Block Breaker by Brian Aspinall
“Blockbreaker” is the second book in the “breaker” trilogy, after “Codebreaker”. Like the “Godfather” trilogy, Brian’s work keeps getting better (on that note, Brian needs to avoid producing an inferior “Godfather III” for the third book).
Also, sorry Brian, but “Stormbreaker” is taken- Thor’s got that one!
One of my favourite things about Brian is his ability to roll with vulnerability, and to laugh at himself. Some more “famous” educators who write books and give keynotes present an aura of untouchability, a veneer of celebrity that can be either a great inspiration, or a real turnoff. Me, I prefer fallible public figures who admit their mistakes, and “rumble with vulnerability”, as Brene Brown would say.
This book is Brian’s story of using Minecraft to reach a student with autism, complete with interesting Minecraft lesson plans, and lots of detours into issues in the larger education world, like how “progressive” or “traditional” one should be, whether hats should be worn in schools, and the role of grading in this current age.
Brian’s conclusion is that Minecraft can be used for many purposes in education, not the least among them making a sort of “Mathland”, as Seymour Papert talked about.
My own students appear in the book, with my account of when a grade 6 class started using Minecraft to “do” math. In essence, they opened a creative world, and represented the mathematics they were working on inside Minecraft. Justly proud, they made it to the evening news talking about their innovations.
Here they are on CTV news:
At the time, these students were empowered and inspired by the newest game obsession. But, as Brian notes in his book, tech tools and games come and go. Today’s Minecraft will be something else tomorrow (and indeed Fortnight is the big craze in today’s middle schools).
The huge potential for “sandbox” learning tools like Minecraft, is their versatility and ability to represent many different sorts of objects, people, animals, and things.
I attempted to work within a “Minecraft mathland” here:
The idea was that many sorts of mathematical objects could be represented (literally, built) in this open world. I think Seymour Papert would have rather had kids do all the coding themselves, but then again, he couldn’t have imagined where video games were heading, in the early 1980s.
Papert could not have imagined an infinite mathland, full of cubic metre blocks and other strange objects and things. He played in the sandbox he had and programming the LOGO turtle is what he had. Later developments, like LEGO Mindstorms, pushed the envelope further, but Minecraft is perhaps the ultimate sandbox for “hard fun” (Brian’s phrase) in the current age.
One of my favourite phrases is “open spaces for mathematical thinking”, and I think Brian would like that phrase too. I named my first blog after this idea. Regardless of what tech or tools you use, classrooms are thinking spaces. They are unbounded thinking spaces or can be, even while being bounded by concrete walls.
Brian’s inspirational book points to a world where students are selecting the tools they need to do their work and using those tools in new and innovative ways. This book points to a world where all students use their knowledge in service of interesting classwork, projects, and assessments.
@MatthewOldridge is a (sometime) blockbreaker, father, husband, and mathematics educator.
