Next post: Implementing MinecraftEdu throughout a school or district.I recently told a room full of academics interested in using videogames as a teaching tool that “to play is the biggest freedom we can have as a child, or as an adult”. I would very much like my students to select a passage of their choice and recreate it in Minecraft.Īs with my Chang'an map, I would like kids to develop their own Custom NPC villagers that could provide a tour of "their" village. One of my favorite books on the Middle Ages is Ian Mortimer's, Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England. I'm leaning more toward recreating Venice or Florence and having students complete quests within each city. I would like to see their Medieval towns grow into Renaissance cities, but am unclear how to transform them at this point. Instead of dropping this all on them at once as a stand alone project, it will be incorporated into a PBL lesson where they can implement and meet expectations during the knowledge acquisition stage. It took far longer than I had anticipated which forced me to split my time working with struggling writers and struggling builders. I had to resort to a follow-up day where I shared good work. We spent too much time dealing with horsemanship skills and horse thieves and not enough time exploring quality work. The idea was inspired, but trying to get 30+ kids to successfully ride a horse from village to village was problematic. Even though I have attempted to compensate for such a wide range of ability levels, I am still missing the mark with several students. My students this year have the greatest range of reading and writing levels as I have ever seen. LOTS of experimentation in designing buildings, laying out fields, and creating structures that looked realistic and period appropriate. Students had to discover how to build tall and complicated structures without flying Grading rubric worked well as solid writing was emphasized before work in Minecraft was allowed. Great visualization of the scale and critical role of agriculture in Medieval life - each village had Fall, Spring, and fallow fields and an orchard Students were openly discussing the layout of the village and making connections with their learning Placing links in the infoblocks worked beautifully with slideshows opening in a web browser On Monday as each student teleported onto the map, I gave them a horse and asked them to head out of town on the road and discover the other villages and see what their friends had created. The project officially ended on a Friday, but I spent the following weekend connecting each village by road. The build portion lasted 6 class periods. They built using primarily stone and oak, to simulate English oak that we learned about. I placed chests full of building supplies that they could use and shared other items by request. In order to limit their movements outside the village and to create a more "realistic" village, we began play in MinecraftEdu mode. Individually, they entered the map and began construction. One by one each class period began by writing about their resource or citizen to better focus their build requirements. They had to meet and plan out the location of each home, field, merchant, orchard, and town commons on butcher paper before creating anything in Minecraft. I placed a couple of roads on their map and a schematic of a churchyard near the center of the otherwise empty village. They each thought that they had their own map, but I had them actually building within a short distance from each other. Each class period developed their village independently from the others. I wanted their voices to be heard through their writing, their Minecraft build, and their narrated tour. Create a screencast tour of their accomplishment and embed the link in a MinecraftEdu infoblock placed near their design. Using evidence students uncovered in class and on their own, create a Google slideshow detailing the role that person or resource played in Medieval society. Let each student independently work in Minecraft to create a village building or resource while collaborative designing and developing a historically accurate village. For my villages project I had three main goals in mind: 1.
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