I did this just before the Winter break started. I was super excited and spent far more time than I should have to prep. However, It paid off. Students enjoyed it, and so did I. The number one takeaway from this building session was when asked for feedback one of the students said what they liked most was meeting new people.
This building sessing took place on the last day before break. All teachers choose an activity they would do during the last 90 minutes of the early release day. The time was Titled “Jingle Jam”
I choose to do a holiday-themed Minecraft build. I had to do some recruiting and managed to find about 22 students willing to come to the computer lab during Jingle Jam. When the time came, about 14 students showed up.
The Set-Up
As students came into the Lab, each was given the following sheet. With the assigned tasks
The world was created using the “winter biome” in Minecraft. I explored a good portion of the surrounding area and set up the border with border blocks. While Ender’s pearl was active, I chose to emphasize staying within the border for this activity rather than disabling the ability to cross it as that would have taken too much time. In my Minecraft club, I have separation barriers between students build, For the sake of time, I did not create them. I had to set expectations verbally to respect each other’s build.
The starting point was in a factory. I went to www.planetminecraft.com and located some schematics of a factory and used @amulet to import the buildings to the world. I typed /setworldspawn where I wanted all students to start, then placed some NPC’s in the immediate area with some information about the tasks.
Happy elf was the first NPC students saw when spawning in he gave a flavor of the situation
To complete the look, I imported warehouse schematics from planetminecraft.com. I also used www.tinkercad.com to find a 3D ship model and convert it to a Minecraft schematic. I then imported it via Amulet and placed it at the bottom of the ocean. For some reason, the ship did not transfer as well as I had hoped.
I should have pasted this ship into above water then cut and paste underwater
I also placed some housing frames in the area using Amulet. I choose to place housing frames because I have observed that some students can really struggle with building a house. While students could still create their own house if they wanted, they could fill in the housing frame’s flooring, walls, windows, etc. This was loved, I did not have enough housing frames.
Reflection:
The number one rule I told all students at the begging of the class was to “respect each other’s build”. Overall this was adhered to by all students. However, I did have to have a few conversations with students about not destroying each other’s builds. After two reminders, this was enough. Some still complained that other students were in their build. However, I told them as long as they were not destroying anything, it was okay. One student’s feedback wanted individual plots as with my normal Minecraft club. Doing this activity with no separation barriers added to the exploration, discovery, and enabled the “scavenger hunt” task. If I had to do it again, I would probably create plots for students to build on (possibly underlying them with allow blocks), then a large scavenger hunt area underlyed with deny blocks (or with immutable world turned on).
Student interaction increased with all students in a large building area with no border to separate them, though not always for the best. Students would try to undermine each other’s builds indirectly without destroying them. Mostly this was done in good taste or humor.
What I would do differently
-Have students utilize the camera and portfolio for scavenge hunt
-Clarify students can pick which of the builds they want to do. Perhaps do some castle frames as I did with housing frames
-Add more housing frames
-Underlay each scavenger hunt objective with deny blocks
When the sunken ship was discovered one student built this over the wreckage, now easily findable by other students. A layer of Deny blocks beneath the wreckage would solve this issue
Someone started spawning zombies in a factory. To solve I typed /kill @e to remove all mobs
More spawning of some flying creature
What worked well:
-Housing frames, students liked filling in the walls, much like kids like to color a picture rather than draw one.
Students really liked it when the weather turned to snow!
Using the “allowing mobs” option, sometimes students would spawn mobs in exes, I would flip the allow mobs button to off, killing off all the mobs or type /kill @e.
The scavenger hunt
Application to the classroom:
The scavenger hunt can be utilized, for example, within the premade of Minecraft that involves cells. For example, give the students a sheet of paper numbered 1 to 10. Then within the world write on a sign (poster) on each part of the cell the definition of that part of the cell. On the sheet of paper, students need to label what that definition is. So next to number one, students could write “mitochondria”. Or students could utilize the camera with the portfolio, take a picture and identify what the part of the cell is, and take a picture of it.
The housing frames concepts could be utilized, for example, a truck. Students could be given a problem, “a truck needs to make deliveries to a bunch of restaurants. The first restaurant took no more than three creates, the second restaurant took no more than five creates. If the truck started with 10 creates fil the truck with the maximum number of creates it could have.” Or “there are at least 4 pigs in the trailer put the number of pigs that could be in the trailer”