Minecraft: Education Edition in Science

Hello my name is meg and in this video i’ll be showing you through the australian curriculum for science and how you can use minecraft education edition to address the science curriculum first off let’s have a look at the australian curriculum for science and how it’s structured so very briefly the science curriculum

Is separated into three strands this is across from foundation or pre-primary all the way through to year 10. the three strands are science understanding which goes into the sort of content topic knowledge of science and science understanding is further split into four uh the four different types of science

So there are biological sciences chemical sciences earth and space sciences and physical sciences typically what this means in a school year is that you’d spend about a term or a quarter of the year on each of these topics the second strand is science inquiry skills and this would be covered

Throughout the whole year and it involves the experimental side and the skills in running a science experiment this starts all the way at the top with questioning and predicting moving through to planning and conducting an experiment to processing and analyzing the data collected in the experiment to evaluating that data and then

Communicating your results the skills involved in this strand advance as students get older so what you’re expecting a year two student to be able to do in terms of running a science experiment is a lot more basic and structured and guided than what you would expect from a year 10 student

The third strand is science as a human endeavor and like the last strand this one is typically done throughout the year and it’s separated into two sections the first being the nature and development of science which looks at the sort of history and how things have developed

Over time so this is where you might study or look at famous scientists or inventors from the past and from different cultures and the second section is the use and influence of science so looking at how science has impacted our everyday life and how those um perhaps discoveries or inventions have then been

Have changed our lives so in this video i’m going to first run you through some ideas from within minecraft about how to address each of these three strands then towards the end of the video i’ll showcase some of the existing minecraft lessons and worlds that are on the minecraft education edition website that

Fit really really well into the australian curriculum for science first off let’s have a look at the science understanding strand so science understanding is split into four broad categories being biology chemistry physics and earth and space sciences so for each of these topics there are lots of different things we

Can do within minecraft to explore these ideas so looking at the science understanding strand it is split into four broad categories being biology chemistry earth and space science and physics i have some ideas here that we are going to explore within minecraft to hopefully uh spark some

Inspiration for you and how you could possibly use minecraft in your classroom for your year group now i’ve just opened minecraft in a random creative world just to talk about ideas addressing the science understanding strand let’s start with biology so in any randomly generated minecraft world if i fly up a little bit

Uh there are different biomes so different environments i think this is a grassland type one here you can see um there’s also deserts oceans even underwater like coral biomes um and each different biome has naturally occurring uh plants here’s a jungle biome over here and um also different naturally occurring

Animals a lot of the biology curriculum under science understanding talks about living things and their needs but also habitats and things like that so within minecraft if you don’t want to go around searching for different biomes you can actually set the biome to start with when you create a new world

So you can either choose a world seed by googling different world seeds for different biomes or so if there is a specific biome you would like to explore for biology under view library biomes and worlds you can see the range of different biomes here each biome has different naturally occurring plants and animals

And you could use that as this what’s called the seed or the starting point for your world i’m just going to come to a big open area to show you some of the animals that are in minecraft so in the creative mode we can actually access a

Bunch of items and they start with the word spawn and they’re all eggs and the eggs spawn uh different animals all the different animals that you can access in minecraft so you’ll notice that the the sort of first few uh eggs are the animals and the last set of

Eggs are actually all the mobs or bad guys in minecraft so you typically i do not use the bad guys but that’s up to you um and there are two special eggs down here spawn agent which is for the coding add-on which we won’t touch on in this video

And spawn npc which is to spawn a non-player character or a person so we’ll have a look at some of the animals now you will only be able to spawn animals if if you are the owner of the world or the host or you have the world builder status set to

True for your character so if you have a visit to your two-year world or students are visiting your world they will not be able to spawn animals because what can happen is if you spawn too many animals all at once uh you can slow down the server and

Cause issues so if you’re trying to spawn and i’ll show you what that looks like um for myself and you’re right clicking and nothing is happening and nothing is spawning try changing your world builder status to do that you press enter forward slash wb which is the shortcut

For world builder and it should say at the top left there world builder status updated to true and then you should be able to spawn animals bad guys npcs um you can see there so the if you have visitors to your world they may not be able to spawn these animals now the

Animals all do different things so parrots will i think if you some animals can be tamed if you feed them their favorite food like horses uh wolves they can become tamed and the parrots and the parrots will sit on your shoulder other animals such as the cow and the

Sheep and the chicken you can farm useful items from so with the cow you can use a bucket to collect milk with the sheep you can use the shears to collect wool and the chicken will lay eggs periodically so you can actually set up essentially a farm on minecraft the pig

Will give you useful meat when you kill it and uh yeah so there are different animal products you can use within the game that are very useful uh horses are useful for getting around the world quickly when you are in survival mode um and like i said they usually naturally

Appear in very specific places and environments so one of the activities that could be a good one to do if you’re looking at the needs of living things is having students design a zoo enclosure for a specific animal within minecraft so researching what their needs are in real

