Minecraft
What is Minecraft?
Minecraft is a building game that is hugely popular with a wide range of students - boys and girls, young and old!
In class, our children will only use Minecraft Edu (Mincraft for Education - a version of Minecraft on a secure school server for student use on a collaborative or individual project.
Students in a specific class or Minecrrat Club are put on a 'white list' and are collaborating on a specific project related to their class work.
You may know the main Minecrraft game that is is free and available either
BUT...
like any activity online, when young students join an appropriate community server requires extreme caution, adult supervision and the use of our critical thinking and digital citizenship skills. Minecraft has many communities of children, adolescent and adult fans. It is therefore essential that parents seek a child appropriate server if they allow their child to use multi-player at home.
In clsas, our many of our students are already very knowledgeable about Minecraft. and they are amazing peer tutors for students for whom the program is quite new. With their help, students and teachers new to Minecraft become quickly competent with the main controls and commands.
In class, our children will only use Minecraft Edu (Mincraft for Education - a version of Minecraft on a secure school server for student use on a collaborative or individual project.
Students in a specific class or Minecrrat Club are put on a 'white list' and are collaborating on a specific project related to their class work.
You may know the main Minecrraft game that is is free and available either
- as a stand alone app/program where you play as a 'single player'. In this mode you can choose your own settings and decide if you want to play in 'creative' or 'survival' mode. Your world is your own!
- or you can log in multi-player mode - this is where you can 'join' other worlds and games via WiFi or a server.
BUT...
like any activity online, when young students join an appropriate community server requires extreme caution, adult supervision and the use of our critical thinking and digital citizenship skills. Minecraft has many communities of children, adolescent and adult fans. It is therefore essential that parents seek a child appropriate server if they allow their child to use multi-player at home.
In clsas, our many of our students are already very knowledgeable about Minecraft. and they are amazing peer tutors for students for whom the program is quite new. With their help, students and teachers new to Minecraft become quickly competent with the main controls and commands.
Why use Minecraft in Education?
You only need to observe children (teenagers or adults!) play Minecraft to understand the level of concentration, persistence, perseverance and motivation involved. Their level of collaboration, cooperation, oral language skills including technical language is amazing.
Tapping into the creative and collaborative opportunities Minecraft offers will be a project for investigation in 2014. During an extremely successful trial of Minecraft in 2013, we were ready to fine tune our settings in readiness for this year's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory project in Year 3.
Some teachers and parents will understandably wonder how it can be used for LEARNING and not just PLAYING. How can Minecraft be harnessed to achieve a range of learning outcomes and why would you use it over other tools?
We know that motivation and relevance has an enormous influence on learning - and engaged, enthusiastic learners is what we want! Learning who can't wait for the Minecraft unit to begin, who don't want to stop, and are bursting to start again next lesson.
Now if the students are motivated, engaged, and guided specifically in their learning task, great things can happen! We plan to video some of it to share during the year.
Tapping into the creative and collaborative opportunities Minecraft offers will be a project for investigation in 2014. During an extremely successful trial of Minecraft in 2013, we were ready to fine tune our settings in readiness for this year's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory project in Year 3.
Some teachers and parents will understandably wonder how it can be used for LEARNING and not just PLAYING. How can Minecraft be harnessed to achieve a range of learning outcomes and why would you use it over other tools?
We know that motivation and relevance has an enormous influence on learning - and engaged, enthusiastic learners is what we want! Learning who can't wait for the Minecraft unit to begin, who don't want to stop, and are bursting to start again next lesson.
Now if the students are motivated, engaged, and guided specifically in their learning task, great things can happen! We plan to video some of it to share during the year.
Creating worlds for learning...
Minecraft can offer many opportunties for learning.
Students can explore or even create worlds to learn key concepts in Mathematics, Science, SOSE and English. This is an example of a world created for SOSE - history.
Students can explore or even create worlds to learn key concepts in Mathematics, Science, SOSE and English. This is an example of a world created for SOSE - history.
