Reflect: Debrief the lesson
At the end of every Minecraft lesson, be sure to build in time for students to reflect on their work. One way to do this is to showcase their work and have them present in front of class. You can also have them think-pair-share with partners, or a myriad of other ways you might debrief a project or learning outcome with students.
For our reflection today, we'll be diving into the actual lesson plan you just experienced and give you a chance to make adjustments if you were to teach it to your own students.
Download the Lesson Planner. Save this template as you can use it anytime you're trying to plan a new Minecraft experience for your class!
The Lesson Planner has a series of best practice guiding questions 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 case, we had the objective of building a house. If we were teaching this to eighth graders, we might have spent more time in the beginning brainstorming—what makes a good house? How can we make it sustainable? Or connect 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 are learning about in Minecraft Education. A similar lesson after this initial one is to have students create a scene or setting from a story they are reading.
- Rubric: You saw that we provided a rubric up front—must have four walls, a roof, two different building materials, and screenshot to a shared drive.
- Duration: How long do you want the lesson to be? Will there be any homework? In this case, we chose 60 minutes, but you can adjust this to your students. Maybe you want three 60-minute sessions. Perhaps it will be an independent project for the month. Up to you!
- Number of students: This helps you plan out logistics—you can adjust this to how many students will be working on it.
- 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 beginner expertise—we just needed our students to be able to download, sign in, move and place blocks to build a house, and assess with a simple screenshot.
- Modality: As we shared earlier, Minecraft consists of world files, and there are different modalities your students can play. We started with the simplest—all students in individual worlds on their own devices. You can start this modality tomorrow teaching with your students—in Minecraft 201 and Minecraft 301 we'll share how to do collaborative gameplay and when you might want to use that technique.
On the second page of the planner, we have a few more questions.
- For assessment, we chose to do a screenshot as a simple way that many kids are familiar with. You’ll see there are many other ways that we’ll cover in future lessons (and probably even more that your students will discover!) You’ll also need to decide where to collect the assignments—because we’re in a training, we chose something simple—a shared drive folder. But you can change to an LMS or other way you typically collect and grade files from your students.
- For modifications, we didn’t require anything too fancy in this one—but you can see there are different kinds of blocks and experiences we can use to enhance the experience that we’ll learn in Minecraft 201 and Minecraft 301.
Finally, we've included the teach, release, reflect model. This helps you plan your time and think—what do I need to model inside of the game for them? We modeled movement and placing blocks.
- For release, what will students be doing and for how long do you want them to build?
- For reflect, consider how you'll collect assessments and in what ways you'd like to share out or reflect on student builds.
Do: Adjust the lesson (2 minutes)
Adjust the lesson as though you were teaching the Build a Simple House Challenge 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! There's a great Blocks of Grass world which has nothing in it but grass and 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 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 regularly used LMS. Any resources or lessons for the world can be adjusted to meet the needs of your own classroom, and you can use the Lesson Planner to design the timing and modifications and assessment plans you'd like to use for it.
Finally, as their teacher you can build your own worlds outside of the library with instructions, resources, and prompts that relate to your curriculum. We'll learn how you can become a Teacher Worldbuilder in Minecraft 301.
Do: Reflect and consider (2 minutes)
How might you take an existing project you do in the classroom and instead have students show their mastery in a blank world?
Principles of game-based learning
What you just experienced was game-based learning! Different than gamification (quizzifying your lesson), this is an immersive experience in a creative world. You may have experienced one, two, or all of these principles.
- The failure dynamic of failing early and often—it's a safe environment for risk and we hope you took a risk on your house!
- The flexibility dynamic means the possibilities are endless and perfect for differentiating to your students because it’s a sandbox game. Hopefully you saw this as you reflected about how your students could build things related to your curriculum.
- The construction dynamic is that you’re building something that matters—students love creating things with purpose. Start to dream what can your students build in Minecraft that they can’t anywhere else?
- The situated meaning principle means students are learning in real-time with real meaning.
- Systems thinking is so powerful, you should start to see how your actions or builds affects the community or world.
- It helps build empathy—players can communicate and work together collaboratively to build some pretty spectacular things. Today, we worked alone, but in Minecraft 201 and Minecraft 301, we'll start to collaborate together.
Do: Reflect and consider (2 minutes)
Students, especially younger students and those new to Minecraft, need to practice the skills of finding items, placing items, and breaking items. Be sure to allow time for this in planning your first few lessons by choosing simpler activities like we did today, building a simple house.
- Which of the six principles of game-based learning did I experience today?
- What frustrations did you have while learning to play?
- Choose one frustration. What skills did you use to get past that frustration?
- What are you most proud of in your learning of Minecraft Education today?
- What connections are you beginning to make between your classroom content and Minecraft Education?
Feel free to share your reflection (and what you learned) by tweeting it out using the #MinecraftEDU @PlayCraftLearn hashtags on Twitter.