Building with intentiality

I wanted to shift the focus from building big to building small with attention to detail for this build. I set out to accomplish this by changing the building objectives from building a big tech building to building a small town square. In a town square, there are several small buildings. I lowered the lower upper barrier to prevent students from flying higher than 40 units over their plot of land. Also, I created a building area for each team that was divided up into 5 smaller building areas. If not for Amulet, this would have been much more time-consuming to accomplish.

How I did it:

I started by creating a mini-town square in my “creating world”.

Then using amulet map editor I copied the top block later into an empty plot of land. I removed the parts that were meant not meant to be built on or destroyed (the stone street, trees) and replaced them with deny blocks. I then copied that layer and pasted it to the bottom of the plot of land. This ensured students could only alter the five mini-land plots. I then copied the this plot of land to the seven plots in the other Minecraft world using the map editor.

I also put border blocks under the wooden fence that acted as a divider between the mini-land plots. This ensured that students would not accidentally destroy a block or two of their teammate’s build during their construction.

One difficulty in using Amulet is that currently, the program does not recognize Border or Deny blocks. They are on the map. However, they are invisible. This made it a little tricky when checking my work in Amulet.

Result:

worked great. At first students thought they could not build anything in the large plot of land, they had to be instructed the stone street, and walking path was not alterable, but the small plots of land were.

What should have been added: I should have told the students to look up pictures of the Marietta Square, the old historic town square near the school. About 5 minutes into the build, a student asked if they could look up pictures of the Marietta town square, I responded, “YES! That’s a great idea; class look up pictures of the Marietta square to get ideas!”. Some students did, but I should have started with that. I did have enough foresight to write on the board that today we were doing the “Marietta square build” with some guidance such as; each building should be between 1 to 3 stories tall. Someone could build a fountain etc.

Classroom management issues:

After I explained what the next build was, students were broken off into groups and assigned their plot of land. One group decided to rush into another plot of land that was not assigned to them and start breaking ground. I should probably have removed them from the served and had re-explained the expectations. However, I decided to open up another plot of land and quietly told that group to make their way to that area. It worked fine, the group was able to start building with no issues. I thought this was the best course of action in the interest of time. Also, it is a club, not an academic class. I would have removed them from the server if it were a class. In hindsight, even though it is a club, I probably should have.

Classroom application;

After doing this, I think I could create a lesson where each plot of land has 5 mini-plots, and each mini-plot could have the space to construct the answer to a question. I may have to creative mode off, turn on adventure mode, put a chest in each plot coating the block that would be best used. However, that would not be a necessity. This would be good for doing work in groups, and best of all, easy to grade because the plots of land are organized for easy line of sight and examination or picture taking for the use of a portfolio.