Minecraft + 8th Graders + Sleep Deprivation = ?

We recently took our 8th grade trip to Washington D.C.  The ride is about six hours there and six back with several long trips between all of our stops.  We have a bunch of time to kill.  I usually encourage my students to bring their Nintendo DS, so I can crush them at Mario Kart...which I do (LRN2Powerslide). 

This year, I found out that I could run a mobile hotspot off my phone and set up a minecraft server.  I got a group of about six students to team up and play minecraft.  I took on the role of the team leader and we quickly produced a decent fortress.  The communication and teamwork inherent in this type of gameplay lead to a very productive bus ride and very few behaviorial issues.  Which is nice.

In the end, we had a well oiled machine of gatherers, designers, builders, and hunters.  We planned our next builds around breakfast and created during the long hours of monotonous bus travel.  We only ever had any trouble near the end of the ride home when two overly sleep deprived students began an in game conflict and eventually decided to rage quit.

 

Considering that the time could have been spend texting each other mindless filth, bothering teachers and chaperones, or playing the next hot mobile shoot-em-up, I think this was a great use of our time.

Chicken Races!

So, I have to review genetics as part of my state test curriculum.  A few years back, I got an idea from an old video game my brother and I had found a long time ago.  The game was called Mutant Chicken Races and I was pretty terrible.  Also, it was very fun.  The premise was that you needed to save up money by breeding and racing chickens.

So, I adapted this game to work in a classroom.  I had the students use Punnett Squares to determine the traits of their racing chicken by using the genes from its parents.

These traits directly translated to how the chicken would perform in a race. 

I held a stable of my own racing chickens to compete with them.  If I beat them in a race, they'd have a change to breed a better chicken by looking for favorable traits in parent chickens and combining their genes.  The follow up discussion led to an examination of how humans can use selective breeding to produce the traits we want in a species of animals.

Survive!

For the past several weeks, I've had a student teacher.  We started up our state test review, and she did most of the review on Physics, Chemistry, and Earth Science.  Now that I am back in the driver's seat, we're reviewing ecology.  I've made a game for mys tudents to play to simulate an ecosystem.  Each of them is given a sheet with statistics that represent a population of an organism.

Each population has certain values for attack, defense, and reproduction.  They also have a starting population.  The rules are essentially alligned with the behaviors each type of organism is normally capable of.  Producers don't have to eat, primary consumers can eat plants, secondary consumers can eat animals, etc.

The game is turned based and has three phases per turn.  Phase 1 - Attack.  Each organism needs to eat if it wants to have the energy to reproduce.  Food is all around them and each student will make a roll against the other's defense to see if an attack was successful.  Phase 2 - Environment.  I roll for a random environmental effect that might harm the organisms.  Phase 3 - Reproduce.  If the organism ate that turn, it may reproduce.

That is mostly it.  I tell the students that the only goal is to survive.  Then I set them loose.

Waves and Slinkies!

A while back we used slinkies to demonstrate transverse and longitudinal waves.  Here are some of the results.

CSI Science Class

We covered light, optics, and fluorescence in class.  As a culminating activity, we set up a crime scene investigation for my students to work through.

THE HORROR!!

I brought in a stuffed animal owl (Thisty the Owl) from home to play the victim.  He was missing and the students had to follow a UV blood trail to find the body.

Ship this poor bird off to the morgue.

They also used magnifying glasses to match fingerprints to our database.  This gave us suspects to interrogate.  I wrote scripts for students to follow, and I even interrogated my guinea pig, Bridget.

Besides fingerprints and blood, the students founf hairs and fibers at the crime scene.  They used microscopes to match with our database of fibers to narrow our search to a final suspect.

Guinea pig hair has a bumpy texture.

Human hair does not.

Using the evidence they gathered and the testimony of the suspects, the students had to justify who they chose to blame the crime on.  (It was Bridget)

Roller Coasters!

Tis week we talked about how gravitational potential energy is used to propel roller coasters through twists, turns, and loops.  In class, we made roller coasters using 3x5 cards.  We each had a potential energy "budget" that came from a ramp set at a fixed height.  If someone wanted to use more energy, they had to design a ride that went off the table to the ground.

My Student's are making a Video Game. Pt 1

Last semester, I dabbled in RPG Maker VX Ace with my computer class.  I had them help out with elements of a game that I produced.  I've decided to pull out all of the stops and give them complete creative control of the building process.

RPG Maker VX Ace has a wonderful mapping utility.

The plan is to have them handle all of the writing and design elements of the game while I do the grunt work over the course of the next semester.  So far, I've had them begin the writing of the story and even write up a budget for our "game studio."  These fulfill the requirements of my class to review MS Word and Excel.

The blank map is used to select random shapes for continents.

Next, I am doing some work with GIMP to teach image manipulating.  The first thing we've done is made world maps.  Each student starts with a "blank" map.  They then select chunks to be the continents and add details to separate the biomes and climates.  These designs can then be translated into RPG Maker VX Ace.

Here's something I cooked up in GIMP.