Hello my name’s steven and today i’m going to talk to you about using minecraft in the maths curriculum you probably know a little bit about minecraft which is why you’re watching this video but basically minecraft’s about breaking blocks down and placing them players can work individually or in groups to build creative Solutions to problems they can create whatever they can imagine and you can also incorporate it in lots of different curriculum areas and today we’re going to focus on maths the education edition brings the best parts of the minecraft game together with some educational features as well as a whole Lot of worlds or lesson activities that you can use with your students so minecraft is is really just a kind of a great big sandbox students can build with blocks and generally the blocks are assumed to be one meter cubed which makes it an ideal workspace to learn about all sorts of Different maths topics so we encourage um teachers to use mathematical thinking and language as students are exploring the world so we can look at doubling tripling we can look at placing lots of blocks together counting how many blocks do i need we can look at measurement we Can look at coordinates and lots more besides so i’m just going to spend a moment looking at the structure of the maths curriculum and then we’re going to go on and look at some of the worlds and how you can find those to use with your students So the curriculum structure is really in three main areas the first area is number and algebra so that’s all about numbers relationships between numbers patterns and there’s great opportunities for using that within minecraft as we’ll see in this session the second part is measurement and geometry and i’ve already mentioned that The the blocks are generally made up of cubes but there’s lots of other shapes and lots of other measurement we can do within the game as we will explore today and then finally statistics and probability so as we go through this session i’ll refer back to the different curriculum areas In the australian curriculum mathematics area so i’ve just jotted down a few ideas that that came to mind but what i find is as you spend time in minecraft whether you are playing in survival mode so you’re trying to survive the night and escape the monsters there’s a lot of thinking to do Around minecraft so how much um how much material do you need to to create a safe place to live what’s the likelihood that a a baddie is going to come and get me and so those sorts of things come up in survival mode but in creative mode when you’re building you’re thinking about How many blocks do i need how much space how deep can i go and lots of other things like that so i’ve just jotted down a few ideas that that came to me so straight away i really want somewhere to live but how much wood do i need And if i’m in survival how many trees have i got to cut down to get woods sorry to get wood planks and i can introduce algebra here so um if i need a certain amount of wood to make an axe which can make me work faster what’s the best use of my time And resources and how much wooden stone do i need to create different tools what’s the ratio of stone to wood in a stone pickaxe these are great questions that you can stop thinking about when you’re playing the game naturally and then we can bring in um monetary values as well if glass clock If glass costs four dollars would cost three dollars and doors cost five dollars how much is your house worth um if i have if the surface area of my of my bedroom is 16 square meters and paint costs three dollars per liter how much can i spend on decorating my bedroom these are All the types of things that that flow naturally in the game measurement and geometry well when you start playing you might be looking around and suddenly it starts going dark well a day in minecraft is is 20 minutes of of earth time so how much faster is this than normal time how Much time is spent in dusk and in dawn how much time is are we in um darkness what what fraction is that if a standard block is one cubic meter what’s the length width and height of your house what’s the volume um how many different cuboids can you Make if you’ve got 36 blocks is that enough to live in can you get a bed can you get a more than one room do they all have the same surface area so these sorts of questions can be brought in whenever you’re working with your students In the world of minecraft there’s a lot of mathematical language mathematical thinking that ties back to the curriculum statistics and probability what’s the probability of spawning a brown and white panda bear this came up the other day actually um i was working with some students and we were spawning Uh panda bears and someone shouted out that they got a brown one and someone else said that’s really rare but how rare is it and does it matter where you are in the game is a dispenser random you can create a dispenser which dispenses certain items certain blocks or tools within the game Is it random it’s supposed to be can we test whether it’s random a world i’m going to show you very shortly um it’s a fishing world and when you fish in minecraft you can either catch fish treasure or junk what’s the likelihood of catching one rather than the other and does it change Depending on the weather or whether you’re in a boat or on the shore or in the ocean or on a river so there’s a lot of questions there that come into all of the different areas of the maths curriculum so what i’m going to do now is show you Where you can get some ready-made worlds that you can pick up and use straight away in your curriculum with lesson plans resources etc so we’re going to head off to education.minecraft.net and i’ll show you the the best and easiest way to find resources there this is the minecraft education edition website at Education.minecraft.net there’s so much information on this website so you can find out all about minecraft the impact it’s having in schools across the world great stories and updates you can get started there are you can download minecraft here share this with