Life and then perhaps also comparing and contrasting that with what their needs are in minecraft so for example the turtle um likes to live in an area that has sand and water because it um sometimes comes up on the sand and that’s where it lays its eggs to to make more turtles

But it also needs water to go and swim in and it will eat seaweed and kelp within the game there are animals like the bee which is a fairly new one which likes to pollinate so it likes to live in a beehive and the more flowers and different types of flowers you have

Within a certain radius of the bee have the better the bees are and you can actually get honey and honeycomb from their hive there are also some animals which interact so i’m just looking for the wolf and the chicken so if you want to look at food chains and food webs which is

More um year seven biology um i mean they’re not perfect replication of real life but uh if we have a wolf or maybe it’s the fox uh let me find the fox we’ll try the cat as well spawn donkey Books so we’ll get a cat going i think the cats you can tame as well and so you can see here we can you do get baby animals that grow up into adult animals uh here’s the fox that’s a baby fox we want adult foots there we go uh if they

Find the chicken they will attack and eat the chicken see there are some natural interactions that the animals will do within the game so you can look at food webs there and the chicken gives us feathers and chicken meat which we can cook um and

The other thing they do is you can breed them so different animals like the horses come with if i get another and you saw with the cats they come in different colors uh so you can actually breed some of the animals for different traits so you can see the horses come in

Different colors the sheep you can get different colored sheep as well there are certain requirements to breed them and usually involves building a fence and putting them in the same area and feeding them certain food but that’s another thing you can look at for the biology curriculum which talks about uh

Not only classification but traits of living things categorizing them based on their features how they have offspring and how they grow and change so there are some of the biology ideas you can explore with the animals within minecraft and the biomes so there and with the high school biology curriculum which starts delving

Into cells and our human body and ecosystems um with the breeding you can touch on dna and hereditary traits different animals their art can inherit not only their looks but they’re uh it’s called a nature uh so for example with the pandas there’s a few different natures for the pandas as to

Whether they’re like energetic or lazy and within the game uh they do inherit or you can breed for those traits whereas in year 8 and year 9 when we’re talking body systems and cells there’s no obvious items within the game that can address that so what we

Have what i have done previously in class is we used um just some of the blocks different colored blocks in minecraft to build a model of a cell and a model of the body systems that we were investigating so even if you can’t find the exactly the

Right item that you’re looking for you can still use minecraft as a space to build a really great 3d model of the thing that you are studying especially for things like cells which are hard to see and and instead of having students memorize like a diagram

They can build that uh structure in 3d within the game so moving on to chemistry minecraft education edition actually has a chemistry add-on that is unique to the education edition so these blocks these four blocks you can see here are not available in the commercial or regular version of minecraft so even if

You have students who are minecraft pros this will still be new to them so there are four four new essentially chemistry like crafting tables so this is your regular crafting table from minecraft where you can make objects and there are four new blocks here so i’ll quickly very quickly run

Through them there is a pdf chemistry lab journal that explains all of the new blocks and items within the chemistry add-on and i highly recommend having a look at the pdf which is freely available on the minecraft website if you want to do chemistry within minecraft now

A lot of these chemistry blocks you’re going to be looking at i chemistry ideas that sort of sit within the high school level of the curriculum but the precursors so in the primary school where we’re looking at changes of state between solids and liquids and how different materials are made of

Different things and things have different properties those basic ideas can still be addressed just keep in mind students don’t need to know what a periodic table is at primary school that’s not to say you can’t briefly introduce it so for the four tables uh the first one here is our element constructor

Which allows us to make these uh element blocks you can see here so p is for proton e is for electron and n is for neutron we can use the plus or the minus here drag the slider or even just enter a number in directly up in the boxes here

To create an atom so for younger students this will be the first time they might be hearing about adams and they might get confused by this but for high school students year seven and above they should be being introduced to this idea and in year 9 specifically uh they’re looking

At this concept so creating atoms by looking at the number of protons neutrons and electrons and you can see here i’ve got a question mark in this box which means i haven’t made a valid stable isotope of an element so if i just play with the numbers a

Little or you can look and look them up online you can see here 12 protons 12 electrons and 12 neutrons and this is what the atom would look like creates magnesium and i can click and drag that down into my inventory now if you are in creative

Mode you do not need to use this table because if we type in magnesium we can actually get it directly from the menu so depending on your activity and whether you if you’re in year 9 you might want to force students to have to use that so you

Might want to put it in adventure or survival mode so that students have to create the elements and use that idea of number of protons neutrons and electrons we can use these blocks for experiments with these other three crafting tables which i’ll show you in a minute but you

Can also use them for decorations so you can build a periodic table that’s one of your activities in year 10 you do have to explore the structure of the periodic table and you’ll notice the different elements have different colors depending on their properties and where they sit in

