New IRL Sessions & Minecraft Wellbeing Questionnaire
WHAT A RESPONSE! Just before Xmas I had the excellent news that we had been awarded a grant from the SCVO (Sandwell Council of Voluntary Organisations) Vision 2030 fund, to deliver weekly sessions to children who are not in school/ EOTAS/ elective home ed using Minecraft Education I opened up booking last Thursday and all the spaces until June are already fully booked. We start on 12th February. I knew there was a need, the parents who talk to me and message me tell me there is a need, but the speed at booking up and the waiting list blew me away! These sessions incorporate creativity, digital skills, coding, design, planning, and give children the chance to make new friends with a common interest, working together in the same multiplayer world. We even have a specially created scale model of Dudley Castle and @dudley zoo in Minecraft to do a virtual day trip, explore, and make it our own, Minecraft style! Not only that, we have created a custom built, unique Minecraft Education world where children answer the Stirling Children’s Wellbeing Scale questions, in the game with NPCs asking and children answering in a specially built wellbeing world. We are able to retrieve and collate the data automatically for analysis thanks to our amazing IT manager! This immersive, low stress, low demand method of children responding to the questionnaire will help us engage more children in this task, who might not be responsive to this type of questioning, and encourage genuine, thoughtful responses. Dudley Zoo & Castle n Minecraft is created by GeoBoxers with data from OpenStreetMap contributors
