Minecraft: Education Edition in Humanities and Social Sciences

Hi my name’s stephen and today we’re going to look at the humanities and social sciences learning areas of the australian curriculum and we’re going to explore some of the ways that minecraft education edition can be used in these areas as you’ve watched the video you either know quite a bit about minecraft or

You’re curious to see how you can use it in your classroom well minecraft at its simplest is a game about breaking and placing blocks students can work individually or in groups and they can build worlds together they can be future worlds historical worlds or present worlds they can explore worlds they can solve

Problems and they can overcome difficulties it lends itself really well to all of the learning areas within house minecraft education edition is available to all students in australia so we can use it in our classrooms and get really engaging lessons as we’ll see today so humanities and social sciences is

One subject or a group of subjects from foundation to year six seven and students are introduced to history geography civics and economics and business throughout those years and then in high school year 7 to 10 they are taught as separate subjects so what we’re going to do today is see how

All of the learning areas can actually be taught or you can learn within minecraft education edition we’ll also look at some really great historical worlds where rather than students learning about um historical periods and events they can actually learn in those periods and those events by walking around historical worlds within

Minecraft and talking to characters and engaging with texts so it’s a very very flexible tool there are lots and lots of worlds and lesson plans already created that you can take and adapt for yourself or you can just use as is one really important thing to note is

That teachers don’t need to be experts in minecraft you’re the curriculum area experts so you can take worlds give them to students and as long as you know what the outcomes are the students know how to approach them and build them within minecraft so the aims of hass

Are to understand the world past and present and to respond to challenges in innovative informed personal and collective ways and that’s exactly what minecraft can be used for so in geography we’re looking about places cultures environments particularly australia the a and the asia region and of course the whole world

And because minecraft education edition is a global app it’s available right across the world we can collaborate with teachers in other countries i’m going to show you a great example of that later on and we can also draw on their experiences and their worlds to explore in minecraft there are great examples

Of historical worlds that we’re going to explore today and of course civics and citizenship we belong to a democratic nation and so we can explore how that democracy works and we can recreate that within minecraft we can set up our rules we can talk about religions and our heritage and how that

Works in a kind of micro world within minecraft and of course with economics and business we can look at business opportunities and the development of individuals and society i’m just going to show you an activity that i’ve used with students of different ages i’ve adapted it slightly depending on the age and the

Focus of the of the learning unit but this is a nice activity that students can just run with within minecraft education edition we’re looking at the past the present and different futures so we’re looking at um places where humans have impacted negatively on the environment could be overpopulation pollution animals deforestation

And it could be something that’s local to you it could be something that’s local to australia or indeed a a global problem and what we’re going to do here is build a world to show how we can shape the future for the better so we look at

What it was like in the past what it was like in the present and how it might change if we don’t do something about it so we might be working in groups building four diff different worlds the past the present the future without change and the future with change

So it could be global warming it could be overpopulation could be climate change could be a global warming’s effect on the great barrier reef and what’s nice about this is students can actually be creative and think about the issues and a lot of the natural environment can actually be built within minecraft so

For example the great barrier reef you have got oceans in minecraft and you can indeed build with uh coral so that’s a really nice activity you might want to adapt it and maybe just build one future world you might want to do a a cross-curricular activity and use that

Problem with engineering or with um digital technologies how can that help and build a better future now we’re going to head off to the minecraft education edition website at education.minecraft.net and i’m going to show you how you can search for lesson activities and ideas and worlds that you can use in your classroom

I’m at the minecraft education edition website at education.minecraft.net there are loads of great resources here for educators if i scroll down there’s a get started guide connecting with other educators exploring lessons stories from around the world loads of really great things for you to explore but today

We’re going to go searching for lessons so i go to teach with minecraft explore lessons and you will find that there are subject kits so these are lessons or activities that have been grouped together we can go into for example history and culture and we can see a whole range of

Different lessons contour maps landmarks making a human timeline there are cities so ancient cities as well as modern day cities we can go and explore in minecraft or even build our own you can also search so if you’re looking for a particular topic perhaps you want to see if there’s anything specific for

Australia we can search for australia and we can see geography gold rush history landmarks and you can go in and explore these activities just click on the title and you’ll find further information so you can find the teacher prep the guiding ideas student activities so lots of great resources there you can