The periodic table uh so i mean the blocks don’t really do anything in the world like this but they’re good for decorating and good for creating recreating the periodic table um or perhaps you could even explore different the history of the different structures of the periodic table until we got to

The one we have today so the other special chemistry blocks we have this one is great for the primary school level curriculum the material reducer allows you to put in any most random blocks from regular minecraft so if i put in some iron ore and it will

Spit out the elements that that block is made from so the iron ore unsurprisingly has iron in it which is this fe here it also has silicon and oxygen and that is kind of what you would find in iron ore in real life and i can break

That block down so that block is now gone to create those elements so if you are an adventurer survival mode this is another way to get elements and it’s a good introduction to the idea that objects or materials are made of these building blocks these elements so these students don’t need to know

What elements are but just as long as at the primary school level as long as they’re understanding that you can break things or objects down into their basic components which are called elements if we take some dirt let’s just get a regular dirt block and we’ll put there we go

We’ll put that in there our material reducer let’s see what we get see we get a whole bunch of different elements that you would find in the dirt and you’ll find that the more common elements so oxygen here we’re getting 42 blocks of oxygen versus

Only two of copper and two of zinc so they it might not be the exact ratios what you’d find in real life but it’s trying to represent that you have different amounts of different elements in these in these blocks so that is your material reducer again if you’re in

Creative mode you don’t really need to use the material reducer because you can just directly access the elements from the creative menu the the sync the dirty looking sink here is our compound creator this is fantastic for year 9 and 10 and even your 8 chemistry because you’re looking at

Creating chemical compounds now you will need to use the compound created because the compounds cannot be accessed through the creative the menu in even in creative mode so to make you know the most common one would be water which is h2o we need to put

One h and one oxygen if i just throw the hydrogen and oxygen in there nothing happens i need to put them in the correct ratio so to do that you left click to pick up your your object and you just right click the number of times for the number

Of uh that element so i’ve right clicked once for one oxygen and i just want two hydrogen so i’m just going to right click and right click to make two now that i’ve got the right ratio i can you can see the end product there is water The list of possible compounds sorry that you can make is in the pdf lab manual so for my little next demonstration i’m going to make some latex for my helium balloons so i think i need six carbons and eight hydrogens oh no did i miss no that’s not that’s benzene i don’t

Want benzene no not eight is it ten no twelve no i’m just gonna look it up okay so to make our helium balloon first we need to make the compound latex which go which creates the balloon uh to make latex and now i’m taking this compound ratios directly from the pdf lab journal

It’s one two three four five carbons and eight hydrogens and you’ll see that now we get latex um now i’m just going to exit that screen there so to then take this compound and do anything useful with it you’ll either need to use the lab table

Or just a regular crafting table so for the helium balloon again the recipe which is a new recipe for minecraft is in the pdf lab journal we’re going to put latex around the outside like so we need a color any color which goes at the top we need to put helium

Which i need to get from here helium one helium in the middle of our balloon otherwise it won’t float and instead of a string we actually use the lead item because within minecraft the lead item can be attached to other objects so if i get that there okay

So now i’ve got my blue balloon and because i’ve used the lead and the way the lead interacts in minecraft we can attach our balloon to objects and you can make a range of different colored balloons the balloons can be popped with an arrow or a thrown item and i believe we can

Also attach them to other items like animals i’ll try it with this horse over here by right clicking there you go so you could look at buoyancy and forces as well if you really want to so that’s our balloon that’s just one of the many really cool new things that you

Can make with the chemistry add-on and even if your students are in primary school and you’re not looking too deeply at elements of the periodic table you’re still touching on those ideas that objects are made of smaller things and different objects have different properties and with years you know year

Six you’re looking at changes being reversible or irreversible so chemical changes like making compounds and whatnot are irreversible generally uh and then with year 4 chemistry it looks at natural and processed materials so this could be an introduction to processed materials versus the natural materials in minecraft like wood and coal and things

Like that and looking at the differences between those things let’s talk about the third topic in science understanding which is the earth and space sciences topic now generally the year groups seem to alternate between spending one year doing earth-based science and and then the next year doing space science for

Example year two looks at earth’s resources being used in a variety of ways and then in year three you’re looking at earth earth’s rotation on its axis and how that causes night and day so you’re kind of alternating between earth and space so we’ll start by talking about earth which is sort of

Year two year four year six year eight and year ten so uh in minecraft we have naturally occurring lines and underground tunnels they kind of look like this from the surface and they occur in all sorts of different biomes so underneath what you can see is a huge network of

Tunnels and it doesn’t take much digging to find in the regular game in survival mode uh you’ll find in the dark of the tunnels a lot of mobs like spiders and creepers and whatnot are spawning in the tunnels and they’re very dangerous places to go i’m in creative mode and i’ve turned

Those monsters off but you’ll need to bring some torches with you to light your way but it should be pretty easy to find some sort of naturally recurring tunnel formations and within the tunnel formations the deeper you go the rarer the ores that you’ll find so it typically starts with um

