TG Tour 2014

TeacherGaming's Europe tour is about raising awareness of social challenges schools are already facing globally with the help of games. The world is full of information and possibilities and our youth are having difficulties in exploring the field of possibilities for careers and making the right choices in the modern ‘education tube’ from Pre-K to university.

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Final blog post for #tgtour2014

The tour is over, but the show keeps on getting bigger!

We could start with trying to describe how grateful we are for our community’s help in making the tour come alive. Unfortunately we don’t think it’s possible with this format of communication. :-/

Let’s just put it this way:

We can’t say how humble and thankful we are for all the support we received from our community and can only hope the results of this tour were positive for you and your local community of students, gamers and everyone else. Thank you a thousand times. (Now here’s your chance to add all the exclamation marks, maybe a few smiley faces, one censored bad word and who knows what! We bet all of it will be well placed.)

We are back home and back in running our everyday lives.

In total our tour was attended by over 2000 kids and over 500 teachers. We ran circa 75 workshops, ten CPD sessions for teachers and other staff members and gave five keynotes and other talks during the tour. So we were not far shy from a hundred different activities you helped us organise and / or organised completely while we just brought in some games and buzz!

In the meanwhile our fair company TeacherGaming is doing very well. We have over 400 schools joining in monthly, not forgetting all the libraries, museums and youth departments that are also interested in using MinecraftEdu, KerbalEdu and other games in various ways. We are lucky to be driving the breakthrough of games in education.

But what happens after the tour? Are we just sitting in our office? NO WAY! Let’s take a look at the TG’s agenda for 2015:

*We are in a conversation of starting very large scale ‘deployments’ in Europe where hopefully hundreds of new schools get access to platforms like MinecraftEdu.

*Next tour will be held in the USA. Why? We went through our data and saw that the biggest user group is in the States and more specifically West Coast. Check this space for #tgtour15!

*And finally, we are thinking of organising our own conference… :)

The impact and the scale of our once-so-small projects are a lot to figure out for our small team, but our goal is to always look at it through they eyes of our community members. For that work we have needed your help and will continue to do so in the future. Once more, a truckload of thankyou’s for everyone who took part in our tour - hope to see you around the world many times more!

-Merry group that is throwing high-fives in a circle and dancing - Jannika, Mikael & Santeri + the whole TG team.

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Guardians of the National Game Day

The first week of November. Finally back in Finland. The last leg of tour outside Finland behind us it was time to focus on Finnish schools and libraries. While both Santeri and Mikael were feeling the battle-stress by then, there was no time to rest!

First week of workshops was hosted by the wonderful library of Tapiola in Espoo. The library already promotes the joy of discovery and tries to spark curiosity in their customers. For example, they are early adopters of 3D-printing and teaching programming. It is no surprise then that all our Tour-games received a warm welcome. Mikael hosted three ComputerCraftEdu-workshops and a Kerbal-workshop and latter half of the week saw Santeri with the whole set: Gamestar Mechanic, KerbalEdu and ComputerCraftEdu.

(picture from: https://www.facebook.com/tapiolankirjasto)

Awesome shirt btw!

The workshop space and computers were limited, so we were working in pairs. This familiar “restriction” can either be taken as a boon or a bane. We choose the former. Instead of complaining about the lack of hardware, you can turn the situation into a learning possibility. You can pair experts with novices and make them share their expertise, make them talk. Many times the difference between playing at home and playing at school is the sense of companionship you get from playing with your friends. You might get the same feeling at home but many times the company you keep in multiplayer games is anonymous and the focus is on the tension between the players. We are trying to set a different tone when playing in class and starting of by helping a friend goes a long way. Another option is to match the student by skill: learning the game together can be helpful and having two pairs of eyes and hands can lower the threshold tremendously. Visa versa, having someone who plays as much as you do can open up new perspectives to the game.

