Reflection
For our reflection, we’ll dive into the lesson plan you experienced and give you a chance to adjust it as if you were to teach it to your own students.
Download the Minecraft 401 Lesson Planner. Save this template to use to plan a new Minecraft experience for your class! The Lesson Planner has a series of best practice guiding questions to help you prepare and plan integrating Minecraft Education.
- Standard and introduction: Just as we modeled for you, you’ll have an objective you’re trying to teach, and you’ll want to open it with your students. In this module, we had the objective of building a house. If we're teaching eighth graders, we might have spent more time in the beginning brainstorming—what makes a good house? How can we make it sustainable? —or connecting it to our curriculum before introducing the project. You can customize the objective to meet your classroom needs and content focus. Some examples might be to have students model concepts from the classroom by crafting what they’re learning about in Minecraft Education.
- Rubric: You saw that we provided a rubric up front—Select an appropriate input, apply a process, and power an output.
- Duration: How long do you want the lesson to be? Will there be any homework? In this case, Redstone requires more time to learn so we did 90 minutes (about 1 and a half hours), but you can adjust for your students. Perhaps you want three 30-minute sessions, or you would like it to be an independent project for the month. Up to you!
- Number of students: Considering the number of students help plan logistics.
- For world, we use a world in the library called Build a Simple House, but you can also just start with a blank slate world and let kids create!
- Expertise: This was intermediate expertise—we needed our students to be able to understand the various levels of Redstone and assess with Flip video.
- Modality: As we shared earlier, Minecraft consists of world files, and there are different modalities your students can play. We used individual for Minecraft 401—all students in individual worlds on their own devices. This section is best supported by each student in their own world.
On the second page of the planner, there are a few more questions.
- For assessment, we chose to do a Flip assessment. You’ll have to make your own Flip page for your class. You can change to an LMS (learning management system) or other way you typically collect and grade files from your students if you prefer.
- For modifications, assign each of the 4 parts separately so that students don’t get overwhelmed. There’s a lot to learn in this module!
Finally, we included the Teach, Release, Reflect model. This model helps you plan your time and think—what do I need to model inside of the game for them? We modeled all the sections for you in the videos. The in-game 401 world also has many hints in NPCs (Non Player Characters) and allows you to go in and out of the teach and release part easily.
- For release, what will students do and for how long do you want them to build?
- For reflection, consider how you’ll collect assessments and in what ways you would like to share or reflect on student builds.
Do: Adjust the lesson
Adjust the lesson as though you were teaching the Build a Simple House Challenge, Minecraft 401, tomorrow with your students. What would you change?
So far, you’ve seen how students can easily use Minecraft with a premade world with prompts and instructions, like a Lesson World. The world we did is considered a Build Challenge. Minecraft Build Challenges start by posing a challenge and inviting students to design a solution. For example, you can build a futuristic car, design a sustainable version of your school, architect an energy-efficient home, or recreate a scene from history or local landmark. Minecraft Education offers a unique learning platform where students can tackle creative build challenges in-game.
You can also use Starter Worlds, which are blank slates that you can ask your students to create anything at all related to your curriculum! Blocks of Grass is a great world that has nothing in it but grass and is perfect for your students' imaginations. There also are biomes that have environments that could be conducive to your curriculum.
You can also use the Subject Kits library. This library houses pre-made lessons in Science, Math, Computer Science, Equity & Inclusion, History & Culture, Social Emotional, Art & Design, Digital Citizenship, Language & Literacy, Esports, and Climate & Sustainability. These lessons are designed to help support your curricular areas and intended learning outcomes.
The in-game Subject Kit worlds can be shared and assigned using Teams, Google Classroom, emailing a link, or copying the world file link to paste within your used LMS. Any resources or lessons for the world can be adjusted to meet the needs of your own classroom. You can use the Lesson Planner to design the timing, modifications, and assessment plans you would like to use for it.
Feel free to share your reflection (and what you learned) by tweeting it out using the **#MinecraftEDU @PlayCraftLearn** hashtags on Twitter.