Today’s work in class was all about Minecraft! It was really fascinating to experience another way of learning and interacting with technology. I’d love to try and incorporate this in to some lessons, but my initial thought was that I wasn’t sure how to incorporate it into a science classroom… but the website education.minecraft.net actually provides some really interesting ideas.
For example, I found this one were students are asked to create an ecosystem that has been studied in class.
It is designed as a collaborative lesson wherein each of the members of the student team is tasked with designing a different aspect of the subject environment, either living or non-living, and this seems like a great alternative way for students so show work. The collaboration aspect of this also ticks off the main curricular competencies, in several areas:
-Communication; collaboration
-Thinking; creative thinking, critical thinking
-Personal and social; social awareness and responsibility
It’s pretty fascinating to think that one program could be used to cover such a multitude of topics.
Here’s a video I found with the simple search “minecraft biology”of a student project outlining a plant cell and its structure:
I think that the main roadblock to me being able to implement in my classroom will be experience, as this was the first time I’ve ever actually played the game! I would certainly want to have more experience before feeling confident in presenting this as an option for classwork.
