For International Women’s Day and Women’s History month, we want to help you inspire girls to change the world, whether they aspire to be engineers, artists, programmers, designers, world leaders, or anything that ignites their passion! To celebrate, we’re releasing new lessons for our Good Trouble: Lessons in Social Justice world about two activists who’ve had an enormous impact on women’s education and their place in society.

In these lessons by Felisa Ford, Dr. Natasha Rachell, and Ken Shelton, students travel alongside US Congressman and Civil Rights leader John Lewis to the worlds of Malala, a powerful advocate for girls’ education in Pakistan, and Emmeline Pankhurst, a leader in the Victorian Suffragette movement that helped secure the vote for women. To make sure as many students as possible can draw inspiration from these two mighty changemakers, the Good Trouble world is available as a login-free demo for Minecraft: Education Edition for students on Windows, Mac, iPad, and Chromebook until the end of March. If your learners are Bedrock players, the world is also free to download through the Education Collection in the Minecraft Marketplace.

If you’d like to see these worlds in action and connect with the community, we’re hosting a Lesson Jam on March 18 at 9:00 AM PT featuring members of the Minecraft team. We’ll be walking through the lessons and chatting with team members with a passion for making sure every girl has access to education. Register for the free webinar here.

Malala: One Girl Among Many

In this lesson, students join Malala Yousafzai to learn about her quest to ensure accessible education for girls all across the globe. Learners will explore the context of Malala’s struggle for education in Pakistan and why equity in education is so vital to a fair and just society. Then they’ll flex their creativity as they help Malala build a school for local girls!

How does education vary for girls in different parts of the world? How does a lack of education affect girls, their communities, and society as a whole? How has Malala been instrumental in bringing about change to oppressive systems? Students can reflect on these questions and more as they work through the activities.

Good Trouble: Women’s Suffrage

Travel back in time to meet Emmeline Pankhurst in Victorian Britain and learn all about her fight for women’s voting rights. In a time when women were disenfranchised from the political process, courageous activists like Pankhurst took the fight to the streets, eventually winning their right to a say in the way they were governed. Students will explore Victorian England and help Pankhurst get the word out to eight women who need to know that their time to vote has come.

They’ll ask important questions about gender and politics. Which women were included and excluded in the voting rights won by Women’s Suffrage? Why was it so difficult for women to win the vote? Why are equitable voting rights important? Learners will be able to apply these reflections to their own political contexts and situations.

Both of these lessons provide ample opportunities for in-game activities, external research, and personal reflection. Students present what they’ve learned and share their voices using Flipgrid and their written communication skills. Through collaboration, creativity, sharing, and personal reflection, we hope that discovering these amazing women’s stories will inspire your learners to become changemakers and champions of education and equality for girls and women all over the world!

***

Don’t forget to sign up for the March 18 webinar and join educators worldwide for our Lesson Jam. Things kick off at 9:00 AM PT. If you’re just setting out on your Minecraft: Education Edition journey, get started here!

The post Celebrate Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day with New Lessons About Malala and the Suffragettes appeared first on Minecraft: Education Edition.

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Celebrate Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day with New Lessons About Malala and the Suffragettes appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

Sat Paul Mittal School is a Microsoft Showcase School in Ludhiana in Punjab, India. When a chance mention of Minecraft on a Skype call piqued their students’ interest, they took a chance on game-based learning. Head of IT Monica Joshi tells the story of how, in just two short years, Minecraft: Education Edition became a mainstay for creative, cross-curricular learning.

At Sat Paul Mittal School, we wanted an environment that was conducive to engaging our students constructively while also paying considerable attention to students with special needs, so we tried game-based learning using Minecraft to attract and sustain their attention. Connecting students with their environment is the foremost responsibility of an educator, and integrating game-based learning into our curriculum served the need of the hour. Children love to play games, so why not introduce play into their lessons? Games present unique opportunities to make the learning process effective and meaningful in students’ present milieu.

Minecraft was introduced at Sat Paul Mittal School by accident. In April of 2018, the school had organized a Skype session, and during the discussion, the word “Minecraft” captured the attention of the students. As the head of IT, I wanted to leverage the students’ interests to empower them. Our very first lesson was on the Egyptian civilization. It was presented as a challenge where students were given the freedom to explore independently with only the help of in-game non-player characters.