Also search by or filter by age range or subject which can be really useful so let’s have another look we look for anzac and you can see there’s a couple of lessons there on anzac maybe we want to look at war more generally and you’ll find there’ll be some things that are

Appropriate for history for example but you’ll also find that there are some games that might have war in the title so here’s a maths activity with war in the title and we’ve got empathy towards war victims um an activity about malala a world war one lesson so you can go and explore

All those lessons you can also search by standards so if i just clear the um country i’ll choose australia maybe we’re looking for the australian curriculum but you can choose your state maybe we’re looking for year 7 activities to do with let’s say social studies okay we can then go and choose a

Standard and then any worlds that are related to that particular standard will appear here so a really nice way you can search by keywords by subject by age range or by australian curriculum standards i’m just going to highlight a few activities that i’ve i’ve picked out and i’ve seen used well with

Uh with students and then we’ll go and explore some actually in the game so sydney cove this is an activity about recreating sydney cove as it was in 1788 so we can talk about what life was like for aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples and why europeans decided to settle in

Act in australia and then there’s a whole range of activities there with links to images and videos that can support their builds so that’s an activity where students can build themselves and got an activity here about city planning if we could build an ideal city what would be in the city plans what’s

Important today what’s of value i was speaking to a teacher recently who was looking at building a city with year 10 and she mentioned we were they were going to do it in minecraft and some of the students didn’t quite see how they would and some said oh i’m too old for

That but when they actually got in and realized that they they could plan and they could develop their city it just gave a new way of using minecraft it wasn’t just a game it was actually a learning and creation tool so that was really interesting so there’s some really great ideas about um

How you can actually build a city within minecraft and there’s an activity on a project-based learning activity about energy so here students are looking at the different renewable energy sources and building a world around that history blocks this is about uh students building unesco world heritage sites within minecraft so there’s some

Worlds that you can download iraq syria afghanistan and then some student activities so really great to explore i haven’t explored this next one um as it’s as it’s brand new it’s just come out five new lessons on volcanoes from minecraft education edition so this actually um some really great worlds that have been

Built here we can go and explore um pompeii and then we can set off the eruption or the simulated eruption of mount vesuvius so i’m going to go and explore that in a moment but there’s five lessons there all about volcanoes the first one is about pompeii

As a teacher i can read through the learning objectives the teacher prep the guiding ideas and then put together a lesson with all of the minecraft resources ready for me so what we’re going to do now is go into minecraft and explore some of the activities that are relevant to hass

As well as exploring worlds on the minecraft education edition website you can also access a whole lot of worlds directly within the game when you go play click on view library and there are lots of resources there let’s explore i’ve just logged on to minecraft education edition using my school email address

Before we go and play let’s just click on this new and featured so this is where any noteworthy resources are shared so there’s a few new resources there there’s some english um hour of code pompeii this is the one i was looking at just now so let’s go and look at this

So if you are opening a game or a world from within minecraft there are links to lesson plans so that will actually open up the lesson plan on the web that’s where we were just now we can also assign this to students so by clicking assign we can actually copy

This link and put it in our learning management system or we can share directly to microsoft teams or we can email it or send it straight to google classroom so really easy as a teacher to share this with students or you can direct them straight to this activity

And then whether students are working individually or in groups you just click create world and you’re automatically loaded into that world a lot of these worlds you’ll want to make sure you read the lesson plans first but this one i can see that there’s some writing on various buildings but there’s

A character here so hopefully they will give me further details so i can observe the city of pompeii and its destruction press the button to launch code builder and run the code to make the volcano erupt okay so press the button below to open the code and start the eruption

Press the button below to join pliny the younger and watch the eruption okay let’s start it first what’s this say make the volcano erupt so on chat command eruption okay so i’m going to click play i’m going to press t to talk and write in the word eruption okay

Oh looks like something’s happening and then i can go and watch it with plenty of younger oh look there’s some ash falling from the sky what are the effects of a volcanic eruption on the environment also i can go and read about mount vesuvius mountain helens and so on

Excellent so i suppose i can just sit here and watch what happens to pompeii might take a little while i don’t want to spoil it i’ll leave it to you to explore that yourself i’ll press escape and save that for now okay so always worth checking the new

And featured in case there’s something that’s suitable for your classes but also if i click on play i can explore the library so this is where most of the really great resources can be found just like we search for them online we can also find them inside the game