families there are guides for educators parents uh it Admin staff and lots more we’re focused today on teaching so let’s have a look at this teach with minecraft section here and on the left hand side you can get trained there’s all sorts of detailed training on lots of different aspects of minecraft and you can dive straight in and explore the lessons So that’s what i’m gonna have a look at today the different ways that you can find great lessons to support your maths teaching so let’s go into explore lessons so there are literally hundreds of lessons here that have been created by educators right around the world and if i scroll down You’ll see that there are subject kits for a lot of the different subjects now these are uh american or they’re kind of sorted by american curriculum areas so we’ve got math rather than maths and computer science rather than digital technologies but if i go into math there’s a whole lot of ready-made Resources that you can start using so some of the most popular ones are listed here and if you just hover over one it gives you a bit more information about it so this one is suitable for all ages this one is for oh can i read that I think it says 8 to 10 and 11 to 12. those are ages rather than year groups so a whole lot of lessons you can just click on and find information about so if i open up this one subtraction world all of these pages have a similar format You can see the learning objectives you can see if there are any teacher prep and notes guiding ideas student activities performance expectations and so on and then on the right hand side there are files so they might be minecraft worlds that you can download as well as worksheets or videos or Completed student work so very simple to um get one of these files Um if you want to direct your students directly to this you can click this button here and you can copy the website address or you can send it straight into microsoft teams great so the subject kit are basically hand-picked resources that have been tried and tested If we scroll down we’ve got the standard alignments for the us curriculum so the common core mathematics standards correspond quite well to the um the australian grades so grade three is the equivalent to year three so eight and nine year olds grade four is nine and ten year olds and grade five is Uh like our year five uh ten and eleven year olds so these guys just have some really great um resources so for going to this one here year five you’ll see some great ideas for increasing student engagement um exploration and links to the outcomes so looking at um algebra numbers fractions Measurement and data so they have slightly different strands and standards than we do in australia but that gives you a really nice starting point particularly if you are a let’s go back where i was particularly if you are a uh year three year four or year 5 teacher You can also search within these subject kits so i can search for a particular topic so maybe i’m looking at fractions i can search for fractions and we find there’s 12 worlds or 12 lessons already made for fractions we can go and explore that further what we can also do is um Search by age range so we can choose the age range of our students we can choose the subject so maths for example in this case and we can also search by standards so if we choose australia we can either choose the australian curriculum or the state or territory Specific curriculum let’s just go into acara and let’s look at for example um yeah four and then we can look at maths and all of the standards are listed there and we can go and choose a particular resource let’s have a look at comparing areas using metric units there we go And we can see there’s two lesson activities that we can go in and explore uh further so different ways that you can search you can either search by keyword or you can search by standard so what we’re going to do now is actually go in and look at a few of the Worlds i’ve currently shown you how to find worlds via the website you can also find them in the game which we’ll look at now but just before that if you do find a a world that you really like or you want to refer back to if you have actually registered for the Website you can see i’ve logged in here you can you can sign up with your school email address and then if there’s a site or a page or a lesson you like just click on the little heart it will turn to red and then that will Appear under your list of resources so a great way for bookmarking things to have a look at later so if i go to my resources i can see i’ve saved these two lessons to have a look at later or to use later you don’t have to sign in you can Obviously just bookmark them in the usual way but i find that quite useful to keep all my resources together okay so let’s go into the game and explore some of these minecraft worlds as well as exploring the resources available on the website education.minecraft.net there’s also a whole lot of ready-made editable worlds Available from within the app so let’s have a look at how we can access those and use those in the classroom let’s now look at some of the worlds that are built into the game so rather than downloading worlds from the minecraft website or making them available on your school network Students can access worlds directly within the game whether they’re playing on a mac pc chromebook or ipad so i’ve just logged on that’s steven hello and i’m going to click play my worlds contains all the worlds that i’ve already used on this computer or that someone else has used on this Computer library is where you’ll find brand new worlds that you can start using yourself so i’m going to go into view library and first of all i’m just going to quickly talk about the monthly bill challenges every month the minecraft education team put together a challenge they’re On various topics and many of them are cross-curricular but if you look through here you might find ones that are relevant for your maths classroom for example area and volume challenge that little character there is the agent so that suggests there