8th grade Transformations

Learning Target: Students will be able to determine and apply; translations, reflections, and rotations to a transformed structure.

Task: Students will determine what type of transformation is being applied to an object.

Lesson Setting:

Students work individually or in small groups to determine what kind of transformation is being applied.

Materials: Students were given a worksheet with questions relating to Minecraft world.

Time: Students had 90 minutes to complete the task. Because this was the end of the year, this turned into a week-long building task. Some students finshed in 40 minutes. on average it took about one hour.

Setup: Set in “creative mode,”, the immutable world was activated. Border blocks were set up to create a long rectangular box (about 100 by 1,400 units) to place each transformation creation. A layer of barrier blocks was set at the height of 80 on the y-axis, creating a “ceiling” students could not pass. To ensure students could not place blocks or select any item, a row of command blocks powered by Redstone with the code “/clear @a” were spaced out 120 units apart on all four faces of the rectangular prism to which the students are confined. This step ensures a student can select no item from their inventory. Global mute was turned on. I ran this world, and all the students joined the world.

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What worked:

1. Putting students in groups of two.
2. A three-dimensional environment added a layer of challenge to the problems. One piece of feedback I got from students is that on paper, this would be easy. But working in a three-dimensional space made it more challenging
3. The very last problem has elements of coding, making this STEM applicable

What could have gone better

1. There need to be violation questions; however, as a grade level, violations were done separately and so were not added to this lesson.
2. More two-step transformations should have been done.