At the end of August, after attending an amazing Minecraft Education Edition Esports Camp, I shared their new esports worlds and how to access them. Yesterday I finally got the chance to try one of the Make and Model worlds to have my students practice building together in their teams! It was so much fun!
I decided to have them practice building, and especially building together, because this year’s Minecraft Education Edition Global Build Challenge, Peace with Nature, is a perfect fit for our environmental stewardship project so I’m having all students participate in Science. If they want their build submitted to the challenge I will but first and foremost, it’s a Science project. 🙂
Pictured here (above) is one team’s representation of the section of our creek where we go every week to set fish traps. We identify and count the fish and send our data to our county’s conservation district every year. We also use the data to keep track of the salmon and trout populations in our creek. Along with the water quality data we collect each year, students get to analyze how our creek is doing and whether something needs to change in our community to protect the salmon habitat! With the work we are doing with regards to our watershed, this year’s Peace with Nature build challenge was a perfect fit so I decided to use the new esports Make and Model worlds to give my students an exciting way to practice building together as teams.
The Competition
Here’s a video of our first attempt at a build competition in the new Make and Model Pirate Cove Minecraft Education Esports world:
The Builds
Using what’s called a command block that was already placed and setup for me, I am going to share their exported builds with them! Here’s the winning build (after the tie the game declared Green the winner so I’m displaying theirs in 3D – the other team’s build is pictured above and below):
If you click the play button above, you can move their Chimacum Creek 3D model around! And if you click on the arrows you can make it full screen so it’s not small. If you get a message about only being to view in 360 degrees, just click anywhere and it will go away.
The picture above shows the yellow team’s Chimacum Creek build that tied for a moment (here is a 3D model of it). At first, I thought it wasn’t going to be even close but after this team got going, their creek build turned out quite nice and I can see why they tied. I know popularity also plays into the voting so we discussed that. When kids are voting on what they like better, it’s hard to argue because they are all entitled to their opinions about which build they liked better. We didn’t get a chance to discuss criteria to vote on. Next time I’ll ask kids what the criteria should be so their voting is not so opinion based.
For the second round I was so excited to get started, I completely forgot to tell teams what to build! I started the competition and had to go over to each team to choose a topic! We decided on the spot to build houses near the creek. Pictured above is one team’s house and that one was the winner of round two! (Here is a 3D model of the house pictured above.)
This was the other house (here is a 3D model of it). I was sure it was going to win. For this build the kids even brought up the fact that the other house won because of one of the kids on that team. I pointed out to the class that if you tell someone their build won because of their popularity that disregards all the work they put in to complete their build. Slippery slope there into backhanded “compliments.”
Reflections
When you start one of these esports matches you choose how long you want to give teams to build. You can add or subtract minutes in increments of 10 and 1. We tried 15 minutes for this build because I thought a section of creek was pretty complex to build. While 15 minutes or longer is just fine to the kids building, it’s way too long for the rest of the class. While the six kids were furiously building the other 17 kids were exploring the pirate themed island but that can only hold their attention so long. They got to throwing items at each other and goofing around and while I normally try to curtail that, even virtual worlds are extensions of our classroom after all, I let them have fun!
When it was time to vote the first time, yes, we did it twice, (see the entire unedited footage here if you want to see all the chaos that ensued and how I learned the ins and outs) it took a while to get all the kids back to vote! Some of them got lost! LOL By the second round of competitions, I had the winning team play a different team and that was probably not the best idea, the rest of the class was getting restless. But they were still in the game and using their restless energy in the game.
I think in a classroom full of students, keeping the build time to 10 minutes or even less would work better. I wish voting would only last 45 seconds to one minute, too. Two minutes was long but the room erupted with excitement! That was so joyous. In the future I think I will keep these builds to simpler tasks so that teams can build something in 10 minutes or less.
I will try this with my second class and then come back to it with this class to see how my tweaks affect the enjoyment. With this class, I will use a different world so those not building can have new surroundings to explore!