Coal and then you might find some iron ore and you can upgrade your weapons to iron weapons and then generally leading on from there to uh sort of gold ore and then the the best one being diamonds now when you’re in creative mode you don’t need to go and collect these

Because you can just pull them directly from the menu you can see we’ve got some bats naturally occurring down here so there are lots of different things you can discover underground in minecraft but it is a good place to start talking about if you’re going to create a mine talking

About how to sustainably um redevelop the land afterwards because you do end up digging big big holes to mine these materials and you could also investigate building uh these minecarts with the rail tracks here um so you’ve got those and the mine cart there and you’ve got a minecart with a chest

To develop like a mine where whereby you’re cutting up the all from deep underground with your mine cart so you can actually develop or build sort of a working mind there uh and talk about the environmental impacts of mining um because you will be changing the landscape and and naturally

Occurring features to be able to dig out those oars you can also see we have different types of rocks rocks occurring here so if i’ll show you in the menu so here just to show you in the menus some of the different rocks and things we can find underground we’ve got

Granite diorite and a site and you can polish them up by processing them uh which makes for nice buildings um we can get gravel which acts like sand and that and that it falls we’ve got different oars here uh so we’ve got diamond lapis luzily redstone coal emerald which is really rare um

Nether quartz is make-believe it’s in the nether which is sort of like an alternate world to where we are at the moment um we’ve got mycelium which mushrooms can grow on if you can find the mycelium block so there’s lots of different types of rocks and ores you can look at

One and there’s different ways you can process uh those rocks so towards the very bottom of the map uh you’ll hit bedrock which you cannot break or or dig beneath and that is the bottom of the map uh and you can also find some obsidian which uh forms

When lava cools so let’s see if we can have a quick look at that lava is really fun to play with for doing the earth science stuff it’s also dangerous to appear in survival mode because it does uh set you on fire and kill you so not something you i guess you usually

Want to play with minecraft but it’s a source of light and heat and it can set fire to things and so what we can do is if we get some water to cool that down you can see that the lava has cooled and turned into obsidian and the obsidian

Does take a long in survival it does take a long time to break down with your pickaxe because it is very hard so you can use the different blocks and different names here to start talking about for example in your eight about the different types of rocks your igneous sedimentary and metamorphic

Rocks and how they form and where you find them you could also get students to classify the different blocks into different categories um if you’re investigating earthquakes or extreme weather or changes to the earth’s surface like volcanoes or flood and fire you could build a model of a volcano with with the

Lava here you could also build a model of a flood so with the bucket of water we can introduce water and into different areas like you can see here and it will it does flow and behave in slightly strange ways but it will flood certain areas uh and and affect objects

In different ways and uh yeah there’s some of the earth science ideas you could investigate with the items in minecraft so let’s talk about some of the ideas you can look at for space science now in minecraft you can’t visit space there is an upper limit to how far you can fly

But you there is a day night cycle the sun that is the sun will move across the sky and then of an evening the moon will rise and the moon will have a different phase we’ll see if we can set or make night so you can see here our sun is

Setting and the stars are coming out as the sun goes down and we should see the moon rising and you can see the moon will have uh different phases just like the real moon obviously it’s not a perfect replication of real life and you could use that as a discussion point

To talk about the differences between minecraft and everyday live you will notice uh i’m up in the clouds here so there is weather in minecraft so you do get rain in some biomes you will also get snow or you know clear skies and you can get lightning storms as well there are some

Options you can play with if you are the creator or the host of the world so under settings here if we scroll all the way to the bottom uh we can make it permanently daylight which is useful if you’re not uh just to keep the world nice and bright and in

Survival mode that will mean bad guys don’t spawn at nighttime um so that’s what it talks about when it talks about mobs so you can turn mobs or bad guys off completely because at night time in survival mode that is when all the uh skeletons and scary zombies and creepers

Appear i can turn the weather cycle on and off um you can also force certain actions using these slash commands so if i press enter and forward slash there’s lots of things you can do but in terms of weather if you want to look at a certain

Weather we can set the weather to and you can see our options here clear we can query what the weather is we can make it rain or thunder i’m going to make it rain so i’ve typed in forward slash weather and rain so you can see i’ve started it

Raining in this section of the world and the clouds will come over you can set the time to Forward slash time we can add time or we can set time or we can query what the time is so we can set it to midnight uh noon if i set it to noon now you can see it’s still raining but it is now daytime so

It’s a bit brighter so you can play with the weather and you can use the world to simulate or set up and simulate floods and volcanoes in extreme weather events um or make a model of pompeii or or some or a famous sort of weather event or

Earthquake or something like that it is up to you but there are some other things you can do to do with earth and space science in terms of other things around space you could just use a flat world in creative mode to make models 3d models of the solar system or you know

