Today we played Minecraft in class. Who would have thought it could be used in class? I have Minecraft on my current computer and so does my younger sister. We would often play together. My boyfriend and his roommate have actually just created a server where they have started building collaboratively. Yes, Minecraft is still popular for people almost out of their teens.
I had no idea that Minecraft Education was a thing. I thought it was so cool how the teacher creates the server and then has all those settings to modify certain aspect and issues. Depending on the level of your students many of these things would have to be adjusted.
I loved how the students talked about what they have been doing so passionately. I also loved seeing the passion in Heidi. I have never thought of Minecraft being used in schools. Obviously the thing that instantly popped into my head was buildings. However, I never thought of this being changed to creating a full civilization for Social Studies or a story setting for Language Arts. Other things talked about were Science by creating a full digestive tract with signs to tell you where you are and what is happening to you (if you were the piece of food). And finally, creating art or using it to inspire art pieces. Of all of these the last 2 interested me the most and would be things I would have loved to have been given the opportunity to do in my schooling. I think it is such a fun and creative way for students to engage with each other and with material.
My issues are probably quite obvious: it isn’t quite aimed at Elementary. It is a fabulous thing for middle schoolers but I am very much aimed towards Elementary. It also concerns me with the amount of screen time. Many students would be playing Minecraft at home which is great but in some ways they may need that break. Additionally, there were some people I talked to after that started to not feel so great so I think the motion sickness and screen got to them a bit. It obviously has worked extremely well with Heidi and she knows her class very well so in those ways I understand but I think I would have to see it to fully understand how well it can work.
We briefly looked into Google Science which is an app you can download onto your phone. I think thats a pretty cool little app that you could use to explore some different Science aspects. This again would be super great in middle school because a lot more middle school aged kids have phones and I remember that was always super cool if you could bring out your own device and use it to help you in class. That could make some Science projects super cool with some awesome data.
