Microsoft Showcase and Minecraft Education Edition 6-8 Week Resource

As part of a Microsoft School Showcase on Minecraft, I thought I would compliment this visit, the hard work the Microsoft team put into producing the video with a resources share for teachers who wish to use my planning pack.

The pack is here. Inside you will find a 6-9 week pack containing:

  1. 3D Models of the items in the world. The musical notes especially.

  2. Student PowerPoints (Google Slides), PNG, PDF versions and the editable InDesign files too.

  3. Game Cards for each lesson outlining Learning Intentions and Success Criteria for students to be successful collaborators.

  4. All worlds and an all-in-one world based on Litcraft’s Treasure Island map from Lancashire University

  5. Teacher Guide for each lesson including all text for sign posts, blackboards and posters in Docx and PDF (below)

  6. Quest clues in picture format for student support as well as the walkthrough-type videos below.

  7. Image pack for further class resources.

This article is a free resource for teachers to use based on the story ‘The Princess Blankets’ by Carol Ann Duffy. Although, you could easily make this up yourself based on the information in the teacher pack. The story and outline is flexible enough to play without the book as there is a quest book in every Game with a score system that can be edited to suit the class/ school.

So what is the main thrust of this series? To enhance teamwork to a very high standard in Year 6 children and to get there through a series of collaborative challeneges and enventually produce a collaborative digital product. In this case, a musical rendition of a nurdery rhyme (or any familar tune) with the Noteblocks in Minecraft. See this example of lesson 1-2 the introduction game card.

Minecraft Princess Blankets Game Cards.png

The game worlds are a weird and deliberately creative place with many side missions along the way.

Before you begin, you need to get a key. 

The key is a number. Normally, you would follow all games in the right order, such as: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. But the order for the game order is very different and you need to use Google to get the data from a strange image.

How can you image search for this toy trainset? All the numerical data you need to open the order of the games in our world is in the search results.

What is the order? Is it 54321? or 43152?

Initial Lesson Game Key reverse image search of toy train.jpg

As a team, once you have the correct order, write them into your game pages or on your table to take a photograph of.

How can we find the numbers out of this toy train?

Reverse image search in Googles drag and drop or use tineye.com and the students find the key to the number/ game sequence.

Why do this? The chilldren need a team plan and to work together to find the key and creates the mindset of discovery, search and collaborating on a simple search technique few wil have encountered. It also creates a barrier to entry thayt says ‘ you need to play like this to succeed’.


Below is a sample of a lesson game card for Game 1, Lesson 5.

Minecraft Princess Blankets Game Cards6.png
 

Lesson 1 Overview

Digital Citizenship - Status Anxiety and Keeping up with the Joneses.

The point to all this is that this episode, the first 15-20 mins at least amplifies the sheer nonsensical aspect to online social streams where they take over every facet of life. When you ask the children: what’s the point to all these streams and posts? They say to talk, to share to let your friends see what you're doing. And this is fine - however when you ask: are your friends there too? Teens tend to get somewhat defensive over this line of questioning. However, this is aimed at years 5 and 6. They half agree thet there isn't any use to this over sharing. And this is key. It's key because it shows us that not only does this open a dialogue as to how to protect young kids I would argue that this type of conversation could go a hell of a lot younger. Maybe not with this kind of material, but with the very concept of understanding consequences of  beig suceptible in this way. I mean, we used to talk in the phone when we were younger. Albeit, for hours sometimes. But this wasn’t to everyone all the time with a giant hailer in public. I think you get my drift.

The video I’ve clipped and heavily edited has taken all the errant language out and the ending where it gets very sweary. The assembly also has no reference to the actual programme in case it’s shown at home or parent’s Netflix streams show the thumbnails - hence the name: Status Anxiety.

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