A whole week of Minecraft?

Yes, indeed. I’m teaching a whole week for teachers on how to use Minecraft in their computer science classes! Not only helping CS teachers learn how to use it in their classes, having some serious play time, but even getting paid to do it. Kinda unbelievable.

This is the second time I’ve done this here for the South Carolina chapter of the Computer Science Teachers Association. It’s a wonderful week, held on the campus of the Citadel, a military school here in Charleston. Week-long courses on robotics, coding, game design, web design, and a bunch of other CS-related topics.

Teachers get so little time to actually "play" with technolgies during the school year. I know that from experience. And playing is the best way to learn something new. So a summer workshop is the perfect opportunity to just learn, without the accompanying stress of lesson plans, lunch supervision, grading, and all the many other responsibilities that teachers have.

Even though I’m now officially retired from teaching, I’ve got years of experience in teaching coding with Minecraft, and I’m thrilled to be able to pass some of that along. Interestingly, numbers for this session are down from last year, and I’m interested to see if that reflects a larger trend away from the use of Minecraft (or maybe I just did a terrible job last year!).

At any rate, I’ve been banging out my plans (loosey-goosey as always) for next week in org-mode and emacs. I’ll have to shift back to Windows from Linux, where I’ve been living for the last several months, as Minecraft: Education Edition doesn’t have a Linux version, sadly. But truth is most schools are locked into one of the big tech-spheres (Microsoft, Apple, or Google), and chances of teachers or classes using Linux are slim to none.

I’ll report back here next week and update our progress!