Content creation in Minecraft: Education Edition

Piaget once wrote, “The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men (or women) who are capable of doing new things.”  I believe this applies to teachers as well.  We should invent, discover, and create.  The childlike wonder of playing with Legos, making cardboard forts, and drawing is often thrown to the wayside as we become adults.  These are not practical…or so it seems.  I want to challenge teachers to discover their childlike wonder again.  It may take a while to allow yourself the freedom of creating and imagining, but it will be worth it.  I do this creation through Minecraft: Education Edition.

About five years ago I started playing Minecraft with my own two kids.  I immediately loved the sense of freedom and creativity that I could express…no cleanup, no mess, no supplies.  As a teacher, I have freedom, once again, in creating worlds for my students to discover.  I teach high school English and have always wanted to play in the worlds my students have been reading about for years.  So, I started with a dystopian classic (Anthem) and have since created a number of literary worlds.  These worlds have allowed me the selfish pleasure of discovering a new perspective on older literature as well as immersive lessons on classic themes.

 

One of my first projects in M:EE.

 

So, why don’t more teachers take on this challenge?  Why don’t more teachers create content, worlds, lessons using Minecraft: Education Edition?  After all, Minecraft is one of the best selling video games of all time and it is the number one selling app in the Apple app store.  My guess involves the question I hear more often than any other, “When do you have the time to do all of this?”  The answer is simple…I make the time.  It is the same for anything we value.

So far, I have created three worlds (soon to be four) and nine lessons on the M:EE website (click here to view my M:EE Global Mentor profile).  IT WAS A BLAST!  All of the lessons I have used or will use in my classroom and I wanted to share.  The lesson development was guided by the M:EE lesson submission form, which helped me better develop the lesson for my own class as well.  The worlds I created in the evenings, weekends, and over the summer.  I did all of this because I knew I could.  For me, I felt that if I could…I should.

You may not be driven to spend hours creating M:EE worlds, but you can contribute ideas to a growing community.  You may have a brilliant lesson that only your students get to experience.  What if you shared that brilliance with other educators and gave other students a chance at an exceptional educational experience.  I challenge you, as an educator, to rekindle that childlike wonder in your classroom…to stretch your creative mind and flex those creative muscles.  View M:EE through the eyes of an artist and make the digital world your canvas.

-For more information about Minecraft: Education Edition and to get a free trial click here.  This could be your first step to being an educational artist.

Using Minecraft to Teach Inference

Reading at the high school level can be tricky.  Lexile levels don’t grow nearly as much once kids reach high school and usually the kids who need the most growth have struggled so long they are on the brink of giving up entirely.  So, I decided to take an entirely different approach…make reading immersive.

For any avid reader, the previous sentence did not make any sense.  Reading is immersive…that is why people love it.  For good readers, reading is immersive…for struggling readers that, I argue, is not the case.  So, how does one make reading immersive if reading has never been naturally immersive?  Minecraft!  This year I am using Minecraft to teach a number of skills in the area of reading.  This blog post will focus on one (more posts to come on this subject) reading skill, inferencing.

Recently, in a few of my classes, we started the book The Time Machine (the H.G. Wells classic).  This book was written in 1895 and even though it was far ahead of its time, it tends to be a bit difficult to maneuver for many students.  The vocabulary is rich and varied, the details are plentiful, and the year 802,701 (to which the main character travels) is very strange.  I knew I had to get them hooked at the start…something a worksheet was not going to do.

The very first day, before we read a single word before any books were passed out, I walked them through the Minecraft: Education Edition world below.

I asked my students to theorize about what happened between now and the year 802,701 for the world to look like this.  They wrote down their ideas and then shared them out.  It was the first time I had ever used Minecraft to teach inference.  They were exploring an unknown system (environment) while trying to determine how they fit into it.

Monster.com (the career website) suggests one of the top soft skills employers look for is “critical observation.”  “Data doesn’t mean much if you don’t know how to interpret it.  Is there a pattern emerging?  What else should you be looking for?  Being a critical observer can help make you a better worker all around.” (monster.com, Soft skills to help your career hit big time)  The students were being critical observers of the year 802,701.

Minecraft: Education Edition (MEE) may be one of the best ways to teach inference.  Before reading, have students explore an environment you created based on a novel or short story (or use one of the worlds on the MEE website).  Or maybe, they simply explore a biome (environment) that is similar to one they are learning about.  This spans beyond English and could be a really fun way for students to learn about biology, physics (TNT placed in just the right spot could be a BLAST), just about any topic.  It’s a simple idea, but one that is difficult to do in the confines of a classroom…have kids explore…on their own…in an unknown environment (but an environment that they will soon know a lot about).