  Pelitaitoviikko

TeacherGaming was the guardian of the National Gameday in Finland this year. Again, this sent us around the country once more to host workshops. Many of the locations were in the southern part of Finland but we also made sure our northern compatriots were not left out. For them, we hosted a webinar to get them up to speed so they would be able to run their own workshops as well.

We also partnered with IlonaIT and Metaverstas to offer a MinecraftEdu webinar for Finnish teachers. A great show to watch if you know any Finnish :)

The workshops themselves were aimed to promote gaming as a cultural phenomenon and to expand the meanings we attach to games. Maybe we can highlight different sides of gaming; in addition to being interactive and great fun, they offer a broad range of experiences in addition to being entertaining. We met hundreds of students and tens of teachers during the week and passed on the game challenge to them: the idea was to challenge someone they know to experience games in a new way. Maybe sit your parents down to play with you, explore a new genre (Mikael is really afraid of horror games!) or try different media (many of us are boardgame geeks, too).

    PD

In the meanwhile Santeri was running around Helsinki doing CPD (professional development) for local teachers. Our model is rather robust. We take only a few keen teacher per session and train them in their own computer suite in the morning and then invite their classes to take part in the training in the afternoon. This way we ensure that the teacher get past the first few thresholds. Free free to try it at your school!

We have noticed that while mass lectures can ‘convert’ people in larger quantities, pinpoint in-depth sessions for teachers that really want to get going are better for the overall penetration and for creating small pockets of expertise around the country. This way teachers can more easily share the knowledge. It’s a fact that our small company can’t run training for the whole world, so we need to focus on creating high concentration of skill where ever we go that can be spread locally.

One special training we ran.. actually it was a workshop for the executive board of education department of Helsinki. For those of you who don’t know, Helsinki is our nation’s capital and the biggest city in the country. We had a group of kids from a local school Siltamäki playing with the board. Every board member had their own student tutor helping them with the controls and with the turtle robots. By the time we moved from learning Minecraft to learn how to program some turtles, the board members took a step back and just wow’ed at students coding a whole bunch of bridge building, house building, mining and other turtles.

It was probably the easiest workshop ever for us ‘trainers’ and really showed how the next generation of learners can adapt to things like coding much more naturally.

More trainings coming up in December!

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Last update from the road. Finland calling!

Uuuuuhhhhh…. after 50 days on the road our team is tired, but very happy. We still have the final stretch ahead of us and the FINALE: National Game Day! Like said, our fair company TeacherGaming is the protector of the National Game Day in Finland on 15th of November.

But first, let’s jump back to Tuesday last week. We went to GameCity, a event we have a long history with! It was 2012 when TG headed out to do some STEAM (add Art to STEM) school activities for local youth, schools and event attendees. This year was no difference and we ran seven workshops for over 150 people who attended!

This year GameCity had their own building for the first time and a whole bunch of game demos from local gamedevs INCLUDING our dear friend DAN200 aka Daniel Ratcliffe who was showing his puzzle / computational thinking game Redirection (check it out: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=243118705). For the ones not familiar with TG’s project with Dan200, ComputerCraftEdu (CCEdu): we made a programming suite for MinecraftEdu and that has been a key part of our tour. Now Dan200 was finally able to come and see it in action with real kids!

Our team was also very positively surprised with KerbalEdu’s (kerbaledu.com) performance. We all know that Kerbal Space Program is a hard game, but now we saw that with a good teacher you can compress the learning curve into two hours - and spending that time to learn something that complex and that potent in school is worth the investment! After that the universe of possible curriculum integrations opens!

Oh boy, we both looked terrible when we woke up near Gatwick for our final ascend towards Finland. :) But still alive! Now we have had two great days in a library in Espoo. The library organises eight workshops for local schools as a part of our tour. We also had the honour to work with a very talented group of students from Siltamäki school in Helsinki to do coding with CCEdu for the whole board of directors of the education department of Helsinki! Great fun and the students were awesome.

Now, couple days more at the library and then it’s our Game Day week with lots of PD for Helsinki’s teachers and workshops for organisations participating in the Game Day! Let’s play some more games!