I’ll start down here biomes and worlds so what you can do is actually go and explore different biomes so if i were to go in the desert biome i’ll find a different uh terrain to the forest to the ocean and so on so if you’re starting creating your own

Environment you can choose one from here they’re pretty much empty you’ll find some animals and some some plants occasionally the odd village but generally they’re free for you to to build in now i’m just going to show you one of my favorite featured worlds you’ll see in here there’s all sorts of

Different things that you can do it’s not just for hass but we’ve got worlds that you can explore we’ve got maths we’ve got uh emotional learning places to get inspiration for writing the starter town is a great little world you’ve kind of got an empty town with

Plots where you can build your community and build your homes and this one i’m going to just point out now it’s called sustainability city so this allows you to explore a sustainable neighborhood in minecraft i could go online and read the lesson plan but i’m just going to go straight

In as i’ve used it before okay so i’ve got a book here which i can just open up so welcome to sustainability town the teacher can send you on lessons follow the sparkles when on a lesson interact with people you have a blackboard so you can use it to return

To the classroom and there are electric buses in each area excellent so i’m going to start with this teacher there we go so i can choose the order of my activities do i want to look at food production water treatment etc so let’s start lesson one and follow the sparkles okay

Oh here we go where are the sparkles taking me i’m just gonna no i’ll follow the sparkles but i can have a look around this looks like a really cool little town oh here we go easy to follow where does your food come from

I think it comes from a farm i wonder if there’s a farm nearby oh let’s see oh all these wonderful food products come from the farm don’t tell the boss but i’ll let you through here excellent so i can come through here what’s going on over here

This is my farm i raise all the food that you see in the grocery store we work hard to make sure we are responsibly producing food go ahead and go inside to learn more okay so i can see they’re growing a farm here and i can go inside oh here we go

And i can go and speak to all these different people who are involved in the management of this farm i will as before leave it for you to explore further and i guess i can return to the classroom oh not with cooked beef but with the chalkboard excellent i’ll leave that there

Okay so that was in one of the biomes and worlds we’ve also got subject kits so these are split into the different curriculum areas so we might be interested in looking at history and culture let’s look at some of the lessons there we can go and explore and add to and

Solve problems and answer questions about ancient ireland at the chinese tang dynasty capital city of florence we can explore world war one there’s pompeii that we were looking at earlier the city of baghdad let’s just go in here and have a quick look around and i’ll just point out a couple of

Other things that are quite useful when you’re when you’re in the game so here we are in the city of baghdad i’m going to run up these stairs and have a little look around and one of the things you can do in in minecraft is you may be you could bring

Your students in here they can actually go and get a chalkboard you’ve got different sizes the medium sized one is a poster and you can actually put the poster on the wall and ask questions what features do you notice how do they relate to islam so you can add prompts there for

The students um or students could add comments as they go through and you’ve also got a camera so you can take photos of different aspects of the the building and all of those um all of those photos appear when you open your portfolio so you can keep a record maybe

You’ve been asked to go and find certain features and you can take photos of them and caption them in there that can then be exported as a pdf to your desktop or you can share it directly into teams depending on how you work with students so really great little activity and

We’re in creative mode so we can actually fly up and get a bird’s eye view and maybe take a nice photo from up here and then go and put that in our portfolio so that’s a great little world that’s been built you can add to it you

Can ask questions you can make a video all sorts of different ways that you can use that i’m going to save and exit that so that was under the subject kits and history and culture feel free to come in here and have a look around there’s lots of great

Resources and then these monthly bill challenges are kind of shorter activities if i go in here these are sort of activities where students can work together to solve a problem or demonstrate some understanding if i open this architecture one pick a partner and choose a style of architecture from history to emulate

So we might be looking at classical gothic brutalist and so on so if i go in here perhaps i should have read the lesson plan first i haven’t seen this activity before let’s see what it is together okay so we’ve got an example of architecture there and i guess we have

To go and research some architecture and build our own yes perhaps i should have read the lesson plan but you can see there’s nice simple little activities that that students can pick up and run with let’s now have a quick look at the sustainable development goals this is a great

Source of inspiration for lesson activities right across all of the house areas you may see them referred to as the global goals or the un sustainable development goals or the sdgs there are so many great teacher resources available and i’m going to show you some great ideas

About how you can use these in the classroom as well so if you go to the sdgs website sdgs.un.org forward slash goals loads of information about all of the different goals and um how governments are traveling as they approach the 2030 targets there’s also a great site called world’s largest lesson