The earth and the moon and you could also use the coordinates to look at scale if you want to look at coordinates uh so if i press escape again and go to settings and scroll down here is the option for coordinates i’m going to turn that on

And now up the top left you can see my position the x y z coordinates so for our students are a bit older and you can use these numbers or the difference between these numbers to easily count just long distances without having to individually count each block which

Could become kind of monotonous and you know error prone so you can use those numbers up there up the top left to take some measurements and do some maths as well as science moving on to our last topic in science understanding which is physics which is my favorite

Uh let’s have a look at some items and ideas you could play with in minecraft to investigate physics so generally uh physics like the earth and space science it kind of moves around a bit so some of your groups are looking at push pull and forces some are looking at light and

Sound or heat and circuits so every year chem in the especially in the primary years can have quite a different focus from the previous year in terms of topics in high school again the same thing happens so your seven sort of forces your eight goes to a focus on

Energy your nine waves and then you turn back to motion with energy and forces sort of combined so depending on your year is at the topic does change so just looking at uh things in terms of forces it’s a little tricky because there are no um i guess ways to measure

Push or pull or forces in minecraft so there’s no sort of force sensor i guess but if we look at motion i’m just gonna set this to always day we can look at motion and how things move so there’s a few different things which move in minecraft you could look

At the different animals one of my favorite activities that i have done in the past was we looked at gravity so we built a really really large tower taller than this in creative mode and then we looked at timing how long it took different objects to fall to the ground looking at

Speed and if you really want to go into it terminal velocity and in creative mode you won’t die but in survival mode you do die from a large character dies from a large fall so just have it in creative mode uh because there are some interesting things that happen when you start

Dropping animals we found that i’m just going to build a little bit of a platform here to show you what i mean we found that when we dropped chickens if i can push the chicken off the edge the chicken will flap its wings and float down really really slowly so you

Can make some have students make some predictions and investigate and measure these things and it won’t be the same as real life and i think that’s a really good point to point out and compare these experiments in minecraft to real life and show that they are different and that minecraft is

Not a perfect replication of real life but you could try and uh calculate what gravity is uh for minecraft and see if it matches the 9.8 meters per second second that we experience here on earth um obviously in the real life we can’t fly whereas in minecraft we can so you could

Even look at flying speed or something like that another cool thing that moves in minecraft is the minecarts which you could and people have used to make really cool roller coasters so the trick with the minecart is uh there are a few different types of rail so there’s a regular rail

If i put a minecart on that and jump in with a right click it moves a little bit when i push a button but you can see i immediately went on to the grass and off the rail so nothing so i stopped so you could look at friction we’ll talk about friction

There i’m just going to reset the minecart and see if i can get it going hang on i’ve got to face the right way i am in creative mode so it will move ever so slowly along the rail i believe in adventure or survival mode it doesn’t really move when you’re on

Regular rail it kind of runs out of momentum and stops and so that’s what the powered rail is for now this powered rail is dark which means it’s not turned on so we need a little source of power with this one i’ve just got a simple

Lever next to it to turn it on and off and when i place a minecart on there you’ll see the difference when i press go the powered rail really shoots you um along the minecart track so you could use that to look at either forces or in

This case energy so i just set up a simple hill and there’s heaps of you know classic worksheet questions about roller coasters and potential and kinetic energy so looking at uh you know look how much powered rail do we need to get up a hill of this size and you know

Counting the number of powered rails we need and then maybe even doing simple calculations to find out well how much power or kinetic energy are those powered rails providing us to get up this height and investigating potential and kinetic energy with our minecarts and perhaps making some roller coasters

Which after in the real life i mean generally the first hill which is the biggest we’ll use powered rail all the way up and from then on out it’s just gravity there are no more powered rails so you could make a design competition whereby all the chickens

Stopped in my mind out there whereby the criteria is you can only use powered rail for your first hill and then beyond that the roller coaster has to work by gravity alone so just by falling so there are a few cool things you can do with minecarts and track

The other thing you can look at is with light like we said before you do have a day night schedule and it can get cloudy and overcast now you know you don’t really have mirrors and so it’s a bit hard to look at refraction but you could look at

Material properties in terms of opaque and not opaque so glass and talk about what the light is doing for the year grips that look at light so that is year five and year nine in particular um look at how light does travel through the glass but uh

So it’s transmitted but is reflected by things like dirt there are blocks which create or are light sources so we have the torch which is a very easy item to make even in survival mode and it’s commonly used as a cheap light source there is also a glow stone

Which will create light as well and if i turn the game well tonight time to set to night you can see the different objects provide light to different of different strengths so it’ll sort of go to a certain radius so you could talk about how light scatters um

And or travels with a straight line until reflected etc etc now another great uh another one is the redstone lamp which you can power with redstone so i’m just going to use a block of redstone i think just to show you what the glowstone looks like or the

Sorry that’s the glowstone it constantly glows you can find it in mines and this is our redstone lamp so you can control this and turn this one on and off so if you want to create like an automatic automated lighting system in your house or something like that the

