Minecraft

I think that Minecraft can be an exciting and excellent resource for students to practice and develop various skills from technilocigical literacy and art to mathematics and science. I like the idea that the program allows for students to take various academic concepts and apply them to an activity that they recognize and enjoy. They may also obtain the realization that their out-of-school activities an be just as educational as their academic work in schools.

Some Pros of Minecraft:

• allows for purposeful play, creativity, and exploration within the school day, especially for older students who don’t necessarily get as many options for play.
• can be used to explore specific learning concepts (math – fractions, measurement)
• Can become large – scale projects
• some student autonomy is developed through unique exploration and creation
• Game – based learning (Check out my latest EdTech Inquiry blogs for some fun facts about Game – Based Learning!!!)

Some Cons of Minecraft:

• Some student creativity and autonomy can be lost as some projects and activities can be teacher controlled.
• Depending on the version of the program, the one used in schools may not be equipped for certain modes which can limit students’ skill building and creativity within the program.
• Students who are familiar and play the game often may feel limited during structured activities.

LESSON PLANS

As I explored the Education and Minecraft website, I was really drawn to the idea of using MineCraft to explore Mathematical concepts and individual artistic creativity. These two lesson plans House Construction and Area and Fractions Pixel Art allow students to explore each of the ideas.

House Construction and Area

House Construction and Area focuses on the development and understanding of operations to discover measurement and area through the designing of a personal Minecraft house. Students  explore the recognition of varying dimensions, problem solving measurements, and identifying the relationship between length, width, and area or shapes (specifically rectangles in this case.

• At the beginning of the activity the students are asked to design their house using 1 cm grid paper to draw a floor plan (each 1 cm square is equal to 1 Minecraft block)
• Students will write out the formulas and operations used to discover the length, width, and area of their rooms.
• The students will then recreate their written floor plan on Minecraft.
• After this is completed, the students can answer some follow up questions to expand their thinking such as:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                a)What is the area of each individual room in your house?b) What is the total area of your house?

  c) If flooring costs $? per square metre, what would it cost you to cover each room?

  d) What is the total cost of flooring for your house?

Fractions Pixel Art

Fractions Pixel Art Focuses on developing an understanding of fractions, being able to recognize number patterns within fractions (1/1 is equal to a whole, 1/b where 1 represent the amount of parts we HAVE within a fraction and b represents the TOTAL AMOUNT OF PARTS the whole fraction is broken into). Students are able to explore these relationships within a fraction by designing pixel art where there is a total amount of pixels within the design and various colors are used to fill the pixels.

• To begin the activity, students can either make their design online through a pixel art program or they can simply design their art on a piece of 1cm grid paper. The students will make their design and count how many total pixels or squares make up their design. for example they could use 100 pixels or squares.
• Next, the students will use different colors to fill in the pixels within their design.
• From here, the students will count how many pixels they colored for each color. They will then be asked to write it out in faction form, remembering that they used (example) 100 pixels in total. This could look like 34 red squares out of 100 squares = 34/100.
• Once this is done, the students can build their designs on Minecraft using the information that 1 Minecraft block equals 1 pixel or 1cm on the grid paper.
• To follow up the activity, the students may answer questions such as:

How did you figure out your color fractions?

how did the fraction hep explain how much of each color you needed?

These lesson plans can work for Grades 3+ and can be adjusted with new requirements and adaptions to fit higher grade levels. I like these lesson plans because they explores important mathematical concepts while allowing students to be unique and creative and demonstrate autonomy in their decision – making. These activities are also open- ended which can make for many solutions and processes. This is critical for students to develop mathematical procedural fluency and confidence with their own thinking.