Lots of great resources that you can use in class lesson plans videos writing prompts all sorts of great content there and microsoft have developed a course called teaching sustainable development goals in partnership with unicef and the world’s largest lesson and this course will give you loads of

Great ideas for using the global goals in your classroom but they lend themselves really well to minecraft activities so i want to just briefly talk to you about the sustainability shuffle this was run by a teacher in canada called ben kelly you can access his website here

And he has created lots of great resources in fact he’s created two great minecraft challenges for each of the sustainable development goals so 34 challenges in total um so right from um poverty to clean water to climate action to gender equality loads of great resources so let’s go and

Explore where you can access those and what that looks like you can find out more about where the sustainability shuffle idea came from on this website it started off as an idea that you didn’t have to just use minecraft in your classroom you could use it right across the world so

Some students solved one of the sustainable goals in australia they sent the world to japan they sent it on to canada they sent it to another school in canada malaysia and so on so the idea was we had this minecraft world traveling around the world and people were adding to it in their

Classrooms so there’s a great video here 17 villages from right across the world so from ireland to malaysia to canada to australia and loads of students just all building together and adding to a collaborative world you can actually download the final world here and then also on this website are the

Challenges that i mentioned so you can download all 34 challenges and there is a world and that you can download as well and i’m going to show you that very briefly but basically these challenges i’ve just opened two of them up so here’s sustainable development goal 11 sustainable cities and communities so we

Just get a really simple little challenge here so this is about building a smart city and then there’s some extension ideas here’s one about life on land so building an animal sanctuary and some extension activities as well so these are challenges that you can just pick up

And give to students but what you can also do is open up this great big world which has got places where you can build these challenges in so let me just show you that as well okay so i’ve landed in the sustainability world and here i’ve got a a non-playing

Character that i can chat to welcome to the sdg shuffle this town is full of guides who will suggest helpful locations for your builds so we can get to any of these um goals so maybe we’ve got a link to the cards as well so you can see here we’ve got the title

Of the world above each hut so we’ve got no poverty gender equality affordable affordable and clean energy let’s have a look at one of these worlds so i can come in here hello so this is sdg seven women in sub-saharan africa collectively spend 40 billion hours collecting water

Build a solution that can reduce this time and allow women to be educated to work and to educate others excellent so this is the sdg 6 clean water and sanitation so there’s two challenges for each of the goals this one fresh drinking water is becoming harder to sustain however science has provided

A solution research seawater desalination and build a representation of this solution that could save humankind so we can watch a video about desalination and then we can teleport ourselves to the build site and we can actually build a desalination plant i can go back to the village

And look at one of the other tasks so this is a lovely world where everything is connected so here we’re looking at uh gender equality and quality education here we go so gender equality here we’ve got um ella stevens is a 13 year old girl who’s trying to be the first female

Formula one driver for ferrari so we can go and find out about ella or we can go to the build site and build a scene of a woman winning that event there we go and everything’s connected so we can always go back to the village if we need to so probably um

It’s worth spending some time to explore but i love the fact that you’ve got 34 different activities all in this one world that you can explore with links to all of the sustainable development goals excellent so hi eric uh who are you what do you do and what’s your experience with

Minecraft okay so my name’s eric jensen i’m a digital learning coach at radford college and over the last few years we’ve been rolling out minecraft uh whenever we sort of see that it could be useful to enhance some learning which is reasonably often um it’s it’s a bit of a stretch for some

Teachers but um and frankly it’s a bit of a stretch for me sometimes it can be sometimes a little bit nerve-wracking to to jump in with a class full of kids who honestly know more than me some of them but um with good management we i think we we

Actually enhance quite a bit of learning with it when we use it well um and we try not to use it badly you know that’s that’s excellent and which which year groups do you work with so i work anywhere from k up to year 12 um

Um and and and i just sort of dip in and out of other people’s classes and sit in meetings and and say have you considered doing this and and uh and then when we stumble across something that sounds like it will work well um sometimes they’ll run it for themselves

With a little bit of help from me and other times i’ll go in and run it for them and with them um with the hope that that next year they’ll do it for themselves sometimes that takes a few years but but we get there slowly that’s great and how long have you been

Using minecraft education edition as part of the cross-curricular stuff that you’ve been talking about um a couple of years now um i don’t remember when it came out i think i started here just as education edition was released so possibly four years ago does that sound about right um and um

