Student Engagement with Minecraft Education Edition (Student Engagement Series)

Uh hello everyone uh this is eric wade um and this pd is uh focused on using minecraft um uh in your uh in your classroom so uh let’s get started so um this is the kind of beginning page i will be kind of clear about something

Before we start though this is not a tutorial on how to use minecraft um i’m happy to come to you and and uh wherever you are and give you a a crash course or even just a multiple day course on how to use uh minecraft like the physical

Like the actual steps to using it um this is more of a pd that focuses on um how you could use it so but if you’re interested in learning more about it i’m happy to uh to talk with you work with you on this um just feel free to email me and and

We’ll find a time to be able to do that so um what i’ve done is i’ve built instead of this being a um kind of a passive uh slide deck type of pd i decided that the probably the best way if i’m going to talk about minecraft is to actually use

Minecraft so i built a world here it is um there’s my entrance right here so i’ll actually start over here and so i built this for us to kind of work within um there’s also going to be a um a slide deck that has some resources and some links on it

For the things that i’m going to talk about uh throughout this pd so let’s get started here we’re going to start over here in this building and we’re going to start right here with a kind of table of contents so we’re going to start with is what is minecraft um

How can it be integrated in the classroom and then i’ll talk about resources to get us started so uh as we walk through we’ll walk to our next building to kind of talk about what minecraft is um so minecraft if you’ve never used it before uh it’s a digital world that you

Can build almost anything you can think of there are limits um things don’t really there’s no wheels or any of that kind of uh building in this couldn’t build a car that moves for instance but there are uh things that do move in minecraft there’s mine carts um

That you can put on uh on rails so like uh kind of like a a cart that um like you see like on a train or something like that you can build that um and there’s great things you can do with that idea um it is uh

There you know it really is limitless in terms of what you can build as long as it’s static um so it it is a fantastic tool for for a million reasons um but it is very different than a game and um i do want to kind of talk about that um

You know in the in the game version of this you’re kind of on your own and that’s the way it is minecraft education difference diff edition is different um in this you can um you get everything at the very beginning so i’ll show you here um if you’re in creative mode everything

That’s in minecraft education edition is available for students when they’re here all of this stuff everything from arrows to potions to element table uh because it’s a chemistry world and then the spell books all of this is available to students in creative mode you could also play in

Survival mode where the students it’s more traditional more like the traditional minecraft game where you have to mine and build and do all those uh kind of things and then you only have the resources that you have available to you and you have to put them together in

A crafting table to make something new um the other cool thing that i really like about um the education edition versus uh like the game version is that um you know in a game you’d have to have a server a dedicated server to be able to have everybody play together in minecraft if

You wanted multiple students to be in a world together to build together to work together collaboratively then they would be able to do that without any issue it does it right then the classroom it’s actually a part of uh of the world when you set it up so that

Is fantastic i’ve used it multiple times it’s really really great there’s actually another application that teachers can download um called a classroom that allows you to see where everybody is and kind of uh hop in and look and see what they’re doing whenever you want to

You can move them around inside of it so if there’s some place they’re not supposed to be you can move them out put them somewhere else the other cool thing and this is the bottom part here is that even if you’re uh you know it’s still kind of you know

Hesitant about this you’re like well i don’t know if this really fits what i want to do and blah blah blah um they have a library of of worlds that already exist that are phenomenal so i’m just going to kind of uh take a second here we’re going to get out of this

And we’re going to go whoops we’re going to go show you the library real quick okay so here’s the library you have a couple options when you begin you have subject kits which we’ll get to in a minute minecraft has a monthly build challenge it’s a lot of fun there

Are starter worlds and then there’s a tutorial on how to play like how to do how to actually work with minecraft so this one when you click it you know it starts here tells you how to play gives you some basics on how to use it um the starter worlds are

Biomes and build plates give you kind of some beginning stuff to work with for anybody that wants that the build challenges are um are fantastic there’s a lot of these uh and you can actually submit them to um microsoft to be able to uh to kind of