could be a coding or digital technologies element to this As well so i can go into one of these challenges and i get a brief description so we’re using minecraft to visually represent area and volume and as i scroll down i can see the objectives and some extension ideas so you can see we use coding in one of the extension activities If i click create the world i’ll go straight into the world i’ll do that in a second i can get an online copy of the lesson plan this will actually give me further information about the the lesson i can scroll down i can see which subject areas year groups How long it takes to complete there we go it’s a nice 20 to 30 minute activity i can also assign or share this directly to the students so rather than ask the students to log on go to view library go to build challenges search for area and volume I can just click assign or share and i can copy this link and put it into my learning management system or turn it into a qr code i can publish it straight to microsoft teams if i’m using that with students and there’s some other options as well I would like to add an assessment tool flipgrid topic or website so before you share this with the students you might want to share a link to a rubric or a place where you want them to upload a solution or screenshots you can just click add a resource Type in the url and give it a name and that will be available to the students within the game or you can just direct students to this world create the world and then the students can work on it either individually or in groups what’s nice about all of these Build challenges is there’s a lot of instructions in game so we’ve got here area and volume use the world as a visual representation area equals length times width and if i struggle to read this i can just press i on my keyboard and it loads up those instructions in immersive Reader and i can have that read out to me or i can change the language uh interact with it in different ways so you’ve got that built in anytime there’s text in the game i’m just going to go straight over here ah so i’ve got to i guess work out the Area of these maybe from uh from above and explain that as a sum on the or a product on the slate that i’ve been given here and then over this side we’ve got uh volume maybe i should have read the teacher notes before i went in but you Can see that that’s a nice little world that students could work in in small groups or work individually then they can build their own or even code their own using the agent let’s go back into the build challenges uh let’s just have a look down so you’ll see many of these are Um cross-curricular topics one particular one that i think is is quite good for maths is this gone fishing grab your fishing rod and head out onto the water use this minecraft world to get started tracking your fishing success so this is about going out and i guess it’s a kind of a Statistics or probability task you can go fishing and record what you’ve caught let’s give that a try i’m going to create the world and i’m going to go fishing oh brilliant it tells me how to fish hold your fishing rod point at the water right click to cast Wait for a fish to bite right click to reel in the fishing line i don’t have a fishing rod okay so quite often in these worlds if you see one of these chests that’s where you will find what you need for the activity so there’s four fishing rods that suggests that up to Four people can play in the game now i’m going to go out here um i could cast just from from the land here or i could row out in a boat let’s just see what happens if i cast from here okay so i’m going to wait for a bite Not all there’s some bubbles oh bite and i’ve caught a some raw cod excellent let’s try again oh what have i got that time a puffer fish so there’s different things you can catch you might catch a fish you might catch some treasure or you could catch Some junk so we could work out the probabilities maybe by doing this as a whole glass what happens if i row out to the middle of the water am i more likely to catch fish or less likely what happens if i fish from the other side or if i go to Another terrain these are all things that we can kind of explore within the game so it’s just a nice kind of statistical task that we can do in the world of minecraft excellent i’m going to press escape and i’m going to come back to that later definitely so that’s just a couple of Examples from the monthly build challenges also in the library you have these subject kits science math computer science social emotional and so on so these are all categorized by topic they’re mainly based on the us curriculum so if i go into math i’ll see common core grade three four five They are roughly equivalent to year three year four year five in australia so let’s have a look in grade three there are a whole lot of different worlds all set up to either help students learn different um concepts or to practice or to represent let’s have a look at this algebra one Explore math models to learn about arithmetic patterns and use this knowledge to build designs okay there’s also a slideshow with this so quite a few of the activities will have resources associated with them so if i click on resources here you can see this is downloading a zip file and within that You’ll find a powerpoint which has got some questions or prompts that you can share with the students during the task before or after the task so there’s lots of great resources available let’s just go straight in and have a look at this world okay so this is an example of a Non-playing character and you’ll also find this in a lot of the ready-made worlds generally you right-click and you find some directions or some questions or some prompts and you can also find links either to other parts of the world or this is a link to the lesson online Um i don’t need to look at that i think i can work this out maybe let’s have a look um so i’m coming over here we’ve got some structures so i can see there’s some kind of pattern here and hello piggy and then here we’ve got Three five seven nine and maybe