Last two years i think we’ve probably been hitting it harder than than than we did the two previous years more people are becoming comfortable with it and we’re starting to develop a few banks of lessons that work well but we’re always doing new things with it excellent that’s that’s really good to

Hear can you um just talk about a particular curriculum area where or learning area where where it’s really fitting in well okay so um the two examples that i’ve got here the the first one was a year eight history task so when i started teaching 20 years ago or so

Um i taught year a history and one of the tasks was that the students all built their own medieval castle and that was kind of four weeks of of torture with some students working really hard and some parents working really hard and i’m not really sure that we achieved much with that

In the end we had some people that built amazing castles but didn’t learn very much um and so last year i was just talking to a year 8 history teacher and i said oh you know what we could do we could get them to build castles in

Minecraft it would take you know two lessons maybe and and they can annotate it as they go and we can really get their understanding of how a castle is um reflects the the structure of medieval society so i start off the lesson by saying that every artifact from a society reflects

The values and the ideas and the beliefs of that society and you’re going to build an artifact and annotate it to show that you understand the beliefs structures of that society um so we really make sure that we’re not talking about minecraft when we’re setting the task up we’re talking about

The history and the people and and trying to get the kids to show us what they understand from that um so i’ll just pull one over uh let’s share my screen if i may um okay you’re gonna see yourself momentarily oh no you’ve disappeared okay good so this one um

This one is one that a student did last year so i’ll just pop up the top so as they they build it and then they um use the book and quill and the camera and go around and and take photos and then annotate their um their castle so you can see they’ve

They’ve said okay important structure is a drawbridge and then this is our drawbridge and they explain why things are important and look it’s not spectacular minecraft work by any stretch but it’s so much more powerful than the work that we did 20 years ago when they actually built a castle

And put all that effort into building a physical thing um and in some cases parents put a lot of effort into building a physical thing and then we didn’t get a lot out of it in terms of their learning um i’m just going to see if i can find another one for you

So with that they’re just given a a blank world and they they design their and i think i i said this to you before um that i’m too lazy to build world worlds for them i’d say start with a flat world and get in there in your little groups and

Start building i’m not going to build it for you and i say look you’d be mad to start with a word world that’s got too much on it already because then you’re going to spend half your time trying to flatten some space um sorry this is another one this one was done

This year um but yeah i i don’t set up anything for them with this one i just just turn them loose in small groups and we’re really lucky that we’ve got a cohort of students who are really engaged already but this engages them still further and

The ones that that are most likely to go off the rails normally don’t because they’re so keen to show what they can do in minecraft it’s really it’s really fun to watch yeah i presume that as well as as well as the learning outcomes from from history and the curriculum in

General they look they’re also developing their collaboration and self organization skills and all those sorts of things yes totally we don’t assess them on that but i think we could if we went down the path of assessing the general capabilities in the next couple of years which is certainly something we’re looking at

This would be a task where we could really talk about okay how did you collaborate what what did you overcome um in working with a group and yeah it’s certainly a great task to showcase those soft skills as well that’s great and you mentioned you had the role of um supporting other teachers

With with technology and a coaching role have you found some teachers uh have really uh without knowing much about minecraft before have really embraced it and found a useful tool yeah in fact one of the um just like five minutes ago i was talking to one of the history teachers who

Said that another colleague who really needed some support with that first task he’s going to do it again now that they’re doing shogun at japan and he hasn’t said a thing to me he’s just launched and done it himself and yeah that should be really exciting as well

Some of our junior teachers have done some really great work um there’s some amazing maths work and mapping work and measurement stuff that they’ve done down in your junior school it’s it’s a real treat that’s not my work so i i won’t showcase that for you but uh

Yeah if you get on to janine at some point she’s done some really spectacular minecraft work excellent i’ll send her an email yeah i look forward to that i’m a maths teacher myself so anything with maths uh i got quite excited so the the next one um

Was a year six i was in a year six meeting and they mentioned that they were doing cartesian planes and i said oh hello um and so i and it sprung out of the castle’s task really because i then said to the year six teachers why don’t

I just come in and we’ll run a session and i’ll get them to build a castle but um we’ll use the fill command to do that so let me just share this one with you so what i did was i went into class with a spreadsheet here it is so this spreadsheet

And it i cut it out i printed it out and i cut out these and so the first task that the kids did was to use the fill command to create smileys in basically two dimensions in the minecraft world so they all just started out with their own flat world they teleported to