Greeting from home!

Santeri & Mikael

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MozFest, Manchester and… #LEGup

Circus is moving, although now within UK only. It’s the last week outside Finland for our #tgtour2014!

Last weekend was the time for MozFest aka Mozilla Festival. Santeri visited MozFest already couple years ago when MinecraftEdu was new and exciting. Now it’s less new, but even more exciting. Our location at the event was within the Youth zone. What we heard was the Youth Zone itself was a pilot for MozFest, but now that the feedback was great and a lot of young people showed up, the rumour has it that the zone will grow. Let’s see if we get an invitation next year!

Our title for the youth zone workshops was ‘Adopt a turtle’, which was by far the most ‘awwwww’ title at the event and we get to thank Mikael for the creativity with that. Feel free to use the title if you are running your own ComputerCraftEdu workshop somewhere. For the sake of open web, and being in good terms with Mozilla, the title is open source and so are all our workshop minutes. We will ‘finalize’ them and write them more clearly when the tour is done. Feel free to use the ‘lesson plans’ however you want. (For our Finnish-speaking readers: there will be a webinar for the National Game Day in November! Stay tuned!)

Mikael went to Manchester on Monday. A classic 5am start from the hotel. Real tour spirit! The host for the two workshops was WOW Zone, WCHG’s learning centre in Wythenshawe. They were conveniently located near Manchester Airport (two pound fifty cab ride anyone?) Their lovely Mac-suite served as the venue and after initial installation scares, we got off to a smooth start (thanks Chris for thinking on his feet!)

The two groups we had for the day were very different: the first one were really a focused bunch and they worked nicely together as a group. However the second group we had were a giant burst of energy. That energy was at times difficult to focus but when it happened they got some really impressive things done. What never ceases to amaze is how quickly kids adapt to Minecraft as structured activity instead of free play. After setting the ground rules it usually takes a few students pushing the boundaries. By the end of the two hours the workshop runs, you hardly ever have to hit the fan-favourite “freeze students” button!

#LEGup is a meetup for educational games (and I also think software) developers and people interested in the topic. Santeri had a wonderful chance to talk at one of the meet-ups about how TG makes our design decisions and how we see our field of business change in the near future. You can take a look at the presentation from Santeri’s slideshare account (@Aalvisto). The feedback was good and the best feedback of all was that few devs commented that the presentation helped them ask the right questions about where their development is going. That was what we hoped!

As said before, the children's faces are one of the best things we see on this tour and the whole idea for this was to give back, work with our community and the great people involved. Sometimes though, we end up in a situation that really leaves a stamp on us for the rest of our lives. Let us tell you a story about Edwin (we wanted to protect the child’s identity and therefore we changed his name for this blog) …

We had this wonderful young gentleman join our workshop for Saturday, but he was more interested in launching rockets into space in KSP than playing Minecraft. After a few rounds of trial and error things started to really fly. A lot of other kids joined too and Edwin was helping them with their rockets. At the end of the day the plan for Sunday was clear: more KSP! OFC!

Now on Sunday morning the organisers were giving out Firefox OS phones. Nice ones actually. Santeri ran back and forth to get one because first you had to get a start or something, then group photo… and I guess after few rounds, Santeri was there, holding a phone.

Unfortunately Edwin and his father didn't come in until later and when they did, they realised all the phones were gone. We heard a rumor that sleep was tight that morning, but that’s how it should be on a Sunday morning! Nevertheless, not getting a phone was a big disappointment for Edwin. That would have been his first phone and all the other kids were running around with theirs. After seeing what was going on - one of our most active kerbonauts was letting out a few tears - we had to do something. We gave Edwin Santeri’s phone and you should have seen the boy’s face. We couldn’t tell if it was disbelief, joy or something else but after few moments the day had clearly turned out to be one of the best ever.

