{"id":7724,"date":"2022-11-28T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-28T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/educatoral.com\/wordpress\/?p=7724"},"modified":"2023-01-26T11:50:41","modified_gmt":"2023-01-26T19:50:41","slug":"coding-in-minecraft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educatoral.com\/wordpress\/2022\/11\/28\/coding-in-minecraft\/","title":{"rendered":"Coding in Minecraft!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Minecraft Education Edition has some amazing Hour of Code worlds that are fun to play to have students learn a little bit of coding. This year’s new addition to the collection is the Escape Estate and it looks great. But what if you want something more in-depth? If you are looking for more coding with Minecraft, I have just the thing for you! Even if you don’t teach computer science or programming but you want your students to do more than a one hour activity for the Hour of Code yearly event<\/a>, this resource will work for you. And it’s FREE! I keep looking on their website because I can’t believe it’s free and it’s really free.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Coding in Minecraft<\/a> is simply amazing! It takes Minecraft Education Edition, an already incredible resource for teaching any subject for any grade level with Minecraft, and adds a learning management system for a fully credentialed course for learning to program. The course starts with an introductory and an intermediate course using MakeCode, a block style programming language, and ends with two advanced courses that teaches kids how to code with either JavaScript or Python!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot kits and I use a free STEM Robotics 101 curriculum<\/a> with my students. Lately I’ve been noticing that students do a pretty good job of designing solutions with their EV3 robots and building prototypes of their solutions with the Legos, but when it came to programming their robots students struggled. Their programs didn’t always do what they wanted to show their robots doing. So when I heard about the Coding in Minecraft course and after attending the training I thought this would be a great way of giving students some experience coding to see if that would help them with our robotics curriculum. We should be starting the robotics unit soon so I will report back how it goes this year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a start page with tutorials and videos<\/a> to help teachers (click on the +’s to see more). There is also a page with videos to help students<\/a> learn how to use their student portal to submit assignments. The introductory course begins by showing students how to move and manipulate objects in Minecraft so this program is accessible to all students, not just your Minecrafters. I assigned the intro course using MakeCode 3.0 to my three 5th and 6th grade Science\/STEM classes. After about one month I had to bring it to a close with only 14 to 20 students out of 75 having fully completed the entire seven lessons of the intro course. Yes, one month and some only got through the Intro course! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though most only got through some of the seven lessons I did notice most of my students using language showing computational thinking! I was continually amazed at how they would explain their code to me using code specific language! I’m not a programmer and I do not know how to code so we got to the point where students would ask me for help and I had to stumble through with them because they either knew more than me or just as much as me! I’m also at the stage in my coding journey where I put some code together and expect the agent to do one thing and he doesn’t quite do what I thought. It’s not as straightforward as I think it should be! LOL<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Coding<\/a>
Student portal view.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Even though the Coding in Minecraft course website has videos to help students get started, I still created my own for my students. Here’s one showing them how to access their accounts and get started: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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