In the Applying Professional Scrum (APS) with Certification classroom, the Minecraft Campsite case study provides the best experience for students and more connections to how they work currently. Practice Scrum in Minecraft’s complex and chaotic environment to experience the high-variance world of complex product development. We use Minecraft Education Edition to bring complexity to life in a scenario everyone can experience regardless of their technical ability.
Why use Minecraft Education?
The traditional format for the Applying Professional Scrum (APS) with Certification uses a case study where students are asked to build an Animal Website. Over the years, it has become increasingly apparent that complexity is not served when building a simple HTML website. For most groups of people, this has become something simple and part of their high school education. Most people have built a website on Google Sites, WordPress, or Wix. These tools make this activity merely complicated and does not generate the level of frustration that true complexity does.
We have also observed the lack of participation of the whole team in the activity, as participants find that only 1 person can edit at a time or that it takes more time to add content than find it.
Why does Minecraft make the APS course so awesome?
With Minecraft, we can involve every participant and create a complex environment that demonstrates both how complexity affects us and demonstrates how Scrum can help in that environment.
What is Minecraft Education?
Minecraft for Education is a game-based learning environment that allows participants to collaborate together, in our specifically designed scenario, in a secure environment. It provides accessibility support and is completely cross-platform; participants can use Windows, Mac, Chromebook, iPad, & Android.
Participants: What do I need to run Minecraft Education?
We will provide Azure Active Directory credentials to sign in and an
associated licence
to allow participants to access the tool. Due to the high security of this educational tool, all participants will be required to sign in to Minecraft Education using the credentials provided on our tenant (This will not affect Microsoft Teams or other SSO tools in your company).
We encourage participants to use a non-work-restricted computer for all of our classes and join off VPN.
Admins: What do I need to do to allow Minecraft Education?
The only requirement for IT admins is to enable the installation of the
Download | Minecraft Education
for the class participants or to direct them to use a personal machine.
You do NOT need to provide a
licence
or credentials for Minecraft Education.
In restricted environments, you may need to check the [IT Admin Guide](IT Admin Guide) for any blocked URLs or ports that need to be opened for clients; however, if participants log in from their home network without VPN, this will likely be unnecessary.
We encourage participants to use a non-work-restricted computer for all of our classes and join off VPN.
Um, so the question was why Minecraft makes it so awesome. I started teaching the apps with Minecraft 10 years ago, 12 years ago. Um, and 12 years ago, if you got a group of people together in a training room and asked them the default case study was an animal website, right? So build an animal website. We break everybody up into teams, they would pick an animal mascot and then they would have to create a website about that animal, and everybody got the same set of requirements.
But 12 years ago that was hard, right? You were probably in a room with limited internet access, right? If the students were all turning up in our particular office, if there was internet, it wasn’t fast. And they had to actually go build something, right? They actually had to crack open Visual Studio or Eclipse or whatever their favourite tool was and go bring all of those things together to create a website.
And that’s not true anymore. It’s just, it’s just that’s not what happens anymore. What happens when you ask people to create an animal website is they go create a Wix site and they’re done in five minutes. They go create a Google site or whatever other platform is out there, and they’re able to solve that what used to be an incredibly complex problem in a very short space of time. And then they’re just adding new pages, and the only thing we really have to pick on is that the only thing we have to pick on is the teams’ quality, right? So are there broken links? Are there half-finished pages? Is the text too small to read, right?
Which is a little bit, I don’t know, it’s just a little bit [___] though. It made the class go from this awesome experience where you had this hugely complex problem that you were solving because you had to do it in 30 minutes, right? So a website’s not complex unless I make you do it in 30 minutes, then it’s complex, right? And it just became simple.
So Minecraft brings in that complexity again. Um, it levels the playing field, and there’s actually two massive benefits. One is that it levels the playing field for everybody in the room understands complexity. It simulates that a complex situation that they have to organise around to solve that complex problem within the bounds of Minecraft. So we’re not teaching the whole class in Minecraft, right? It’s just the case study, the sprints that we’re doing in Minecraft.
And when you come back from that, you can dive into the relationship problems, the way people approached the problem. You can dive into how they communicated with each other, all kinds of really interesting aspects. The additional thing is that everybody can now participate.
So what would tend to happen when we were during the sprints of the animal website, there would be a few of the participants who were the actual coders who were building the website, and the rest of the people on the team were either just helping them or doing their email, or helping them for five minutes and then doing their email, or collecting some information, emailing it to the developer, right? It goes into that black hole of the magic and magic black magic developer over there who’s going to build the thing, and then they would have nothing to do in the Minecraft space.
Every single person can participate. Every single person can do something. It doesn’t matter what skill level you have. When you come into it with Minecraft, in 30 minutes you can figure out how to provide some value, figure out how to add it. You’re learning as well, so we can diagnose some of those learning techniques. It’s just a fantastic experience for everybody.
If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.
Schedule a Teams Call with Martin Hinshelwood
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