Minecraft Edu, Roblox, & Rec Room
The three widely popular sandbox-style gaming platforms provide fun opportunities to learn essential 21st century skills such as digital content creation, problem-solving, critical thinking and reasoning, collaboration, and digital citizenship. They are all mobile-friendly and available for both Android and IOS. Generally speaking, they are kid-friendly even though exposure to inappropriate content for kids is a possibility, so caution must be exercised by adults. Share your experience with these games in the class blog!
This is the most education-friendly game. Students can create virtual worlds of their own and explore other worlds as characters in the game. They can also work collaboratively on projects. The game offers teachers control features that enable them to keep students focused on a task. In addition, it provides a safe environment as it restricts contact with strangers. As for teachers, they can benefit from being part of a community of teachers, mentors, and trainers who use this tool, and make use of tutorials, lesson plans, and other resources and features to support them and make both learning and teaching fun.
Roblox allows users to create their own games as well as play other user-created games and experiences. It combines social media with gaming as users can chat and send friend requests. Users can compete in sporting events, play arcade-style games such as shooters, enjoy racing games, or dive into role-playing and MMORPGs, among many other things. Roblox has parental features that enable parents to restrict in-game chat, in-app purchasing, and access to certain games.
Rec Room also allows users to play and create games and share them with the Rec Room community. It is also a social space where users can chat using text or voice, compete against each other, and join different rooms based on their interests. Children under 13 can create junior accounts which limits their access to rooms with mature themes and other inappropriate or potentially dangerous features and materials. The junior mode is also certified by the kidSAFE Seal Program. However, parental supervision is always required.
While not exactly a game, this tools is widely used to teach coding for kids. Scratch is a block-based visual programming language. Students can use it to code interactive stories, animations, and games. It can be integrated across multiple subject areas and age groups. Visit Scratch's website for plenty of resources and stories of how educators are using it.
A ROBLOX Experience:
This is a short loom screen-cast to give you an introductory Roblox experience. This game was made by Afrah from my ETEC 510 group so I must say a big THANK YOU to Afrah and the rest of our group for giving me permission to use her game for this demonstration.
Lastly, enjoy the Memory Game below:
Optional activity