The Egypt lesson was a great introduction because it touched upon many aspects of the civilization, including the social ladder, culture, and more. Students even created some bridges to cross the river Nile using Minecraft’s electrically conductive material, Redstone. In one instance, there was a missing Redstone circuit that required the students to build cross-disciplinary linkages. You can see the amazing outcomes from the lesson in this student creation!

The lesson was a great success! Both the teacher and students were happy with the outcomes, and the lesson was completed within two days. Most importantly, the teacher observed that students were more engaged with self-paced learning since they could re-visit concepts they didn’t understand and perform their evaluations in a non-threatening environment. The approach was to combine elements of fun and work to create a holistic experience of teaching and learning for both the facilitator and the student.

It was very important to involve both sets of stakeholders at Sat Paul Mittal: students and teachers. We announced a creative story-writing competition that would involve both educators and learners. The story would be written by the teacher and created in Minecraft by the students. Our learners trained our teachers to use Minecraft collaboratively in the classroom after an introductory session provided by a Microsoft Training Provider. The students seamlessly adopted Minecraft into their respective lessons without feeling the pressure and stress of integrating it under any compulsion.

There was a form assembly organized in our school based on the theme of mythology. We used Minecraft to showcase the story of Ramayana with a build prepared by two students. It provided a powerful demonstration to the school that Minecraft could be used to collaborate and create meaningful learning beyond just playing games.

In 2019, the school organized the Satyan Innovation Fest, bringing the two wings of the bird of imagination together: The Start-up Edge and The Satyan Gamification Challenge. The festival took place over three exhaustive days of learning experiences focused on innovation and empowerment. It encouraged innovative and entrepreneurial mindsets among the young people and delved deep into gamification—the cutting edge of learning technology in an ever-changing education system. The Gamification Challenge was based on the motto created by our students: “Be an innovator, not an imitator.”

The festival was broken into three segments taking place over three days. The first day featured a workshop on AI and involved setting up kiosks in the Learning Marketplace. Day two involved a pitching round where students made presentations about their Minecraft projects based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. On the third and final day, students displayed their projects in the Learning Marketplace and showcased their Minecraft worlds live.

The Satyan Innovation Fest helped students work through their thought process to address problems they saw around their neighborhood and create solutions. It’s worth appreciating that out of the 22 schools that participated from across India, 16 were new to Minecraft: Education Edition. The festival provided the impetus for students to use Minecraft to collaborate and learn meaningful lessons.

The impact of Minecraft can be measured across many subjects. As part of the research for her Master’s thesis, our principal, Ms. Bhupinder Gogia, conducted a case study with one of the classes, including a sample of 30 students from the third standard and 30 students from the fourth standard. She observed a significant difference in achievement in mathematics between the groups taught through Minecraft vs. traditional teaching. First, the students were tested after the teacher taught the lesson in the traditional manner using a worksheet. Then, students who didn’t perform well were asked to play the game in the form of a tutorial. After playing, the children were evaluated on a specific topic: Area and Volume in Minecraft.

The teacher had created different blocks in the shapes of a square, a rectangle, a triangle, and a cuboid. She wrote questions for students in Minecraft’s Book and Quill tool. Students read the questions and answered on boards placed by the teacher. Not only did the gaming platform clear up the concept for the students, but they enjoyed the experience at the same time. The difference in performance helped motivate the students toward learning mathematics. Our team reflected that we needed to recreate the mathematics curriculum along the same lines in the future to increase student’s interest and scores through using technology in our teaching.

Three years ago, the school had only 40 Minecraft: Education Edition licenses. Now, all of our students have access to the game. For teachers who might not know how to create their own Minecraft lessons, there are numerous activities available in the library, which can be easily mapped onto your own lessons. Our school has used Minecraft throughout all phases of a lesson—to introduce ideas, summarize content, evaluate students, and reflect on learning across the curriculum, including topics like area and volume, symmetry, and the respiratory system. We even conducted a cyber-security lesson as a game and studied simple machines in the form of a Rube Goldberg machine!

The Satyan Entrepreneurship Program (SEP) at Sat Paul Mittal School aims to empower every Satyan to unleash his or her potential. The program is intended to inculcate 21^st-century skills by motivating the next generation of thinkers, collaborators, communicators, and innovators. This student-led club provides Satyans a platform to showcase their skillsets, act as mentors, and lead as they carve out a niche for themselves and their team.