our task is to work out the next two numbers and maybe build the next one in the sequence uh oh similarly over here so there’s a number of different tasks that we can do and we can record there’s areas for building over here so these are ones That and perhaps we are starting from scratch and then we can actually look at how these number patterns and these representations can be used if we’re building structures so perhaps i should have read the lesson plan first but i kind of have got the idea here and that’s already made so Students can just open that up work on it save it back to their own device excellent we’ll just have a look at a couple more so you get a feel for the types of different activities are there again view library subject kits math let’s look at some grade four this time Ah look angles base 10 puzzles finding factors let’s do some factors here we go so ah here we go students will use a hundred chart on paper as a map to build rectangles that show the factors for each number between one and a hundred okay so i guess if i read the lesson Plan i’ll find out a bit more about that but it looks like there’s a world there where we can just go in and we can represent what we’ve already worked out on paper so not everything is done in minecraft there might be times where minecraft is just um I’ve just flown up there minecraft might just be where you demonstrate your answers so you’ve worked out how to do something on on paper or um with lego or whatever it might be and then here we can come and let’s see what this one is here Who’s this person 12 so in here we can come in and represent all the different ways um that we can make 12 using factors so 1 x 12 2 x 6 3 x 4. look at me go excellent so just that’s kind of like a template and it keeps people in the uh Right place we’ll just look at a couple more while we’re here i’m not going into my world so i’m going to go into the view library subject kits let’s look at some year five uh city planning quadrilaterals fractions javelin line plots ah loads of great decimal dungeon that looks fun i’ll Explore that later volume yeah let’s look at some volume today students will learn about volume by filling sandboxes creating equations and finding the total amount of block in rectangular prisms okay so this is just uh an alternative to maybe getting out um cubes we’re actually going to do it using cubes in Uh minecraft i guess so let’s have a look over here how many green units ah so i guess we can we can explore this and find out how many units ah there’s robert he’s going to give us some instructions good news we got the sand for the sandboxes now fill them Um get shovel so presumably if i click that yay look i’ve been given a shovel so that’s gonna um that’s gonna help me break those oh boxes and i can collect those if i’m i’m not there we go i’m collecting you can see as i break the uh As i break the blocks i’m collecting them and i’m counting them in my uh bar at the bottom so so far i’ve got six eight nine and i guess once i’ve collected them all then i know the volume of that shape um i guess the same with these other colors and like What’s over here sandbox five what’s the volume of this sandbox oh okay so we have to then fill this or maybe we’ve worked out in a a formula for working this out and then if we get it right is it 24 not yet oops i’ve done something wrong Oh i’ve lost a point look you can see on the right hand side there i’ve lost a point whoops i should have read the instructions but that gives you a a nice idea of um some ready-made lessons but tip there always read the uh always read the instructions as a Teacher so you know what you’re prepared for you don’t necessarily know how to play the game or use all the commands but you need to know what the kind of rules of the activity are let’s look at one more and this next one i’m going to show you Has got some nice features that i wanted to highlight so i’m going to go into math and i’m going to go into um this quadrilaterals one here so obviously you you can’t have perfect uh quadrilaterals due to the the fact that we’re working in a block world but There’s some really nice features that i just wanted to highlight here so here we can kind of categorize a parallelogram a kite um a trapezium and you’ll notice here that there are um blocks so i can’t actually get out of here so i can’t go and explore i’m kind of stuck In this world until um i’ve completed the activity so there’s that really nice um idea of just having a small confined world so as we discussed right at the beginning of this minecraft is a kind of really big open world but you can kind of box people in so they’re just focused on Doing a particular task and then it might be that we want to go and create our own quadrilaterals over here look at that i’ve made a square well i’ve made a cuboid but let’s imagine okay so there’s just a few ideas you absolutely just go on to um the Library and explore the maths activities to find loads of other maths activities um the other thing i wanted to share here is this new and featured so every now and again there are some great new worlds that have been created in partnership with minecraft or they might be worlds for a specific um A specific week or holiday you’ll find oh these are new since i last logged on and so you’ll find any new worlds that you might want to go and explore or any highly recommended worlds for different topics so always check the new and featured you might find something that’s perfect for you Okay so yeah my i guess my number one tip is before you ask students to go and look at one of those worlds open it up have a look at the lesson plan and the great thing about this is you can go into these worlds and maybe change them slightly tweak them to So they’re suitable for your curriculum outcomes excellent are we done for now stephen there we go getting a nod from stephen geocaching listen this is one of my favorite lessons that i’ve used it’s uh originally a year five lesson made by mark grundle to solve a series of problems using order Of operations and save a village from the