Building Student Engagement Block by Block

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by Tracey Brown Instructional Technology Teacher Specialist

    If you’ve spent any time around OIT lately, you have probably heard Tracey say it, there is no single bigger bang for your engagement buck than Minecraft Education in the classroom. Educators today can struggle to connect with students, inside and outside of the classroom. Smiles and greetings in the morning are met with a muffled grunt from inside of an oversized hoodie that presumably contains a student. If this is your reality then Minecraft can be the tool that wakes your students up and gets them actively engaging with you and each other, even if only for the duration of the lesson or project that utilizes the app.

What Can My Students Do with Minecraft in the Classroom?

    Minecraft Education can teach or reinforce content through worlds built by Minecraft experts and provided for educators and students from right inside of the app’s Library, but that isn’t usually where we suggest that teachers begin using Minecraft. We think the best way to introduce it into your class is for a student project. If you have any unit in your curriculum that says, “have students build/create a…” then Minecraft is a perfect no-cost, no-materials, no-setup, no-cleanup, no-mess digital project option. With Minecraft, students can make just about anything their imagination can dream up as long as it is blocky, or pixelated in appearance because everything in Minecraft is a cube. Need to make a wheel? No problem! You just need to make it big enough to convey the idea of rounded edges when you only have squares for building materials.


Do I Need to Know How to Play Minecraft?


    I wouldn’t recommend a teacher use any tool in their classroom without having some experience with it themselves. The beautiful thing about Minecraft is that you are guaranteed to have enough experts in your class already that if a student asks a question about how to place a block or how to locate a certain item in the inventory, you will instantly have 10 volunteers to help. That doesn’t mean you don’t need to know anything, it just means you don’t need to know everything.

    We recommend that teachers complete the tutorials that teach them the basics of how to play the game. The tutorials are also built right into the app in the Library. They can be found by launching the app, choosing Play →View  Library → How to Play → Start Here Keyboard.  There are a total of 6 tutorials, but you can learn the basics of how to navigate a world and place and break blocks by going through the first 3:

  1. Movement

  2. Place and Break

  3. Interact


How Can I Be Sure the Students Aren’t Just Playing Minecraft in Class?


    We recommend the teacher have all students in the class work in the same world; a world that is owned and “hosted” by the teacher. Sound confusing or complicated? It’s actually really simple! Think of a Minecraft world as a file. Just like you can open a Google Slides lesson and invite all students in as editors, and monitor what they are working on in real time, you can also open a Minecraft world and invite everyone into your world to build. We have even created the world for you! We have Individual Build worlds that can accommodate up to 24 students and up to 40 students depending on the size of your class. In these worlds, the settings prevent the students from building or destroying anything outside of the designated areas. Each student is assigned a build space. Inside of that build space they can place blocks and destroy blocks as needed. We even have a means of preventing students from entering into each other’s build spaces to sabotage the builds of classmates. One of our favorite features of using this world is that there is nothing for students to turn in when the project is done because you own the world and already have all of their work. Also, they can see the builds of classmates in a gallery walk style by simply exploring the world during or after the build.

    Intrigued but still uncertain? Reach out to your OIT Teacher Specialist or your school’s eCoach. We are here to support you and will teach you everything you need to know to open up a Minecraft build world for your next project.

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