After a wonderful discussion with Edwin’s father, during which all of us were clearly struggling to keep in the tears, and after getting a warm email from Edwin himself we think a good way to end this lengthy blogpost is to copy paste something from the email we sent back to Edwin:

“Hope one day, when you grow up, you are standing in a similar situation with a possibility to do something really great to someone else and you go for it. +1 for the world as a better place. Your reaction after we handed you the phone really made our day.”

@Miiku87 & @Aalvisto

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UK time!

English speaking world is the where TG has the biggest spread. Based on that we bet it's no surprise that UK is the hotspot for us in Europe. :) The last ‘international’ stretch is going to happen in UK where we are currently writing this blog post.

We (Santeri & Mikael) are travelling from East-Kent to London to attend MozFest aka Mozilla Festival over the weekend. We are going to run two workshops with a bunch of facilitators, but hopefully also have some ‘me’ time to see the other workshops and talks. Thanks for Dorine and Epik for organizing this!

Ok, that’s it for the future and now some info about what just happened during the last couple days: Mikael was in Cologne running workshops and meeting people from our German hub. TG has a warm relationship with a local polytechnic university and a few local schools. Once more the host exceeded our expectations on how they organised our stay, so a big thank you for that!

In the meanwhile Santeri was around East-Kent, more precisely in Margate and Ramsgate. Couple years back we attended an event called GEEK (Gaming Expo East-Kent) and our dear colleague Kate, who also runs the event, invited us to do our tour around her hoods. After a visit to the very southeastern tip of UK we traveled… 15 miles (?) inland and stopped at Canterbury to check out the cathedral and to do some workshops. 

Canterbury workshops stretched out only during a single day, but that day (today actually) was double the busyness compared to our normal day! :) What we did was training facilitators in the morning, then playing MinecraftEdu and KerbalEdu with the help of those facilitators and THEN even one more workshops / forum session for teachers around local schools. Once more… the time we had was possible because of the host. ;)

Btw, we did mention ‘facilitators’ a few times. We at TG have been encouraging teachers to ask older students to play with the younger ones to get the examples and help we all need to kickstart our projects. Now we were able to really witness the power of this model ourselves. The help, especially with KerbalEdu, was phenomenal in terms of keeping the players engaged and helping them to progress in the game. 120 minutes passed and students didn’t want to leave the class. Lot of explosions, lot of laughter, lot of learning. The good stuff!

Now our energy levels are running a bit low but we are gearing up for the busy weekend at MozFest and just wanted to point out a couple things: if you are around Nottingham for GameCity next week, come and say hello! Or if you happen to be interested in the design thinking TG uses, pop in at LEGup meeting in London on Monday. And of course drop by at MozFest if you are there!

The ‘Mozzillians’ say that keep hacking… what should we say? Keep adopting turtles and sending kids to space? :D

Ok.

Happy but tired chaps from the road, Santeri&Mikael(&Jannika compiling this post)

Ps. We did some math: we have over 1000 students and over 400 teachers who have joined our workshops around Europe!

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Tour blog post 7

Germany was (and will be) AWESOME! Everything else has been great too, but now the top one in our minds is the last stay in Germany for a few days.

Before taking the last long stretch of our #tgtour2014 in the UK, which precedes our long tail in Finland, we came to two places in Germany: Neu-Isenburg and Kaiserslautern (the highest lump of Americans outside America!) and Mikael is still going to Cologne.

At Neu-Isenburg we went to a small youth center that had a big focus on gaming! There we saw game savvy adults that also like to join in the games when the youngsters are playing and a surrounding community of parents that would like to put their children’s game enthusiasm into good use. The center did both pure gaming fun (Awesome! Best gaming there is: group of friends and a multiplayer game + an interested and involved adult! ), coding, game design (not only digital) and much more. We had the chance to work with a highly motivated and a friendly group of kids that had very ‘constructive’ approach to gaming!

Neu-Isenburg was a great example of how the educators and the community can use gaming for theirs and the community’s advantage! We at TG hope to hear what you are doing in the future too!

