Brine Ayun and Joel Falgui are AJHS' two newest Minecraft Ambassadors

Two Ateneo de Manila Junior High School (AJHS) teachers were inducted as Minecraft Education Ambassadors several months ago, and they are not “card-carrying” Minecraft devotees like their predecessors! Science faculty and Builders Org moderator Brine Ayun, and English faculty and Loyola Reading Club moderator Joel Falgui, received their Minecraft ambassador’s badges on June 19 and August 16, 2023, respectively. They joined the ranks of longtime Minecraft (MC) enthusiasts Jason Arias and Lavi Subang of the AJHS Science Subject Area, who were named Minecraft Global Mentors in 2021 and 2022, respectively, and then Minecraft Ambassadors when the title was “rebranded” in May 2023. That makes four AJHS Minecraft champions in the AJHS faculty. 

Unlike Arias and Subang, however, who became global mentors/ambassadors when a then-current title holder either vouched for them or sponsored their admission into the exclusive circle, the rules had changed since 2022 and were more relaxed, allowing Ayun and Falgui to apply for the title themselves. The two MC newbies went through the process, which required them to take and pass a three-hour Minecraft Education: Teacher Academy course, and then join a private Facebook group that required them to answer a few questions. Lastly, they had to share an example of a Minecraft Education Edition resource, lesson, project, or world that they had created. The process turned out not to be as easy as they had expected. In fact, they were both rejected upon their initial application but were later admitted after their second attempts. Ayun and Falgui are now “members of a global community of educators who are passionate about using Minecraft in the classroom and dedicated to supporting others in their Minecraft journey.” 

As stated previously, however, both Falgui and Ayun consider themselves MC newbies who do not have the playing, creating, and building experience of fellow ambassadors Arias and Subang. Ayun, for one, never even played the virtual world-building game, though he was exposed to MC by a seven-year-old cousin. For his part, Falgui had been aware of Minecraft Education Edition since around 2010. He has MC: Education Edition builds as the products of his completing the Teacher Academy course, but it is his three children who are the more avid MC builders. In fact, Falgui prefers Lego and even helped steer, with Subang, the AJHS varsity Lego team to a 1^st runner-up finish at the ASEAN Legoland School Challenge held in Malaysia last August. 

So how did they become MC ambassadors despite their limited experience? What Minecraft Education resource, lesson, world, or project did they submit when they applied? Ayun, for his part, took inspiration from a seven-year-old cousin who built a house in MC. And since he is a Science teacher who has a keen interest in architecture and is knowledgeable about electricity, he set up a space in the MC world and began building his virtual house. What started out as a simple home, however, became more elaborate with the addition of a balcony and lights that were powered by Redstone. (Redstone is “one of the more advanced elements in Minecraft” and is used to “create lights, open doors, and build devices that lift stones, raise bridges, or move water.”) He then went on and built neighboring houses, which he also illuminated with virtual lights. He recalls, “I tried a lot of things because I am a fan of electricity and circuits. So I experimented to see how far the light source can light each block, and how high the circuits can go.”  

Not content with this, he also built bridges to connect the islands in his MC space which his digital avatar and visitors could travel to and from while riding in a Minecart. “Sasakay ka sa minecart, then you go around the villages instead of just flying to the other islands,” Ayun elaborates.  

Falgui took another approach for his application and submitted a lesson plan, not a build. He proposed a lesson plan/enrichment activity for students taking up Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, tasking them to build two things in MC: (1), a scene or structure representing something from the epic and (2), its modern-day equivalent. “So that’s what I did,” Falgui explains. “I designed that, set up the world, prepared the module, and sent it to Minecraft along with a statement to the effect of how I saw my role as an ambassador, which is to try to build connections with students here and abroad, and to make sure that the work that we do is curricular. That it is relevant both to the curriculum and to the students’ context and their situation.”

And how have Falgui and Ayun shared the joy of using Minecraft in the classroom since they became Minecraft ambassadors?  

For his part, Ayun looks forward to attending more training sessions before he can use Minecraft in his AJHS classes. “I want to learn more about blocks such as Redstone, the cartography table, and others for use in future projects,” he enumerated. He is also eager to teach sustainability with a Minecraft twist. “In lessons about building roads, for example, we can use MC to teach about where to position the street lamps so as not to cause light pollution to animals around the area…things like that,” he says.

