 and in 9th grade, shared several YouTube videos he’s been watching recently about Minecraft. This fall he recorded and shared a presentation for the 2012 K-12 Online Conference, “Creating and Playing in Minecraft,” in which he shared some of his favorite YouTube channels by Minecraft gurus. Here…

  • Yukon Students Learning Computer Programming with Scratch

    (cross-posted from the Learning Showcase website of Yukon Public Schools) The December 12, 2012, issue of the Yukon Review featured an article on page 11 about students taking STEM classes with Chris Simon at Independence Elementary School. STEM is an acronym for “Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.” The article was titled, “‘Scratch’ teaches students computer…