The Challenge!
That is this year’s Minecraft Education Edition’s Global Challenge: Peace with Nature, a challenge partnering MinecraftEdu with UNESCO!
Intro Deck
In addition to the video, to get students excited and curious about this year’s challenge, here is a slide deck that comes with the challenge for teachers to introduce it to students:
Perfect Fit!
This topic fit so perfectly with our Ocean Guardian School Environmental Stewardship Project that I’m having students work on this while they are also working on our HZAD Zombie Apocalypse health unit (adapted from here)! Technically, we don’t start working on our environmental unit until March but in the fall and winter we trap fish and get water quality data so that by spring we can have data to analyze!
I teach two classes and I have each group two to three times a week for an entire day (I have each class every other Wednesday). Since I teach Math and Science, and with everything else that goes on like Music class, PE, Library, and garden time, kids get to spend the last hour of the day working this project. That means that they get two or three hours a week on this project. I will probably give them more time as the deadline approaches.
More Resources for Kids
When students first enter the world, there are five animals that “talk” to the players and introduce them to five different sustainability development problems. I was noticing that kids were reading what the animals had to say but they were skipping the resources to get more information. Teams were also beginning to build with no idea what problem they were solving and no new ideas of ways to solve their problems! Just letting them loose in the world did NOT work! So I put the five sources together in this Wakelet Collection and had kids research each resource together outside of the game.
I put together this graphic organizer and instructed kids to choose one person in their team to host the document and share it with everyone else. As they research the five topics in the Wakelet, they are to take notes together: Collaborative Notes Document
Once I approve their collaborative notes, teams were to choose another person to fill out the following Planning Google Form as they choose a problem and sketch out a plan to solve it. A third group member is to be chosen to be the build manager and help plan and sketch.
The fourth team member would host the Minecraft world on their laptop for the entire team to join. I completely copied two great Minecraft Community Charter and rules and put them into the following document (sources listed in the document): Minecraft Charter
I then took the Assessment Rubric that came with the challenge resources and added a review of the sustainable development video!
By November 19, when the submissions are due, we will choose the best ones to submit! I told kids that if they are all good, I will submit them all! And if the builds aren’t complete or otherwise ready we don’t have to submit any; it’s still a great Science project so I’m not worried about them getting done by the deadline.
Update: the deadline was extended to Wednesday, Nov 24! Shh, don’t tell my students. I need them to finish by the 19th! LOL