As for how MC can be applied to AJHS English lessons, Falgui already had an assessment activity last August where he used the lesson plan he submitted for his MC ambassador application: “An Odd(yssey) Exhibit” had Falgui’s students in the advanced English classes using Minecraft: Education Edition to create a build that represented something from the epic poem and its modern-day equivalent, and then explain the build. The exercise produced almost 120 pairs of virtual builds that Falgui was delighted with because they brought out each student’s unique creativity. Says Falgui, “It was an exercise where each student could claim afterwards, ‘Oh, I built this. This is what I’ve got. And it’s different from everyone else’s.’”  

To enrich the lessons on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Falgui intends to use an MC world created by another educator during this second grading period. Of this pre-built world, Falgui raves that it is “really good and well-done,” with a castle and a host of non-player characters (NPCs) that gamers could interact with. With his current MC know-how, Falgui can make edits and changes to the NPC text so that his students can interview the NPCs and hopefully realize that the Macbeth of Act One is very different from the Macbeth at the end, to drive home the tragedy that befell him. “So I want the students, when they interact with the world, to pick that up,” Falgui says. “But in doing so, by interacting with the different NPCs, they get the ‘ordinary’ folks’ perspective. And they get lines from the text to support that.”

Beyond creating more engaging MC lessons for their own subject areas, what excites both Ayun and Falgui is the prospect of using MC as a tool for collaboration with other AJHS subject areas. Ayun, for one, envisions an integration where Science and Christian Life Education (CLE) could create a Minecraft version of the Stations of the Cross that will see teachers of both subject areas building and taking charge of different stations. Thinking even further, Ayun says, “Maybe we can even have one ambassador per subject area and work together on an integration activity. For example, when a teacher from CLE becomes an MC ambassador, he or she could then train the students in an activity where they create a Biblical location in Minecraft.”

Falgui emphasizes that Minecraft is utilized even in AJHS Subject Areas which do not have MC ambassadors. Case in point, Araling Panlipunan (AP), which in School Year 2022-2023 utilized MC for a project that Falgui described as “wonderful.” The activity taught students about biomes (defined as “large, naturally occurring communities of flora and fauna occupying a major habitat, e.g. forest or tundra”) and tasked them to establish communities in different Minecraft biomes such as a mountain biome, a desert biome, a forest biome, and so on. By doing so, the boys learned how easy or challenging it was to obtain certain resources depending on what habitat they chose, and why it was necessary for the people to engage in trade and to travel. Following the exercise, the students then reflected on such factors as accessibility to water and the inaccessibility of certain resources, thus picking up vital lessons about why certain civilizations thrive while others do not. Says Falgui emphatically, “AP did it. Cool! They made it a game that was fun and whose educational objectives were met.”

More recently, Falgui with head coaches Arias and Subang, coached the Ateneo JHS BluBLOCs Lego-Minecraft varsity teams, which are now in the final round of presentations for the 4th Philippine National Minecraft Education Competition. Organized by Felta Multi-Media, Inc., this year's competition revolves around the theme, "Cybersecurity."    

Ultimately, Falgui and Ayun believe that Minecraft’s unique power to engage students makes it an ideal educational tool. Ayun recalls a “happy moment” from the time he used Mr. Arias’ Minecraft game for a Grade 10 lesson on catapults and projectiles last school year when classes were still being held online. When the time came to check each group’s progress in the Google classrooms, he was amazed to see that one group that had finished ahead of the others had already used the extra time to edit the world, adding virtual pigs, calves, and even fireworks to the game area! “The students used the time to bond, to try new things…nakakaaliw yung ginawa nila!” he beams.   

Similarly, when the interview for this article was conducted with Falgui in the AJHS Library, a Grade 7 boy casually came over to say hi and to introduce himself as a member of the Gamebreakers org. He then added that he was intrigued by the conversation that two adults were having about Minecraft. 

Falgui concludes, “In other schools, there’s that tendency to think of (Minecraft) as a technology or computer-related topic. But it doesn’t have to be. In fact, it is something that you can tie with any subject. If you design the lesson properly, you can use it to increase engagement, build a stronger connection between the lesson and what the (students) do on a regular basis, and make it fun. Online games are so much a part of the environment of our students, but not all of those games have to stay as games. They can be reused and refined in ways that strengthen the lessons, strengthen the engagement and make the lesson more meaningful in a way for them.”