Have it published or to have um have it looked at uh they’re really great and then there’s the subject kits and you can see that there’s a lot of subjects that are covered here and what these are are worlds that already are exist that have been built so for

Instance one of my favorites is the chemistry world in the chemistry world you can it’ll kind of walk students through this tutorial and they build elements from scratch like from at the atomic level put them together to make compounds and then put those compounds together to make

Other things so like when i do the chemistry world the kind of assessment at the end is they have to be able to screen record themselves making a pig fly uh using a balloon um so it’s really fantastic it’s a but as a whole world see with this all of these

Are all worlds that have already been built same with the math ones these are worlds that already exist um inside of minecraft and you just have to download them and kids can use them whenever they uh whenever you want them to so the library is amazing it really is worth

Exploring um just by itself it’s really quite incredible um and there’s uh they’re kind of self-directed so you can kind of you can either help students work their way through um and kind of assign pieces or you can let them go and they’ll let them self-direct their way through things so

Let’s go back to my world again and we’ll talk some more about integration okay so uh let’s move on past uh out of here so we’re gonna move out of this world we’re gonna go uh into this giant uh building right here and kind of talk about integration

So first things first um let’s start with uh science so um in uh minecraft you have uh the flexibility in this to build pretty much any model you want i’ve built a person and had the students make all the internal organs of that person i made

The person myself uh sent them gave them the world and then they filled it in as we went and then at the end they gave uh the um they had to record them screw their screen recording of of them working their way from uh the mouth um out to

The anus talking about how all of the body systems are connected along the way um there are boards in there kind of similar to what you’re looking at now um it was uh um it was really quite cool so there’s chemistry wearables we just talked about there’s basic physics stuff i do a

Roller coaster project in this um where the students build their roller coasters and we build them all in one world and then everybody gets to ride the roller coasters afterwards um there are ways in minecraft to make it what’s called immutable meaning that they can’t nobody can destroy anything so

I would lock them all in their little places using these things called border blocks they would build their roller coasters while we talked about potential in kinetic energy they would build their roller coasters and then at the end i would open it up and make the world immutable so nobody could be

Could break anything and let them all ride each other’s roller coasters we’ve also done rube goldberg machines which are really fantastic and a lot of fun to do especially talking about circuits and simple circuits using something called redstone um so uh really amazing there’s a lot of

Great stuff you can do with that same with math you can build models of all sorts of different things you could build a model of a hundreds chart you could build models of fractions quadrilaterals you can identify different quadrilaterals and build them too as well um it’s a great way to model adding

Subtracting multiply and dividing looking at symmetry calculating area and volume and you can use these as practice you could use them as an introduction you could use them in the middle uh you know you can kind of use minecraft at any point in a unit or in a lesson that

You really feel fits and students are so well versed in this that they really kind of hit the ground running with it so let’s go over here and look at computer science there is a huge uh coding piece to this in fact there’s a whole hour of code

That’s focused just on minecraft you have a uh let me see if i get them in here here we are um you have uh the codes here in your code builder and in fact you get this little guy right here um and when you click him he has all sorts of

Different stuff to him um but this is how you can kind of co build this is called your agent um and when you hit c the agent comes and then you can kind of go from there deciding how you want to go about building your code

There’s lots of ways to do it it’s really fantastic it is really quite cool but just watch out if you accidentally start your agent he’ll follow you around so um and there’s also worlds that exist in the computer science library of uh that you can just do to code in

Minecraft so learn how to code in minecraft they’re really straightforward they’re very simple um they are really quite amazing um to do and it can simplify out um the steps that you’re taking in minecraft um but it can also i chose i built one that i i needed to

Replace all of the blocks in a certain area with uh that were there with a different color i wanted them to be red because we were doing uh we were building a um a mars we really mars basically and so i wrote the code so that it would so my little code builder

Would go back and forth back and forth back and forth changing all of the um the blocks that were there to i think it was red sandstone but it doesn’t really matter so let’s go upstairs and we’ll talk about the humanities a little bit um literacy one of my favorite things to do