Redstone lamp is the block to use so the other one of the other big ideas and great things you can explore in minecraft is circuits electrical circuits now it’s not a perfect representation of real life but there is an item called redstone now it’s fictional it’s not real but it essentially acts like

A wire and you can lay wires along the ground in minecraft to make little circuits so for a redstone red zone circuits are great for upper primary sort of on so we’re looking at year six talk about circuits and year nine uh talk about circuits they don’t

Always behave exactly the same way as a real life circuit but they are pretty close so you need a source of power for redstone so that could be a redstone block or a redstone torch both of those act as uh power sources for redstone circuits and you’ll see that the redstone trail

Or wire that i lay down on the ground lights up now the power source only travels a certain number of blocks before it sort of peters out uh so you could use that like property to as an analogy for resistance within the wires again like i said not perfect

And uh if i put my redstone lamp a bit further away you can see now it’s not physically touching our power source but it’s powered by that wire there we can then add in some things to control our circuit like uh lever is my favorite simple easy button it’s another one

So if i put a lever on whoopsies my item no on the power source no uh in the circuit has to be in the circuit just like real life i can turn uh that half of the circuit on and off now in real life your circuit would need

To make a full circle back to the power source whereas in minecraft it does not so that is one big key conceptual difference between the game and real life so there are lots of objects that you can power in minecraft there are not just lights there are also things called pistons

Which go back and forth which you can use to make really cool things like doors to secret bases and all sorts of pistons can push certain objects so you could also use the pistons to talk about force and transferring force or energy between different objects there are also

Any door not made of wood so the iron door here you can also control with or you have to control essentially with uh power to open the iron doors so you can make an automatically opening door for your base there’s also trapdoors and lots of different things you can play

Around with circuits i won’t go too much more into it there but there are lots of youtube videos about all the amazing things you can build with redstone circuits and you can get very carried away with them very easily but uh one way you can investigate or look at electricity within minecraft

Using redstone now looking at the second strand which is science inquiry skills we’re going to look at how you could possibly run or address these experimental skills within minecraft as a as a game but i do feel it’s important to compare and contrast doing this in minecraft

To doing this in real life so it’s not to say that you would replace doing experiments with minecraft but that you could use minecraft alongside of doing real world experiments as well using the same skills so in this section i wanted to focus on the science inquiry skills strand so these are skills

That revolve around conducting scientific experiments in the scientific method and as students progress through the years they would develop more refined and advanced versions of these skills so we start off basic and work our way up and these skills would be incorporated all the way throughout the year so not in

One particular science understanding area but across all of them so i wanted to show you some tools within minecraft that are useful for helping you run experiments in the minecraft world and the way that i would use these in lessons is to run them alongside of also doing real life

Experiments and then comparing and contrasting results at the end or doing experiments in minecraft that perhaps you cannot do in real life for maybe reasons to do with cost or safety or time so first off uh one of the science inquiry skills is questioning and predicting so some tools that are good for

Recording information and data and predictions are these three items here which are unique to education edition so in the regular minecraft there is a sign which looks like this and you can write a small amount of text on it however once you’ve placed it and written on it

You can no longer interact with it um so i’ve actually just placed a new sign you can see there so once you’ve written on it that’s it and i cannot change that and if i try and interact with it i destroy it essentially um so you can place signs on

Walls uh or or just freestanding you can still use those however in education edition we have these three new items so we have the small one is called the slate the medium one the poster and the really big one for putting on lots of information is the board

The difference with these items is that i can actually go in and edit the text as we go along so if students want to record their hypotheses or their predictions for an experiment you could use these boards here the creator of the object can also decide whether the text

Is locked or unlocked so if it is locked only i can edit the text because i placed the item if it is unlocked anyone can go in and edit that text so if it’s uh you giving the students instructions you might like to leave it locked so students cannot accidentally delete the text

However if it’s students recording data or predictions you’ll leave it unlocked or have them place their own um item on in the world another tool you can use to record information is the book and quill items so if i just look in the menu here for book you’ll notice there’s two separate ones

The book and quill is the one that you can actually write in the book by itself you cannot write in and then once you sign it the book can no longer be edited so that is your book and quill and let’s just say i sign it um i can enter my title

And it gives me a warning here that once i sign it i can no longer edit i can sign and close and now you can see the item has changed to be a book with my title um and i can place it on a lectern for someone else to come and read

So if you want students there we go so someone else can come and read and i can also export that as a pdf so you could have students leave their lab report in a certain section of the world and then or export and just save the pdf and send that pdf

To you the teacher to mark or just as evidence of what they have done so that these tools are really good for also the next step in science inquiry which is planning and conducting perhaps you get students to write the steps for their experiment on a board

For everyone to see or for the whole group to see that’s the benefit of using the board whereas the book you can only see the text if you interact directly with that book and it has to be on a lectern so it’s a bit the book’s more

