This week’s editorial post comes from our own Mikael Uusi-Mäkelä (@Miiku87).

TeacherGaming Tour 2015 is officially done! The three week period gathered over 400 teachers all over California to experience the power of games in education first hand. Starting from Orange County, our tour team worked their way north towards the Bay Area (tour map). We met with some pretty amazing people and were inspired over and over again by how teachers jumped to the deep end with a new media. Let’s look back and reflect on the tour as a whole.

One goal we had was to have a more permanent impact on teaching practises in schools. Last year, our tour in Europe gave over 2,500 students a chance to try games in their classrooms. While many teachers were inspired by the workshops, we felt we had left them little to follow up with on their own. This time around, we wanted to reach out to teachers themselves and train them to run a workshop with their game of choice on their own. Apart from the workshop itself, we supported them with a host of materials from lesson plans to printable materials for classrooms. If they’d feel comfortable enough to run even a single workshop for a group of 15 students, we’d have more than doubled our reach in numbers. Oh, and we gave each participant full access to our games until the end of the school year, so they could keep playing beyond the first workshop experience!

Photo credits: John Miller (@johnmillerEDU)

The tour also gave us, as game developers, a chance to see our products in the hands of the very audiences they were designed for. As you might know, we are developing a programming mod for MinecraftEdu called ComputerCraftEdu. It enables the students adopt a turtle robot and while using it, learn to program within the game. While there are many great ways to introduce programming, we’ve felt they often teach you some basic concepts of programming, but offer few possibilities beyond the initial challenges to directly apply the skills. That’s not the case here: after you’ve learned to program with ComputerCraftEdu’s robots, you can use them for any task in the game, be it mining diamonds or building a castle. On the tour, the first groups of teachers got their hands on the turtles and put our designs through their paces. There was a lot of aha-moments but also some great feedback. Our initial map went through some major redesigns during the three weeks on the road and we got some invaluable feedback to polish ComputerCraftEdu before the release later this summer. Stay tuned for more!

Also, fresh out of the figurative oven, our participants got their hands on Earth History Campaign, the first major content update for KerbalEdu. If you haven’t heard from Kerbals before, they are a wonderful race of fearless, hapless and adorable creatures who are taking their first steps in exploring the solar system beyond their own planet. Students take charge of their own space program and learned about many STEM concepts alongside Kerbals. In Earth History Campaign, the Kerbals and the students join in the Space Race as the third, silent party. Intercepting radio transmissions from Earth, they try to compete with the humans in exploring the space. The first chapter premiered on the tour teaches the basic controls of the game and sees the students stumble upon Sputnik I, the first satellite the humans created, learning about the earliest steps in space flight. We can’t wait to hear what the students think about it after the teachers who participated on the tour take it back to their classrooms!

That’s it for the tour this spring! We hope that by gathering teachers in the same room to learn about games in education, they went home with a sense of community - you are not alone trying to figure out how to use games with your students. We also hope that, in our hosts, we left behind some new Minecraft community hubs that will keep organising new, wonderful events with our games in the future. For us this was, yet again, another experience of a lifetime.

We ourselves were left with a deep sense of gratitude. Thanks you wonderful people (with a special thanks to Shane Asselstine!), for making TeacherGaming Tour 2015 possible!

- Mikael (@Miiku87), Jannika (@jannikaaalto), Santeri (@aalvisto) & Joel (@MinecraftTeachr)