My 5th and 6th grade students are participating in this year’s Minecraft Education Edition and UNESCO Sustainability Development Global Build Challenge: Peace with Nature. When using Minecraft Education Edition, or Minecraft:EE or just M:EE, in the classroom teachers have access to ready-made worlds for all subjects and different grade levels. It’s amazing how much is available for teachers who have little to no experience in building their own worlds! So far this year I’ve had students complete a mindfulness SEL activity in Minecraft using the Mindful Knight world and a world where kids were able to review skills with fractions. Of the three Minecraft activities the kids struggled the most with the fractions activities. More kids completed the Mindful Knight and everyone did very well on the build challenge. I see that even using Minecraft, some activities are still difficult for students to complete. Adding and subtracting fractions, even in Minecraft, is still adding and subtracting fractions. The hope is that building arrays and checking to see if you got it right in Minecraft is fun enough that it will engage more students than drawing arrays on paper. It’s still not engaging for ALL students so having the paper option, and physical manipulatives will make the assignment inclusive for ALL students.
Whereas the Mindful Knight was more engaging and more students completed it, the building challenge was the most engaging by far. Makes sense because we are most excited when creating something and building in Minecraft is not only fun it’s full of endless possibilities and the kids do not disappoint! Their creativity and what they can do in those words never ceases to amaze me. I’m constantly asking, “how did you do that?”
I was also excited to hear kids using what they learned about sustainability issues as they showed me their progress. It really helped that they had to look up unsustainable issues before they could start building. I used the form in the screenshot below to help teams organize their research into proposals that I had to approve before building could begin. This was a huge success!
Here is a glimpse into our classroom on a day when all teams were engaged in building their build solutions:
On one particular day, I was amazed at how completely they were focused on their building. Kids worked non-stop for two one-hour and 45 minute blocks and one final hour-long block, because our schedule is broken up quite nicely to give kids breaks and other classes like PE and Band. So a full day in my class gave teams about four and a half hours of solid work time and they used it all. When it was time for lunch or recess, they’d say, “What? Already?” I don’t hear that often. I also noticed that while on a typical day we have almost 30 visits to the restroom, on that day there were only 14 visits. That tells you something right there.
As teams rushed to finish the final part, recording a tour of their build in two minutes, it was difficult but doable. This was where I needed to put on my coach hat and motivate students to stay on target and get their video recorded! This is what Minecraft and UNESCO was looking for in the two-minute tour:
- Share ONLY your team name, school, and country. Besides that, do NOT share any information that can identify you – remain anonymous.
- Briefly describe your project including the UNSUSTAINABLE problem you are solving.
- Explain how your team applied what you learned about the impacts of humans on the environment in your build.
- Explain your solution to the problem.
- Share what you learned about sustainability development and your problem specifically as part of your involvement in this project.
I had teams, mostly made up of four students, decide which of the four was going to take each of the las four bullets. Then I had them write scripts of what they were going to say so they could rehearse. Rehearsals happened with a two-minute timer going so they could keep their tours to under two minutes. Then they rehearsed their tour in Minecraft. Below you will see four complete submissions from each of my two classes. In this first class, we learned that you really need to get within one to three inches of the microphone for your voice to be heard well. In the second video, in the second class, students got closer to their microphones and their sound quality improved. We are allowed to submit text files so I will have students write their scripts into transcripts that I will submit along with their video files so the judges won’t miss a thing!
It’s nice to have projects with a hard deadline. I don’t mind extending deadlines as needed, I mean there are real-life deadlines that get extended, so it’s nice to have a deadline that is NOT set by me. If you submit one second after the deadline, your submission will not be viewed and will not be scored. It’s a hard deadline and sometimes in life we have those as well. So maybe I should tell the kids that the deadline was extended to Wednesday, Nov 24. Nah. LOL