Now we all now that Minecraft has this insane halo-effect around it, right? Santeri went to an US army garrison school at Kaiserslautern, Germany and the first thing he took part in was a morning assembly for Vogelweh school’s younger students. The person hosting the assembly made a comment before asking Santeri on the stage: ‘He is like Santa who goes around schools and gets Minecraft for them’. :)) You should have heard the crowds of young students go loud after that comment…. ‘We’re going to get Minecraft for our schoooooolllll!!!!’

Vogelweh Elementary school hosted our tour, not only for their students, but for students from two other schools too. A dear member of our community, Mr. Flores is the one to thank for this opportunity! After spending time at a local carnival, staying at the Flores’ family house for three nights, experiencing an army base lockdown, fire drill, rail strike, garrison school we-spirit atmosphere, getting a Army community ‘award’ coin for doing good for the community and, of course, not forgetting the four awesome groups of students we had the chance to work with, the Kaiserslautern excursion was an absolutely delightful addition to our memories from Germany.

Like we said, next stop is UK. #tgtour2014 is over 50% done. We have spent a long time on the road and I guess it’s ok to admit that we miss home, but at the same time we can’t wait for the rest of the great people and the experiences we are going to have from the last parts of our tour.

See you soon UK and thank you once more for all people involved so far! We do this because we think you guys are the best.

Yours from the road,

#tgtour2014 team

(Mikael, Santeri and Jannika)

Ps. I don’t know if we have remembered to mention it here, but every time we go somewhere people are asking: ‘Who is this great gal we are working with over the emails? Is she coming?’ She’s Jannika, our tour producer! Jannika is the one who knows how schedules and moving pieces click together and is working to make this possible from her expat time in Arizona! Say ‘cheers’ when you talk with her the next time! :)

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Santeri is drawing a coding grid - blended learning☺#AnimatedLearning #tgtour2014

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Calm before the storm

After Derry, Northern Ireland both Mikael and Santeri had a breather. Time to reflect, think about what worked, what didn’t, do we have more good ideas to throw in and so on. Breather meant that Mikael went back to Finland to really do what was described here and Santeri flew straight to NYC for meetings and our dear co-founder’s bday! 

So that was the breather.

The next stop for the #tgtour2014 was Viborg, Denmark. A collage of workshops, keynotes, forum sessions and something else we’d like to share. To be honest, it was Santeri’s first time in a Danish school. He has been in many others, but not Danish. 

At the schools we did both Gamestar and MinecraftEdu workshops with the students. Gamestar workshop included a following path:

figuring out what’s a game

breaking game into pieces, what are the components? (check google :D)

recognising the components from a popular game like soccer

hacking an existing game - rock paper scissors (omg the students came up with awesome ideas)

creating a game with all the components 

creating a digital game with Gamestar mechanics 

and playtesting friends’ game and tweaking your own based on feedback.

I sounds like we didn’t do much with computers? That’s actually right and the blended approach worked really really well and we had many laughs. Fun and experiences are the goals for our tour in terms of what we wanna give to the students. 

MinecraftEdu/ComputerCraftEdu workshop was the same sunken city exploration we used in Derry. After a small collaborative tutorial the students use surveyor (turtle) robots to get samples from the ocean bottom aka sunken city that is beneath them. They can modify the programs, create their own, compete with the turtle robots and build their vessel to get away from middle of the ocean. Everything in teams, of course. 

This mission has some added game mechanics on top of Minecraft. You can only build where your vessel is and for material gathering, and unless you wanna drown, you have to use the robots. 

As said, our stay in Viborg also included a keynote about ‘changing how we teach’. It was about… well games and education and what type of impact it can make. Here’s a link to the presentation that may not be that self-explanatory: http://www.slideshare.net/SanteriKoivisto/games-changing-how-we-teach

The other keynote was about ‘how to design products / games that make sense to schools’. This was probably the visually dullest keynote ever I’ve made, but I only had two days to create it! Link:http://www.slideshare.net/SanteriKoivisto/how-to-design-games-that-make-sense-to-schools

The last talk was about lesson structure and didactics with games. No presentation for that one, sorry! :-/

AND LAST: we promised that there’s going to be something we will share as a resource from our tour! We created a programming hopscotch outdoor activity for teachers. 150 teacher took part in it! 

