Round two of our MinecraftEDU club opened up to fourth and fifth grade students and my excitement for their increased capacity was met with their excitement to show me what they knew! Compared to my third grade group, this group is much more experienced, presumably since they've been playing longer than their younger counterparts. I only have two students who've never played the game. The rest are pretty experienced. Surprisingly, I have a majority of students who play on tablets or other mobile devices so playing on the PC was a new experience for them. Of course, at the beginning, they expected to come in and just play Minecraft! We went over expectations, impressing upon them our goal was to use Minecraft to learn and discover new ways it can be used by their classroom teachers. After a few grumbles, they accepted the fact we are still at school and using Minecraft to learn wasn't so bad. #WeAreStillinSchool
In my continued effort to learn more about the game, I've discovered something called achievements. I thought this might be a way to guide our time together, giving the students enough freedom to be creative and inquisitive, yet staying focused on concepts I wanted them to learn. Rather than using the in-game version of achievements, I modified them to fit our needs. The first achievement was to build a living quarters. The only requirement was that we all built near each other so that we could form a village. That's it. The creativity that unleashed from that point was amazing! We have small, basic huts, large creeper style houses, quarters that venture underground and connect to friends' house via tunnels, and even houses that reach up into the clouds.
After our first day of building, I realize we need more time. We meet for one hour after school, but after getting logged on and explaining the goals for the day, we are often left with only 40 minutes and rush to pack up in the end.
In my continued effort to learn more about the game, I've discovered something called achievements. I thought this might be a way to guide our time together, giving the students enough freedom to be creative and inquisitive, yet staying focused on concepts I wanted them to learn. Rather than using the in-game version of achievements, I modified them to fit our needs. The first achievement was to build a living quarters. The only requirement was that we all built near each other so that we could form a village. That's it. The creativity that unleashed from that point was amazing! We have small, basic huts, large creeper style houses, quarters that venture underground and connect to friends' house via tunnels, and even houses that reach up into the clouds.
After our first day of building, I realize we need more time. We meet for one hour after school, but after getting logged on and explaining the goals for the day, we are often left with only 40 minutes and rush to pack up in the end.
Quote of the day - "Want to build an underground tunnel to connect our houses?"