Minecraft activities, communication, and artifacts
Minecraft activities
The Minecraft Education website is a hub full of ready-made resources to help you engage your MSAs with the game. The site features helpful lesson plans and downloadable worlds, as well as hundreds of lessons created by teachers around the world! Minecraft Education transforms the game into a virtual classroom plus there are endless ways to design creative tasks that encourage students to use their imaginations to create projects through activities that infuse social emotional learning, creativity, problem-solving and collaboration.
Multiplayer games
Minecraft Education offers multiplayer functions that connect players through picture-based join codes so they can play together at the same time in the same Minecraft world. This allows your MSAs to build together side by side in the same Minecraft world and is a great way to encourage collaboration, communication, and problem solving. If your MSAs are together in the same location, you'll hear the sounds of laughter and excited chatter as your MSAs work together in the same world. Whether your MSAs are playing together in class or remotely from home, hosting multiplayer games is a great way to encourage teamwork and collaboration.
Example Minecraft activities
Communication
Establishing clear channel of communication with your Minecraft Student Ambassadors is a key part of running a successful Minecraft club. Students need to know how you'll communicate with them. Will you use email or an app like GroupMe or Remind?
You need a virtual MSA home base (online hub) to provide a central repository of communication, information about upcoming events, shared resources, to post announcements, etc. Will your MSAs have access to a Microsoft Teams, a Google Classroom, or a OneNote? If you use Teams, you can set up different channels with different goals: announcements, meetings, events, etc.
It's also important to collect artifacts to help document your MSA program’s journey. This will help you to create a history of your program and it helps you tell your story. How will you document your MSA meetings and events? Will you take pictures? Will you Tweet our information or create Instagram or TikTok posts? These are some examples of what you should document:
- Monthly meetings: What activities did you do? Which MSAs and sponsors were involved in the activity(s)?
- MSA events: How many schools were involved? Was it just one school, or multiple schools in your district? Did you collaborate with other MSA programs in different districts, cities, states or countries/regions?
Artifacts
MSA OneNote: OneNote is an invaluable tool because it can be accessed anywhere and, on any device, making it easy to keep in close communication with everyone involved. OneNote also makes things simple by keeping everything organized in one place so there's no confusion about who needs what information or where the information is located.
Ideas for other artifacts include:
- Meeting Recordings: You can always record your meetings if they're virtual. Recording your MSA meeting helps in several ways: MSAs who were absent can watch and get caught up on what they missed, a recording provides a historical record that can be used at future meetings for verification of past decisions, and recordings can be used to document past events and actions.
- Videos: Students love to watch videos. How about recording and sharing the gameplay with your students? Your videos could be shared on YouTube or Vimeo.
- Screenshots: You could share screenshots from inside your MSA multi-player games or any of your virtual MSA meetings or events.
- Pictures: You can take pictures whenever you host an MSA event, whenever your MSAs participate in an event, and during your MSA meetings, if you meet face to face.