Create fun, interactive classroom projects with Minecraft

Minecraft is quickly becoming one of the most popular tools in the classroom, as it is fun and engaging for students of all ages. Minecraft provides a great platform to encourage creativity, computing skills, and collaboration with their classmates.

 Using Minecraft, students will learn to:

  • Collaborate and communicate with their peers
  • Self-direct their learning in a games-based environment
  • Use computational thinking to build functioning worlds in Minecraft

 Suggestions for successful Minecraft adventures!

  • Have students use their own Minecraft accounts to let them use the program anytime, anywhere, rather than just at school. You can get students to make an account here.
  • Check with your school's IT department to make sure that Minecraft can be accessed on the school network
  • Set some basic rules - for example, no bullying comments and no destruction of other's Minecraft world's
  • Create a document detailing the project, rules and ideas and share this with your students
  • Establish a limit on how much time can be spent on Minecraft each day

Launching

  • Give them time to talk to discuss project ideas
  • Let students form sub-teams if needed
  • Then let the students go in-world for the first time, and let them play around for a while. For students that haven't used Minecraft before, it can take a while to get used to

Projects

There are countless projects that teachers can set up for their students to work on. Below are a couple of ideas:

  • Imagine the year is 2450 and earth is facing imminent disaster. The world's leaders have ordered the evacuation of the planet in order to preserve the human race. Your students have been given unlimited funds to build a space craft and create a new civilization on another planet. It is the task of your students to design the space craft and build this new planet using Minecraft. It must include residential dwellings, amenities such as hospitals and schools, entertainment areas, transport systems, monuments, and parks, and must also include two invented creatures and plants. For more information on this plan, go here.
  • Give your students the challenge of creating the world's most liveable city. Their task would be to design the perfect city that they would like to live in, with efficient public transport system, recreation areas and ample housing. In order to complete this task, students would have to research the problems facing modern cities now and in the future, and brainstorm ways to combat these issues.
  • Get students to think of an issue facing the world today, and have them work in teams to design a machine that would solve it. In order to create cool working machines in Minecraft, coding and computational thinking is needed. Redstone and command block commands are necessary for this. Information on how to use Redstone can be found here.

Once your students have created their amazing structures they can facilitate virtual excursions for other students at their school. These excursions can also be workshops where students teach each other Minecraft skills. This is a great chance for your students to demonstrate the skills they have learnt, and explain to others the concept behind the world they have created.