evil wizard you can search for geocaching lesson on the minecraft education website and there is a downloadable world there so i’m just going to go straight into my worlds and enter the geocaching world now i’ve used this activity with Students and i’ve used it with staff training as well but i’ve also adapted it so it’s actually a solving math problems but i’ve changed it to for different age ranges and different topics as well so let me talk to this person here okay so we get given the instructions if We click discover more it takes us to a an online link where we’ve got to solve this problem so here i’ve got to do a little bit of maths 418 uh 100 takeaway 37 63 1000 divided by 10 100 700 760 minus 760. oh there we go that’s quite tricky So i’ve written down those coordinates and i’m going to accept the quest ah so i’ve been given a whole range of clothing some a tunic a cap i’ve been given some tools and some food excellent so it looks like i am going to Need a torch i’m going under ground at some point and i’ll probably have to document something with my camera and portfolio okay let’s see if i can find my way to those coordinates so i need to know my xyz coordinates so i’m going to find my way on the okay so I’m going to 4 1 8 i think was the x let’s see if i can move in two directions at once so somewhere over here and so the middle coordinate is our 63 so i’ll need to dig down at some point so it’s four one eight minus 760 so i’m guessing Go back a bit over here somewhere oh this looks good ah brilliant so i’m gonna get a pickaxe so i can find my way down yes brilliant aha congratulations you found our first gold block take a picture okay so i’m gonna just maybe i need to put my clothes on there we go And then i could get a camera and a portfolio so i can take a photo and that appears in my portfolio problem one once i’ve solved them all i can export those to a pdf file excellent ah so then i’ve got to solve the next set of coordinates Yeah i won’t do that now but that’s a really great little task for working out the coordinates in the the real world but also solving some little um order of operations problems as well okay so have a look for the geocache world and of course you can come in And i’m currently in survival mode but i could switch to creative and actually change these questions or set different problems so it’s a nice little template as well every world that you download or you access can be adapted and repurposed for your own needs i’ll stop recording now but i’ll go and Explore this myself in a moment if you want to find out more about minecraft education edition and how you can use it in the classroom here are some really great resources that you can access so the first one there is the minecraft education website that we’ve already visited today There’s also an australian landing page so this is specifically for teachers in australia there’s hand-picked resources and a curriculum guide and some brilliant worlds that you can download and use there and then finally my minecraft journey is available on the mine microsoft educator center and this is actually an 11-hour course that takes You through a lot of the ways that you can use minecraft in the classroom so it talks about editing your own worlds classroom management adapting resources extending students experiences and lots more besides so i’ll just uh quickly show you those three websites education.minecraft.net or you can scan the qr code for quick access There’s the australian landing page again a qr code and finally my minecraft journey oh look i completed it in 2020 hopefully you’ll be completing it soon as well thank you very much for watching i hope that’s given you a few ideas of how you can use minecraft education edition in your maths lessons Thank you Video Information
This video, titled ‘Minecraft: Education Edition in Mathematics’, was uploaded by Minecraft Education on 2021-09-08 21:14:10. It has garnered 19236 views and likes. The duration of the video is 00:37:41 or 2261 seconds.
This video introduces some of the ways that Minecraft: Education Edition can be used within the Mathematics learning area of the Australian Curriculum.
Resources: Minecraft: Education Edition website for Australia: http://education.minecraft.net/australia Minecraft: Education course for teachers: https://education.microsoft.com/courses-and-resources/courses/my-minecraft-journey
00:00 Introduction to Australian Curriculum: Mathematics 03:18 Some mathematical questions for Minecrafters 06:54 Exploring resources at http://education.minecraft.net 14:04 Exploring Minecraft Lessons & Worlds for Mathematics 30:59 Geocaching activity 36:07 Where to find out more
This video contains references to and images from the Australian Curriculum. © Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) 2010 to present, unless otherwise indicated. This material was downloaded from the Australian Curriculum website (www.australiancurriculum.edu.au) (Website) (accessed 28 June 2021) and was not modified. The material is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). Version updates are tracked in the ‘Curriculum version history’ section on the ‘About the Australian Curriculum’ page (http://australiancurriculum.edu.au/about-the-australian-curriculum/) of the Australian Curriculum website. ACARA does not endorse any product that uses the Australian Curriculum or make any representations as to the quality of such products. Any product that uses material published on this website should not be taken to be affiliated with ACARA or have the sponsorship or approval of ACARA. It is up to each person to make their own assessment of the product, taking into account matters including, but not limited to, the version number and the degree to which the materials align with the content descriptions and achievement standards (where relevant). Where there is a claim of alignment, it is important to check that the materials align with the content descriptions and achievement standards (endorsed by all education Ministers), not the elaborations (examples provided by ACARA).