Like for your final lab report and your boards are more like for your hypotheses and your planning and collecting data so uh the third step in in the process in doing an experiment is processing and analyzing data and information so to collect data um we can use these items to collect written data

We can also use this other item which is new to education edition the camera i mean you might need to explain to students why it looks like that versus a more modern camera but um you can use the camera to take screenshots you don’t need to use this camera item

But it is really fun you could just take screenshots by using if your keyboard has a screenshot button or like a snipping tool or a screenshot function on your ipad or other tablet otherwise if you use the camera and you right click on it it will have a little

Timer it will count down and flash and then you’ll get a photo of whatever the camera was facing towards so you can use it to take a photo of yourself or your experiment setup or your results and then the photos from the camera appear in this item which is also new to

Education edition called the portfolio so if i look at my portfolio you’ll see all the pictures i have taken in this world even from previous play sessions here and i can put in a caption so it could be like result one and i can delete photos with this little

Trash can if i’ve taken one that didn’t quite work out and i can also just like the book and quill i can export my portfolio as a pdf of all these images and the captions another option for students who are struggling with maybe english as a second language or their younger readers

Is usually when you open the books or these is this uh book with the speaker icon here to open up immersive reader um which i won’t go too much into but is a tool embedded within minecraft you can use to help you read text there and it will read out the page one

Result one things to you there so that tool is available for you to use and your students to use as well so uh looking at collecting data within the game a few tips and tricks that could help you is the number of blocks is really easy to count and is a good

Way for measuring distance or height or length or size um it’s a great tool to use to measure like area or volume of an item and it’s not complicated it’s really easy to understand and you could even add colored blocks like wool is my favorite go to because it comes in

All sorts of colors as like markers so you could say okay one two for every five one two three four five we’ll put a purple block and that makes big things even easier to count one two three four five so i can immediately see this is taller than ten

Um so number of blocks is a great measure to use within the game and uh if we’re going to equate to real life i like to just do the easy conversion of let’s assume one block is one meter because our avatar is like slightly above one block about one and a half blocks

Tall if not about two blocks so it’s just an easy approximation to make in terms of lengths and distances like i mentioned previously you can use your coordinates your xyz coordinates up the top here if we’re doing really long distances to record or have students record it

Could be physically on a piece of paper or in their book and quill or on one of the boards what their xyz coordinate is for a certain position move and then record the new coordinates and then find the difference between those numbers you will some of the coordinates may be negative so this

Would be better for upper primary and secondary students who have an understanding of what negative numbers are and what xyz coordinates are so that is another measure you can use and you can turn them on and off in the settings menu the some other uh really cool items you could use for

Measurements are um the daylight sensor oh time uh often we use time and we would either use a stopwatch in real time in real life to measure how long something takes or you could use the stopwatch function on your computer or tablet and measure time taken to do something

In the game for our experiment that is another measure i commonly use and it’s commonly used in a lot of science experiments um so our daylight sensor works with redstone circuits and when there is full daylight this will provide a signal which can then be put into a redstone circuit so it could

You can also do it the reverse or inverse of this where it is essentially a night time or lack of light sensor to make lights automatic lights that turn on when it is dark so there is a daylight sensor there other items which could be useful for collecting or observing or measuring

Things there is actually a block called the observer and it has this little face on it which looks quite funny i will also pull out actually let’s talk about the observer so the observer is also another object that works with redstone circuits and what happens is the observer

Observes or sends a signal when a block near it changes so if i for example if i put a block of ice in front of the observer and the ice ends up melting i’m going to try and force it to melt with my torch here

I think if i put a torch near it it should melt fairly quickly anyway when oh maybe oh there we go one of the mouses not the one i wanted but maybe it’ll well in a second uh eventually when something changes so this could be ice melting into water or plants growing

Is what they’re commonly used to observe it will send a signal through our redstone circuit um so perhaps when the plants have grown you want a light to turn on so you know it’s time to come and harvest your your field or perhaps when the ice melts uh

Or the water freezes or something like that you want the observer to send a signal to your redstone circuit to turn on a piston um or something like that so that’s what the observer is for it’s uh it is a little complicated so i do recommend giving it a google and

Reading up on how the observer block works but it is there to measure changes in blocks nearby uh so that is what the observer is for but you will need to build or use redstone circuits with these two items so a few more items that work with redstone circuits so

Better for older students but can be used to detect or or respond to changes in the environment which could be useful for designing experiments are the trap door so the trap door basically the wooden trapdoors should open when i click on them but also when i step on them nothing’s happening the trapdoors

Let’s see if we can get this chapter working so a few other items that work with redstone circuits that may be useful for today for designing experiments in minecraft uh we have some trapdoors here so you can control the trapdoors with minecraft to open or close um responding to a certain input

