Cultivate Student Creativity with Minecraft: Education Edition
Looking for a way to permit more student creativity in your classroom with a low-floor of understanding needed, but with unlimited potential? Minecraft: Education Edition might just be the answer for you!
Minecraft: Education Edition is the educational-focused derivative of the main Minecraft game that exploded into the world. It makes perfect sense why combining forces and offering this platform to students and teachers was a “no-brainer” for Microsoft. Many of our students today have grown up playing at home with their family members. For those who haven’t played before, once the basic controls are mastered, the creativity is available to be unleashed for all!
One of my favorite aspects to share with educators about Minecraft: Education Edition is the immense Lesson Library that is available in-game, with even more available at the website (Lessons for Minecraft Education | Minecraft Education Edition). The lessons found at both locations include detailed lesson plans, objectives, standards covered, guiding ideas for educators to facilitate classroom discussions, student activities and performance expectations so educators know what outcome the students are expected to complete at the end of the lesson. Talk about a one-stop-shop that many educators did not even know existed!
The in-game world selection screen, including Monthly Build Challenges, Starter Worlds, and the Subject Kits!
The Lesson Library has around 1,200 lessons divided into Subject Kits such as Equity & Inclusion, Computer Science, Art & Design, Math, Science, Literature, History & Culture and more! Every time I share the lessons and resources housed on the website, educators instantly begin scouring the catalog for lessons that could fit into their classrooms and can oftentimes find something very quickly.
Looking for a specific Biome to build in or explore with your students? Minecraft: Education Edition has those, too!
There are also Monthly Build Challenges, that offer students and educators a chance to complete a design challenge in a relatively short period of time (~30 minutes) such as Build a Treehouse, Build a Mars Rover, and Build a Better Bedroom among many, many others. These Build Challenges require little preparation on the teacher’s end, but allow for student creativity to flourish to complete a task where every student can showcase their individuality and creativity. These are among my favorite lessons to run in a classroom when invited in!
If the lessons or challenges still do not meet your needs, why not create your own lesson, world, or activity? I have spent numerous hours sitting with educators helping to shape their learning of Minecraft: Education Edition and then turning that interest around and creating our own world or activity from scratch for them to then use in their classroom with their students. Educators can create a lesson idea, create a checklist of needed components for the students to include in their designs, and then create a template world for the students to use or have them start on an empty starter build plate. Minecraft: Education Edition worlds can be saved locally, exported and then shared via Microsoft Teams (or another LMS) so other students can access those files and play.
This opens up new possibilities for the classroom, too…anything that students could have created to showcase their learning (a diorama, poster, piece of art) could now be created in three dimensions through the use of Minecraft: Education Edition. I hope you decide to give it a try, and I’ll be sharing more thoughts and ideas in a new blog series on here every Monday evening entitled Minecraft Monday Musings, starting next Monday, February 28th!