To the origin of the world to zero zero or zero four zero and then they used phil to create this 100 square block and then used phil again to fill in the red spaces so they had to sit there with their little paper maps of the smiley and and figure out

What the coordinates of each of those places was going to be so that was everything was at um four i’ve got a four and a five here but i said just put everything at at four and that will be on the ground and once they’d done that

Then um i gave them this one and this is a castle and so this time um the towers should start at four which is on the ground and go up to 24. the walls should only go up to 20 so the towers sit slightly higher than the walls and then the

Central keep should be 30 so it sits higher than everything else and this is what they came up with in a lesson so that’s about 50 minutes that they started out just struggling away with a smiley face and then very quickly got this sort of thing happening once

They’d finished their basic castle then they could elaborate on it and some of them i managed to get to dig a moat using the fill command with air around the castle which is quite complex um but yeah they they really enjoyed it and and uh let me just

Show you this one as well so this is i gave them that spreadsheet on paper as i said and this is what it ended up looking like they had writing all over it as they sat in little groups figuring out what these numbers were going to be exactly what

You can see there one four one five two four five and and the look of horror on their faces when they filled something way too much and then they had to refill it with air and remember what they’d done but it was great learning seriously like again the

Results in terms of minecraft aren’t spectacular but the learning was really good um yeah it’s a such a great it’s all for spatial awareness isn’t it totally yeah yeah and that’s one of the things that we keep coming back to is that um spatial awareness and and good spatial

Awareness is a really great predictor of how well students are going to do in stem subjects way down the track so it’s something we really try to develop um whether we’re using minecraft or any other 3d tool where we’re always thinking we don’t know exactly

How this is going to help them but we know that that it’s going to help them later on so it’s always about the learning not you know who cares if they can build a castle but at year 6 when they’re learning cartesian planes and they get that sense

That this is two planes that intersect and that’s how we work in 3d there’s so much that comes out of that that ability to then take that and work in all these other platforms where they’re building 3d spaces um is really really powerful yeah that’s great thanks for sharing

Those uh two examples eric my pleasure um anything any other plans or things that you’d like to like to explore next um no look as i said everything that that i do comes from what we’re trying to teach not not trying to wedge minecraft wherever i can put it so

I’m always waiting to hear what people are trying to achieve and then using minecraft when it’s appropriate rather than going where can i use minecraft today i’m thinking what does minecraft do well um what what does students learn well from using minecraft and when i hear that’s what we’re trying to achieve then

I pull that in there um so yeah i don’t have plans as much as i have just my ears open great um thank you thanks very much my absolute pleasure hi nikki where do you work and what’s your role hi stephen i’m nikki and i teach year 4 at st mary’s

Catholic primary school in bunbury and i’m a general classroom teacher excellent and so you’ve been using minecraft for a few years now yeah um yeah i think about four maybe four years i think yeah about that so it’s good it’s engaging and the kids love it as soon as you say we’re going

To do some tasks in minecraft they’re like yes so yeah it has that you’re a cool teacher factor attached to it and you use it as well excellent so in year four this year or other years when you may be taught other classes which particular learning areas have you found minecraft to be

Beneficial uh so i’ve used it quite a lot in hass for different meeting different outcomes so um we’ve i used a template that i found in the worlds in the library and it was an anzac parade template so i’ve used that before um so we’ve used that obviously around

Anzac time and to commemorate you know sort of special ceremonies to meet some of those outcomes um and that one’s a good one because you can have a whole street like you know sort of looking at canberra that sort of idea or they can choose one or two memorials to create um

So with that we looked at lots of photos of bunbury the war memorial and like canberra obviously in other cities around the world where they have memorials and then the children had some other tasks of research attached and then one part was to build their parade their street their parade street

In house i’ve also used it for geography so we talk about environments and compare australia africa and europe so we do a lot of um looking at climate and rainfall and that sort of thing and then the children choose an african animal that they wanted to bring to australia

So i used to have that task just as like a project and they’d make a project board with pictures cut out and things like that and then after i discovered minecraft i thought well i can actually use minecraft for that task um so i generally have used your barrier

World that you shared with me one time or they’ll do like blocks of grass and just have it in creative mode and then they have to think about how someone in a zoo would be able to see their animal what sort of environment does the animal need there

