Minecraft Resources for the Classroom

Minecraft, the virtual building block game that currently boasts over 100 million users, has proven its purpose in the classroom the past couple years. If you're looking to use Minecraft in your classroom, check out thist list of resources that will provide you with everything you need to get started.

Minecraft Lesson Plans for Young Learners

Lessons4Minecraft.com provides lessons specifically for K-5 classrooms. If you're a K-5 teacher, this is probably great news for you since most Minecraft lesson materials focus on older grade levels.

Lessons on this site cover everything from language to data and measurements, giving you plenty of options. Example lessons include using screen shots from Minecraft to create a story and using the game to learn how to take measurements such as volume, though there are many more lessons that cover different subjects. 

Check out the site here. 

Using Minecraft to Teach Math

Homeschooler Amy Landisman is a fan of using Minecraft for educating her three girls and shares through her blog, Adorable Chaos, ways to use the game to teach math.

She provides resources such as user-made videos detailing math lessons such as finding surface area and finding volume of prisms and pyramids with walk-throughs in the game and a list of math problems designed to challenge the learner in question.

Check it out here. 

How to Use Minecraft to Benefit Reading, Writing and Problem Solving

K-8 technology instructor Jacqui Murray on TeachHub.com explains to educators the best ways to use Minecraft to teach reading and problem solving for the benefit of students.

She offers lists of questions she poses to students before they begin playing, and gives examples of how she assesses what they've learned.

Murray uses Twitter to keep students fully engaged, having them use the social networking tool when they complete tasks with the game.

"We use Twitter as a shared resource, and students become Minecraft Tweeple, tweeting questions and answers using #hashtags. When they solve a prickly game problem, they type #problem with their name into our class Twitter stream and lay it out in 140 characters," she said.

Check it out here. 

Microsoft's Minecraft Education Blog

Still in development but expected to be promising, Minecraft's relatively new owner Microsoft has launched education.minecraft.net, a site that is intended to connect educators using the game for the purpose of sharing lesson plans and ideas.

Currently, Microsoft is asking educators to send in their lesson plans and ways they integrate Minecraft in the classroom to be posted for reference soon.

Check it out here. 

Minecraft Competitions

There is no better way to engage students with learning in Minecraft than to have them compete using what they've learned.

Take an example from an initiative from the State Government of Adelaide, Australia that prompted students in certain districts to create a perfect national park using Minecraft.

"The list of suggested features -- which need to be translatable into the real world, and compatible with the natural environment, so a Cat Park would be out of the question -- includes hiking trails, picnic areas, scenic lookouts, campgrounds, playgrounds and natural play spaces, public restrooms, rock-climbing locations and geocaches," said CNet.com. 

This specific competition was intended to get kids interested in learning about national parks by taking a hands-on approach and building one, but Minecraft competitions have endless options for subject matter.

On a larger scale, iED's Minecraft Builder Bowl takes participants from all ages and from all areas and has them compete in small teams to use Minecraft to create the most interesting immersive experiences, content, and applications. The first competition has begun this summer and will culminate with a conference in Paris in September to honor the winners.

Compiled by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

07/01/2015