Leah Bamford has created a Minecraft world in which Maths is relevant and fun.
Meaningful everyday maths is a vital skill for living an independent life. Our students, who have a wide range of special educational needs and disabilities, use maths in their work experience and in their Independent Living Skills (ILS) sessions. For example, Hospitality students count and weigh ingredients, Performing Arts students count beats and moves, Retail students count stock, check temperatures, use-by dates and operate the till, and Horticulture students need to measure depths and spaces and record progress. Students learn to use money for shopping. There’s just no getting away from maths.
I teach Maths and English, and it’s no secret that Maths has not always been my favourite subject, so I understand the panic that descends when your brain is bombarded with numbers rather than words. I have made it my mission to make maths fun and meaningful for our students in their Functional Skills sessions. We have combined numerical skills with imagination and everyday mathematical problem solving. Students taking Functional Skills maths lessons are benefitting from the ‘gamification’ of maths, solving problems on a gaming platform that they already enjoy. Maths lessons have been given an engaging and relevant twist, thanks to our personalised Minecraft world. Instead of using a pre-created world from the Minecraft Education library, I have created Derwencraft, an online Minecraft world which features maths problems created by me. As we have progressed, the students asked if they could design some tasks and now they enjoy devising maths problems to test each other.
Performing Arts student Megan and Retail student Justin are among the students who enjoy weekly maths sessions in the Minecraft world. Meg has built a virtual holiday home, and rents out a speedboat. She is learning money skills, map scaling, and how to work out the cost of her boat trips using contextual maths problems. Justin has used his maths skills to create a giant roller coaster, and a house involving maths problems for other students to solve. Justin, who enjoys maths and is a keen gamer, says “I have to calculate problems, but in an interesting way.” Meg says “I like building things. We are learning maths but can be creative too. The only rules are: don’t kill villagers and don’t destroy other people’s buildings. All’s fair in Maths and Minecraft.”
We are always looking for ways to make learning meaningful and engaging, and it’s great to see students enjoying maths so much. We have created a world where maths is disguised behind colour, creativity and competition. This is a world where solving maths problems is not intimidating—it can be personalised and brought to life.
Students aged 16 to 25 are learning independence skills to support them in adulthood. Most students learn functional skills which are embedded into their vocational pathways. Where appropriate, some students receive dedicated additional timetabled functional skills sessions, offering extra learning and sometimes accreditation, in maths and English. As they become more confident in their abilities, many students progress to external work placements in the community, at local and national businesses. Maths is, of course, important in everything they do.
Leah Bamford
Leah Bamford is Functional Skills Coordinator at Derwen College.
Website: derwen.ac.uk
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