So we talk a lot about the plants that they might have in africa but what would be similar or what could grow here because our climate is similar so i’ve used that one in first fleet as well we haven’t created but we’ve looked at and walked through the

The one that’s in the library which is sydney cove and had a had a good wander through that one but that’s such a complex world by the time we get to that during the year we haven’t had a chance to build that ourselves but we do go in and out of that one

So that’s useful as well um in maths i’ve done some of the preset lessons with area um in that one and we’ve done book covers some of those more simple tasks just as introductions so quite a few learning areas we’ve used in excellent that’s great and you mentioned

The students building in the streets and so on so do you get in amongst them and build and what are your skills like compared to those mine is still useless i still fall off things and get stuck in things but um yeah and i usually i just go around and problem solve because

You have quite a few kids that are really good at minecraft because they’ve had older siblings or they’ve you know been introduced to it as a younger student um at home or wherever so usually i just go around and problem solve with some of those kids that

Aren’t so good at it or have never used it before so um yeah my skills are still pretty simple i’m not a very good expert but i don’t need to be luckily because the children they show you all sorts of things so it’s good that’s it you’re the you’re the expert

In the curriculum and they’re the expert in minecraft yes exactly so together you do wonderful things yes that’s the idea hopefully and what about other classes your class sounds lots of uh fun and the minecraft class but are the other other teachers using it as well um not so much um

Yeah mostly it seems to be in year four that they do that um and then they seem to get busy and do other things in year five and year six but i do know that some of the kids still sometimes go into their projects later on and recreate things so

I know some of them do do things at home the anzac project we did last year as part of our remote schooling so we set the same task over year four five and six so they all had an opportunity to do that because some of them had siblings in

Say year six and year four so that was quite nice that they could sort of work together and do that together so um but not as a stand-alone in the separate classes there they’re not doing that quite so much not from lack of trying

Okay and if you if you were to uh speak to a speak to a teacher who never used minecraft and thought yeah i fancy doing something about um sydney cove or about anzac memorial what would you suggest uh how would you suggest they get started if they if they’ve not done it before

So if they go on to the minecraft education web link um there’s lots of how-to’s and lots of lesson plans in there so it’s always good to start with the how to play and so you just go through and complete the tasks and read the little notices and you know work levers and

Create blocks and things and also on the innovator program there’s those lessons that you can take yourself through to earn a badge and get some training so that’s helpful but i find as well just to get in and just have a play really because um yeah the kids the kids know really quite

Well and they pick things up really quickly so if you can have a basic understanding then that at least gets them started and plants the seed of oh wow we can do these amazing things and then their imagination and creativity does the rest really excellent so imagine you had lots of

Time to to play and plan and think and explore what what do you think you might like to to try next in in minecraft with your students um probably one of those really large projects that you know where they’ve built whole towns and um there was a school i it was on i

Think it was on btn and there was a whole school they matched their school and they they went around the school and worked out the area and did trundle wheels and it was so it was a huge project um that would be amazing to be able to do

That but that would probably be a joint you know joint year group sort of task but that would be really good because that would cover so many different outcomes in different learning areas so yeah in the perfect world with lots of time and lots of knowledge and tools that would

Be really good that would be amazing that’s great thanks so we’ve covered quite a lot in that little uh chat uh anything else you’d like to like to say um no no not really thank you for your training that you’ve done over the years as well and that you’ve come out and um

Come to school and worked with you know a couple of our classes and that’s always really good and you’re a great resource for that so people should should get you in their school oh thanks thanks nikki see you later thank you if you’d like to find out more about

Minecraft education and using it in your classroom here’s three really great resources that i will direct you to so first of all is the minecraft education website that we’ve visited a few times today there’s a qr code there so you can get quick access and this is where you can find training

Resources news stories about what other people are doing around the world a subside of that is the australia landing page in here you’ll find resources specifically for teachers who are teaching the australian curriculum or one of the states or territories curriculums there’s some getting started guides there’s some curated lessons and lots more

Information there and then finally if you want to go and spend a bit more time digging into minecraft yourself pardon the pun and do check out my minecraft journey it’s an 11 hour course that you can do in your own time via the microsoft educator center

If you register for the site and log in with your school id you will also earn a number of badges and it will track the courses that you do while you’re on the site so i hope you found that useful please go and enjoy playing minecraft in the classroom and remember your students

Know how to play minecraft you know the curriculum thank you for watching