For our final club meeting before the thanksgiving break in Minecraft Club, Students judged and graded each other’s build. The ranking was entered on Microsoft forms surveys during the club meeting. I have never utilized Forms and Minecraft to this extent, so this was also an experiment testing what issues would come up and how well the procedure set up would work out.
To make this work, I set my goal; to alter the world so that students could walk through each other’s build without changing it in any way, and then fill out a survey judging or ranking the build. My second goal; set up surveys and the links for Microsoft forms.
To set up the links, I first created a survey in Microsoft Forms based on the prior input of the students concerning how they thought the builds should be judged. The overarching build assignment was to build a Large building a Technology giant would want to work out of. For the ranking procedure, I decided on using a Likert scale of 1 to 5 stars.
When the students filled out the survey, I would get a numerical value from 1 to 5 averaging each builds score.
I created a single survey then duplicated it until I had seven copies. I then titled each survey to an appropriate plot of land.
Then I adjusted the settings so that each survey could only be filled out once by each person. Once submitted, the students could not retake a survey. This was made possible because each student in my district has an office 365 account; they would be signed in via their login info when they clicked on the survey button.
To prep the Minecraft world, I put an NPC in each plot of land with instructions and a resources link directing them to the forms survey. When the link was opened, the survey defaulted to the Microsoft Edge browser. The process of placing the links in each NPC in each plot of land was a little more tedious than I had initially thought. I had copied and pasted all the links into Notepad along with all my comments on each build. I chose Notepad rather than Word because my laptop tends to slow down when Minecraft and any other medium or large program operate simultaneously. I entered my ranking of each build as a test run on each build. All links worked, and I could see my feedback in Microsoft forms for all builds.
Next, I needed to make sure no one could alter the world. I placed the world on an “immutable world”. However, that was not enough. I also added several command blocks to the preexisting one’s with the command code “clear @a” and set it on repeat. This continually cleared the inventory of all players. I was making it impossible to select anything in their inventory to drop in the world. Not knowing the range of this command, I set it up with all other command blocks in the lower section just below the street. This also meant that my inventory was cleared as well.
The Aftermath
After the club was done (each week we have maybe 25 minutes tops) I had to teach first period. After school, I checked the survey response. Overall I am happy with the results. All the links worked as they were supposed to. However, each build had a different number of responses, ranging from 9 to 21. I think this is because some students did not vote on all builds. They did a few rankings, then quit and did something else. To counter this in my next build, I will try to have the builds closer to each other or easier to find. This will be difficult as they are already very close to each other, and I put a beacon in front of each plot of land to signal that plot is ready to be judged. If I were to inform the students to go Plots 1A, 1C,2A,2B etc., at the start of the club meeting with a check-off list for each student, that might help.
I also found that students are very harsh graders, much more so than I was.
One of the other Minecraft club teachers also wanted their students to do a survey on their builds. Due to time constraints, I only had to alter my survey by adding a question at the beginning of the survey “What plot of land are you ranking?”. The settings for the survey were changed to “any number of responses” because I was not able to create a separate survey and implant a link for each build. The link was placed in the “resource link” button on the start menu. I could not meet with the teacher at the end of the day to see how it went.