Here’s a couple links to see what was going on:

https://vine.co/v/Omwu1Fbx5bV  https://vine.co/v/OmwmO1vEhZm  

Thanks you Mathias for sharing! 

And once more, it may not be the most easy to follow guide, but here’s some documentation and instructions for our playful programming hopscotch:

Feel free to tweak it, share it, use it (ofc)…

Next stops:

Mikael - Oslo!

Santeri - Frankfurt! 

See you around Europe!

-Santeri

(+ Mikael & and the TG team)

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A Tale of Two Cities

Phew, that was busy couple of weeks: Santeri and Mikael toured over 20 schools and brought games to more than 500 students in Derry, Northern Ireland as part of the CultureTech festival. The workshops gave us the opportunity to finally work on ComputerCraftEdu in classrooms. The game was met with nothing but enthusiasm and we had a chance to showcase it to local CoderDojo volunteers along with many other interested parties.

Northern Ireland and Donegal treated us with a lovely weather and we had a chance to tour the north of Emerald Isle over a weekend. The vistas were breathtaking (as was climbing Mount Errigal, mind you :)

Spread Thin

After Derry, TeacherGaming is spread across the globe; Jannika in Arizona, Santeri visiting Joel in New York before and heading to Denmark and Mikael returning to Finland and workshops in Helsinki. The rest of the guys remain in Tampere to hold the fort. 

The Helsinki workshops got us into Finnish classrooms, something we don't get to do as often as we'd like. The good news is that the same things seem to work here as in Northern Ireland - again, the kids had to fended off the computers to a recess between the sessions. In particular Mustakivi Elementary School caught our attention with their game-based learning projects. 

Next up; Santeri will be in Denmark in two different events and a week later Mikael is headed to Oslo to run first KerbalEdu-workshops.

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First leg done; almost twenty schools and classes and hundreds of students have taken part on the Tour! STEM-invasion of Europe imminent!

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Tour (circus) starts to move tomorrow!

It just struck us last Thursday that first flight between Finland and Northern Ireland (Derry) was scheduled for Friday! It meant that the tour would finally take off.

When we first had this crazy vision of doing a tour in the first place, we were thinking about 5 countries and maybe 20 hosts. One thousand participants was our wild hope. What happened was that yes, we are going to five different countries, but what happened too is that now we have over 30 hosts, 10 professional development days for teachers, five keynotes / panels / talks in different events and over 45(!!) workshops for students that adds up to almost 1500 participants for our tour plus the people present when we are giving public talks!

For a eight person startup this would not be possible without our extraordinary community and huge portion of thanks about why this is becoming reality belongs to them.

So for the following two weeks we are going to be in Derry, UK. Our main host there is CultureTECH, but local schools are also heavily involved. First week of the two Santeri will spend training teachers and visiting schools. Over the weekend Mikael will join and the boys are driving around Island of Ireland to do some sightseeing (any suggestions?).

The second week will be more complex: Mikael will be running workshops in Derry at CultureTECH 2014 event for the whole week, but Santeri will pop in Hamburg in the middle of the week for PLAY14 festival, but will fly back to do more workshops later the same week. The last thing we will do is to meet and greet with CoderDojo people and run the last workshop / training for them on Saturday.

So that’s the first two weeks for our tour that also act as a prologue for the whole tour. During these two weeks we will also solidify our plans for workshop activities etc. and who knows we might share the whole thing so you can host your own workshops if you like! That would be awesome, too.

Let’s get back in touch when we get back! Well, Santeri will fly straight to New York, but it’s kinda back. :)

Check #tgtour2014 on Twitter, more frequent updates there!

TG Team

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Here it begins! (very technically)

We're creating the TG Tour 2014 webpage as we speak with Aleksi and Jannika. You can follow us on Twitter!