Is uh to use minecraft to build the setting of a story we did uh every year we read the martian or every other year we read the martian and students build mars as we read uh in minecraft so we change you know they just go turn make everything red which

Is where we use code builder and then kind of build from there and then add everything as we go uh really great i know a teacher who did this i gave this as an option for students to do with to kill a mockingbird um there’s some really great ways to do this

You can use minecraft as a story starter there’s actually one about a shipwreck there’s a world about a shipwreck that you go and kind of explore the shipwreck and then you can use that as a story starter recreating your favorite fairy tales you can code a story which is

Really fun to do again there’s a world that’ll help you do that and then you can use these things called npcs to help you as you travel through so that person right there is what’s called an npc and you spawn them you have to kind of be specific about it

But when students click on them um you know it’s a non-player oop i spelled that wrong non-player character right you can give information about the world um you can give web addresses in here for people to click um there’s really quite uh these little npcs are really great you as a

Teacher and i’d have to you know this is something that’s kind of specific you have to be what’s called the world builder which you can easily turn on um can place these npcs anywhere you want and edit what they have to say and their names and things like that all of the

Different worlds have these npcs already on them so all their creative worlds like pre-created worlds that already have npcs on them to give directions to students about what to do next um or what to do period so it’s a really great way to tell a story

Or to include them in your setting as you go so uh lastly uh minecraft with history culture and geography um there’s a really fun one there’s a world that already exists which you can build this however you want to um where they use npcs um to build a timeline um

Or you can just build a timeline right you can just build it out of blocks it wouldn’t be real difficult to do um you can recreate landmarks you can build build them right you literally can build whatever you want you can build the eiffel tower you can build leaning tower

Pizza you can do anything you want you could build maps uh like topographical maps are pretty straightforward to build um you can just build a map of the world on this if you really really wanted to be uh to be kind of creative with this or have students create that and then

Really back to the library idea there are so many worlds that already exist that fit into all of these different subjects into the history culture and geography all of it that are absolutely worth exploring and students will have access to those so you can make it so that they can be a

Part of that as well um you could even i’ve gone as far as um taking the world and giving it to students on uh google classroom like you can absolutely do that so that’s integration let’s look at some resources real quick i’m going to switch over to my web browser this is minecraft

Education edition’s web web page this is a fantastic resource in fact this is where you start you hit download and you download a minecraft education edition for your pc or for your mac or for your chromebook it’ll work on all those you can also use it on an ipad um

It has uh you know has how it works the teach with minecraft gives you the lessons and our code is an esports piece as a training piece um you can go to the support and they’ll give you help it’s uh you can download it there’s the how to buy so if you buy

This um this is kind of a side here if you are interested in minecraft but you want to buy it for your students it’s five bucks a piece um but if you also want to this is what i just did because i don’t have any students right now

Or you want to do it after school program or something like that um you can do a direct purchase of 12 for each user for a year or if you want to do the volume licensing or the direct purchase you can do it for five dollars

Per student per year they get a login and a password they get their own stuff it’s all saved on their computers so um they can uh come back to it whenever they need to um the uh the quick start guide will get you going on this if you need to but it

Also has some really great resources for um and we’re gonna go back to the teach part uh you know the lessons there’s exploring the lessons piece of this already here there’s mentoring i’m the only minecraft certified instructor in the state so i can absolutely help you with this

Again if you want to just look at what’s available to you you can go to the website and look at the subject kits that are all right there or you can look by resources and even have feature lessons down here at the bottom so this is a really really great program

I really really i’ve enjoyed it so much my students have it’s talked about a way to engage students this is a fantastic way to get students engaged with what’s going on so uh that’s uh minecraft kind of in a nutshell there’s so much more to

This that i could never get into uh in the short amount of time i have but that’s why if you’re interested and you want to learn more um i will come to you we can do or we can read through zoom we can do whatever you want um i’ll be

Happy to work with you in any way you want to so thank you very much have a great day