Blog Entry #4: An Exploration of Minecraft EDU
For the first time in my teaching career, my students this school year all had access to reliable laptops. This truly was a game changer in my Humanities classroom, and it allowed me to incorporate resources that I had never used before. One of the resources that I tried to incorporate regularly in my classroom was Minecraft EDU. In today’s blog post, I will be exploring some of the pre-made Minecraft EDU worlds, as well as, how I could use creative mode with my students to teach Humanities curricular outcomes.
On Friday’s we would see our students for a half day and Minecraft EDU proved to be one of the best ways to keep my students engaged in their learning. Being on innovative technology like Minecraft EDU seemed to be a lot more grounding than any of the other traditional activities that I tried. For example, I tried to do free writes, book cafes, etc. with them but Minecraft EDU truly worked the best.
Let’s start with some of the worlds that I have already explored with my seventh-grade students:
Jamestown Settlement: In this pre-made world, my students landed on a ship and were asked to find their way to shore. Once arriving on shore, they needed to build a colony where other settlers could live and work. We only explored this world for one morning, but I feel like I could have let my students build larger and more detailed colonies for more periods of worktime.
Minto Ahbee Aki: This was the first pre-made Minecraft EDU world that I used with my students. It was a well-built world that my students could explore for a long period of time. In the world, they were tasked with exploring a traditional Indigenous village and speaking to its residents to learn information about their tribe. If your students have never played Minecraft before, then they may need some help with this world as they will need to mine, build, navigate, etc.
Six Room Poem: In this ELA world, students are placed into a maze and must navigate through it to visit six rooms. Each of the six rooms houses a different skill for writing an effective poem. By the end of the world, students should be able to write a poem about their experience in the maze using descriptive language, repetition and more.
Ways I might like to use Minecraft EDU in the future:
Food Truck Design: Every year, I have my students do a writing assignment during the first few weeks of school where they write about and design their own food truck. I think that building a food truck using the Minecraft EDU creative mode would be a great addition to this assignment.
Create your own Museum: In the subject kit area of Minecraft EDU, there is a world where students can create their own museum. I have never used this world before, but it would be interesting to have students build a Canadian history museum as their final project.
Accessibility Park: This Minecraft EDU world is new. In the past, I have completed a novel study using the book “Out of my Mind,” by Sharon M. Draper. In the text, the main character Melody has Cerebral Palsy and faces many obstacles due to this. It would be interesting to explore this Minecraft EDU world in connection with this novel.
Finally, here are some of the negatives that I have heard about using Minecraft EDU in comparison to traditional methods of teaching:
- If you are working on a Minecraft EDU server, then all students in your school have access to it. It is likely that another student may come along and knock down other students' work.
- Slow internet = Glitchy Minecraft EDU
- If you plan to ask students to transfer their work from Minecraft EDU to an online dropbox it can be tricky for them to figure out how to do this.
Have you used Minecraft EDU with your students? What are some of the pros and cons that you have discovered? How have you used it successfully with your students?
Resources
Minecraft Education Edition. (2021). Discover. Discover Minecraft | Minecraft Education Edition. Retrieved July 15, 2022, from https://education.minecraft.net/en-us/discover
Hi Megan,
ReplyDeleteI have never considered that you could have premade historical worlds in Minecraft. The closest I’ve seen to that is my friend downloaded a supposedly to scale Middle Earth map and he sporadically tells us about what section he is in! I haven’t personally used Minecraft in my classroom, however when I TTOC’d I was once in a high school coding class that used Minecraft fairly frequently. I would love to use it in my class room, however I would just be concerned that I would lose the student’s attention as they get to “play” a game during school. Have you found it hard to keep the students on task when they are using Minecraft for specific purposes?