First Litcraft Teacher Training event – 24 Jan 2018

Jan. 30, 2018 | james

Last week (24/01/2018), the project team was proud to attend its initial training event through Computing at School – a series of training events intended to introduce areas of innovation that will shape the classroom of the future. This was our first engagement with an audience of teachers, and thanks to Sally’s hard work on converting Litcraft – Treasure Island over to the iPad version, and the incredibly useful input from Dr Zoe Bolton on shaping the lesson plans to meet current classroom focii, the full-morning event was a success.

Of course, one group of teachers set about to systematically dismantle the Hispaniola, pre-empting potential distractions…

Sally introduced the wider project and the aims of the Litcraft component, whilst James provided a detailed summary of Minecraft and guide to using it. Only two of the teachers had prior experience with Minecraft, and even then it was indirect (through their own children); none had played it before – which demonstrated the primary barrier (ease of accessibility) that such resources need to break through. Lots of feedback was received that highlighted one key potential issue: a potential reliance on pupils having a broader knowledge of the software than the teacher could. Of course, teaching method varies from teacher to teacher, and some argued for the benefit of allowing pupils to direct lessons, and this very concern formed one of the core approaches for the project – that it could be used to encourage peer-to-peer learning.

This feedback has highlighted the need to provide a greater degree of instruction in the core software control schemes – as was pointed out, given the immense popularity of the game, pupils *would* have that knowledge and assist one another – which is encouranging a focus on group-based lesson plan activities rather than purely as solo activities.

The core concept of Litcraft – allowing those of weaker literate ability to interact with a literary environment in a novel manner, and come to discover the texts through a whole new (visual , active, and task-based, rather than purely textual, passive, and narratised) direction – was incredibly well-received, with a number of participants expressing an interest in directly trialing future iterations in their classrooms. Minecraft is becoming an important part of the modern classroom, and Litcraft is wonderfully positioned to pioneer digital literacy education in a new and exciting direction.

Flint’s Pointer – to a digital classroom

If anyone else would be interested in discussing opportunities to host a trial event at a school, library, or any other event – please do not hesitate to get in touch.

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The project begins – first engagement event – so much reading

Nov. 8, 2017 | james

Hello world. (apologies… I have always wanted to start off a research blog with that iconic phrase)

A month in, and work is progressing well. We have already demonstrated the first of the Litcraft resource designs at the International Games Week event held at the British Library on November 4th.

Sally and James attended with the Treasure Island Minecraft and card game designs and Swallows & Amazons Minecraft task; with a great location on the first floor mezzanine, and beautiful posters acquired just in time, the project saw a lot of interest from visitors. It was an ideally-sized event to trial our project iPads and unveil the research goals to members of the public – several of whom worked with libraries across the country – we hope to remain in contact throughout the course of our work with everyone who we met on the day!

Sally instructing Litcraft – in French, no less!

The children really took to the Minecraft – especially Sally’s treasure-hunting and in-game map-reading  tasks. We were delighted by how many people fondly remembered Ransome’s work (again, they very much enjoyed building Wildcat Island – with some very creative interpretations of the map), and were encouraged when several parents said they were going to try and find a copy to read to the children at night. That is exactly what we were hoping for.

Not so subtle a nook (not pictured, the coffee shop round the corner!)

It was a long day, but extremely productive. Our thanks again to Stella Wisdom for inviting us to attend – we very much hope to return next year, with a whole array of Litcraft resources.

Obligatory event selfie

Work continues on determining the final few texts that would complete the corpus, and make it as representative as possible – no easy task when we haven’t set ourselves any era- or genre-based boundaries, and indeed need to demonstrate the coding is so versatile in can apply to all manner of texts. There’s worse ways to spend time than browsing bookstores, both virtually and in person, making copious excited notes, and discovering some unconsidered gems. If only we had funding for five years so as to have enough time to work on triple the amount of texts. But one step at a time…

(anyone reading this – if you have a suggestion you strongly believe would be an ideal fit the the chronotopes discussed under the Corpus page, please get in touch – we always enjoy considering new material)

 

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