Inference is a tough skill to teach.  A 2012 article from the ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) website claims “…many teachers identify inference as one of the most challenging of all academic skills to teach.” They go on to write, “…inference feels abstract and difficult to model, design lessons around, and assess.” (ascd.org, Inference)  In Minecraft, students have the opportunity to explore a digital world and a teacher can assess this through writings, and various in game features.  No longer does inference have to be “abstract and difficult to model.”  In fact, if you have students create the literary world (of a book you have been reading) in MEE as an assessment then it will be ready to go for the next class.  Not only does it require a close reading to accurately depict the literary world in MEE, but students will have to reread, collaborate, determine scope and scale, as well as a plethora of other next gen skills.

If you have ever struggled with teaching inference or wanted to get kids reinvested in reading, try using Minecraft: Education Edition.  You will discover just how many reading concepts you can explore using MEE (which I will write about in coming blog posts).  If you don’t currently have MEE, you can download a trial on their website.  If you have never played Minecraft but are intrigued by the idea of using it in your classroom, check out my YouTube series Minewhat?

Minecraft & Rigor

I recently made a post on Twitter about my own belief on rigor.  The post was short and a bit random at the time.

A combination of frustration and perspective drove me to post such an uncharacteristic Tweet.  I have told many people that this summer was the best in my adult life…which is completely true.  Why?  Because I gained back my love for teaching…true pedagogy.  I had hundreds of conversations this summer with educators from all over the world.  Most of those conversations centered around reaching kids and teaching them in ways that make sense to them.

It is no secret that I am a huge advocate for using Minecraft: Education Edition (MEE) in the classroom (my Twitter feed is flooded with Minecraft retweets and information).  The first question I get now from both teachers and kids is, “Tell me about all of this Minecraft stuff.”  My first response is, “Let me show you this…”  I have half a dozen screenshots from worlds I have created on my phone that I like to show people when they ask.  Once they see it, their perspective is shifted.  That is all I need…a foot in the door….a shift.

Recently, I created a number of MEE lessons for literature I teach (all of these are available on my Minecraft Global Mentor profile).  As I was developing the lessons I began to see just how much depth my lessons could now have.  The content was richer, the questions were deeper, the writings were more meaningful, and the sequencing made so much more sense.  For example, teaching inference skills to high school freshmen students can be challenging.  It often feels like learning in a vacuum…well, because it often is (I will come back to this later).  In fact, my entire approach to teaching literature is changing this year.

The Odyssey is one example of a widely taught piece of literature that, while interesting, can fall into the classic mode of read and quiz…which is death to any piece of literature.  I am not saying that quizzes are bad and I am certainly not saying that reading is bad.  What I am saying is that exploring literature like a cadaver, where the teacher shows the important parts and kids can only watch, will leave that literature as cold and lonely.  However, breathing new life into classic pieces is what MEE can do for you and your students.  What if The Odyssey gave kids a chance to explore the story on their own, where they could dig deeper into what they find most interesting while integrating informational texts?   The Odyssey will become unforgettable and buzz words like grit and rigor become real.

Common Core has become the standard of learning, and testing, in most of the U.S.  If you have spent any time exploring these standards, for any age, you will notice the emphasis on informational texts and argumentative writing (English).  MEE allows teachers to integrate these texts and writing seamlessly as a way of better understanding their immersive environments (for an example check out this lesson).  In Math, students have to analyze, evaluate, investigate…this is rigor (example lessons).  When you place kids in an immersive environment, digital or otherwise, all of these concepts take on new meaning…they become REAL.

Minecraft is a game, but it is also a tool for taking the conceptual and making it real.  It is real collaboration, real problem solving, and real creativity.  No worksheet is ever going to compare to the experience a student has in Minecraft.  You want to teach real inference, drop kids into an unknown world and ask them to describe what they think it is about.  These are the skills kids will need in the next century…to be able to figure out an unknown system and thrive in it.  If we want to prepare kids for careers that don’t yet exist, we have to give them the tools to innovate.

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No worksheet is ever going to compare to the experience a student has in Minecraft.

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I stand by my tweet.  I do believe that we, as educators, need to explore how we address rigor…not because we have to, but because we want to create the best possible experience for our students.  Minecraft: Education Edition is the single best tool I have found to leverage both rigor and engagement…to give students a truly unforgettable experience.