There are also pressure plates so for example let’s see if this works i’m not sure if this will work let’s give it a go so this is a pressure plate and it will turn on or respond when i walk over it there are two pressure plates one uh so

If i type in pressure there is one pressure plate for a lightweight so the weight of my avatar or a pressure plate for a heavy weight so heavier than my avatar so like many animals or mobs all in one spot um and that will pass on a

If you have it connected in the red stone circuit it would turn that part of the circuit on or off another thing that you can use in redstone circuits is our detector rail so if you had a railway track the detector rail detects when an item

Like a minecart passes over that part of the rail track so you might like to design an experiment where when the minecart gets to this certain position something happens and so you can use this detector rail to make that something happen as well as the pressure plates and

Detector rail we also have a tripwire hook in minecraft where um if we place it between two sort of walls and then use some string to connect the tripwire hook like so it will be able to detect when something like myself or an animal passes through the tripwire and we can

Then connect that to a redstone circuit to set off a piston or a light or or whatever it might be so it detects when something passes this this gate and it doesn’t have to be ground level it could be like the next level up so maybe chickens can pass through without being detected

But avatars and large animals like horses cannot so that’s another input sensor you could use for your experiments so there’s lots and lots of different things and items and objects you can use you can be really really creative with how you run experiments within minecraft there’s

Lots of animals and mobs you could use or just use your own avatar now i would then export for the next part of the scientific method is analyzing the data and information evaluating it so comparing it to existing scientific claims or in this case i would compare it to the real world results

For a similar experiment and then communicating those results so to achieve those next steps i would be exporting the portfolios or book and quills or even taking a screenshot of the boards another option you can do is to record your screen just like i’m doing now so

Mac and windows both have inbuilt screen recording software or there are is free software that does it for you as well and use these videos with the students verbally explaining their results or showing off their experiments um as artifacts or a record of their um of their science experiment and their learning

Uh otherwise exporting those pdfs out and then doing the analysis in something like excel or you know together on the board or however it is you want to analyze that data and then doing some writing around those results and communicating those results and our third strand science as a human

Endeavor really looks at the history of science and inventions involving not only the culture and the people who created these inventions but also how they have impacted our lives so we can use minecraft for this strand as perhaps part of a larger research project and use minecraft as a way to

Utilize the knowledge that we’ve gained by recreating old inventions for example aqueducts or building a monument or a museum to a famous scientist or group of scientists uh or something like that in this last section of the video i wanted to share with you some of the existing lesson plans and minecraft

Worlds that are on the minecraft education edition website so when you first open minecraft education edition you’ll see this new and featured button here which shows you some of the new resources that have just been released so we’re talking about creating a museum for scientists there you go

There’s a there’s a template for a museum that you could fill for lots of different subject areas here we’ve even got a starter town sustainability city which is a great fit for the earth sciences but if we click on play view my worlds is to view my existing saved worlds but here

We’ve got view library now you can view the library through the minecraft menu here or it is also listed on the minecraft education edition website so like we saw before you can choose a starting biome there are some great tutorial lessons for learning how to do the controls in minecraft so if your

Students have never or yourself have never played before start there otherwise under lessons we’ve got them categorized by subject area and we’ve got some great starting science ones here so there are some fantastic worlds around biodiversity conservation and sustainability which are already built and ready for

You to pick up and use and the lesson plans are on the minecraft education edition website uh and under here we’ve got some here around extinction and usually designing or interacting with the world to help solve a problem or design a solution so we’ve got some great

Chemistry ones here and all you need to do to run this lesson or or get this world going is click on it it will give you a description with some of the learning objectives and you just click create world it’s going to download that information so you do need to be online

To access that these world libraries and usually they’ll be either an npc or a board with information here for you to interact with to start exploring and enjoying the world you don’t need to use the whole world you can as a teacher come and preview the world and maybe

Just pick and choose elements of it that you want the students to go through for your purposes so this one’s all about using or learning to use the new chemistry objects and items that came with the chemistry add-on for education edition and here it’s even got some chemical

Formulas so you don’t need that pdf that i was talking about earlier so there are lots of these amazing words so don’t feel like you need to be pressured to create an amazing minecraft world to be able to use the game within your classroom you can just use what is there

Monthly build challenges is also a great place to check out it will be a mishmash of different subject areas but this is where i found i said there wasn’t any space stuff and i was wrong someone has recreated the international space station also someone made um

The moon there was a build a mars rover so there’s a sort of a mars world there and then i also saw a mooncraft where it looked like the surface of the moon so um let’s have a quick look at international space station just so you can get a feel for it

Um here we go oh my goodness so there’s lots and lots of cool things that you can explore and find to help you explore and use minecraft in your classroom and don’t feel like you need to recreate the wheel i’m just going to exit this spaceship and see what’s out there

Oh there we go look at that we are in space thank you for watching the video i hope you have found something useful and inspiring uh there are further links and information and details in the show notes underneath this video and happy experimenting