The SEP provides Satyans vast opportunities to explore and adopt creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving in an immersive environment to fast-track their learning experiences as students. With leadership and communication as the key goals, the SEP aims at nurturing responsible citizens and empowered leaders of tomorrow. We’re thrilled to see students in leadership positions, empowering teachers and their fellow learners to explore game-based instruction.

Students have created numerous impactful projects, including a fashion line made from reclaimed denim, a bakery featuring homemade goods sold online, and a digital shop for handmade cards and notebooks. The same imagination, problem-solving, and self-directed learning that students experience while using Minecraft come into play as they dream up their small businesses and make them a reality.

Minecraft enhances life skills like problem-solving, creativity, higher-order thinking skills (HOTS), communication, and collaboration. It helps develop self-confidence for students and also complements academic skills. The platform acts as a stress-buster while providing children with an innovative and ingenious approach to access the curriculum rather than limiting them to rote learning.

Instructors can provide voice, choice, and agency by allowing students to demonstrate their understanding in a variety of ways, using a variety of tools. The subject integration and thematic approach can be tried and tested through Minecraft. As school leaders, we shall encourage our teachers to foster 21^st-century skills using a creative learning environment.

***

Monica Joshi is the head of IT at Sat Paul Mittal School, Ludhiana, Punjab, and her role focuses on technical and management skills. She is a Teach SDGs Ambassador and writes for the organization’s official blog. Her role involves training teachers in IT skills and orienting students with incoming technology. She’s passionate about integrating technology into education and hopes to make projects engaging and fun for students as well as teachers. As a Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert and Global Minecraft Mentor, she has successfully integrated Minecraft across subjects. Follow Monica on Twitter to keep up with her journey!

If you’re new to Minecraft: Education Edition, get started today!

The post Creative Learning and Leadership | Minecraft: Education Edition at India’s Sat Paul Mittal School appeared first on Minecraft: Education Edition.

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Creative Learning and Leadership | Minecraft: Education Edition at India’s Sat Paul Mittal School appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

Pyramids, pharaohs, mummies, and the mighty Nile River… now your emerging Egyptologists have a chance to explore all of their favorite topics in Minecraft: Education Edition!

Enter the world of Ancient Egypt and interact with one of the world’s earliest great powers, learning about its fascinating geography, advanced economy, governing structure, iconic architecture, and unique culture. The team at Phygital Labs has designed the Egypt Toybox, an immersive Minecraft: Education Edition world built to house your learning about this fascinating part of the ancient world.

Five new lessons offer learners the chance to participate in both digital and physical activities. Students will conduct research and engage in rich learning experiences featuring educator-created resources, learning objectives, and guiding questions. How did living on the Nile River impact Egypt’s people and its status as a world power? What aspects of the Ancient Egyptians’ views on the afterlife impacted how they treated the burial process? In what ways was life different for members of various social classes in Ancient Egypt? How are the civilization’s queens remembered throughout time?

Students will explore these questions and more as they take part in game-based learning activities designed to be covered over the course of three weeks in 60-minute sessions. Each lesson provides the resources and questions you’ll need to lead engaging activities and discussions. Take a look at what you’ll find in the Egypt Toybox!

Explore five new lessons on Ancient Egypt

Lesson 1
Students research Ancient Egypt’s history as a world power, its architecture, society, beliefs, and political system. In this first lesson, learners discover how Egypt’s location on the banks of the Nile helped it become a world power.

Lesson 2
Pyramids are the most iconic structures associated with Ancient Egypt. In this lesson, students create architectural marvels through building and carving pyramids and other monuments. They’ll explore whether it’s easier to create a structure by adding or removing material through either building or carving using code.

Lesson 3
Wonder what life was like for different social classes in Ancient Egypt? This lesson examines the roles of different stations in Egyptian society. Students take on the roles of farmers, slaves, temple workers, or rulers and experience a day in the life of different members of Egyptian society.

Lesson 4
Venture inside a tomb to uncover Ancient Egyptian ideas about spirituality and the afterlife. Students will meet famous Egyptologist Howard Carter, whose journal entries will guide their inquiry. Learners unpack Ancient Egyptian symbolism, burial practices, and the purposes behind such elaborate rituals.

Lesson 5
Ancient Egypt’s history reveals that women could take on powerful roles in society. Students research an Egyptian queen and design a tomb for her. They also activate their creative writing skills and draft an autobiography from the queen’s perspective, explaining her journey to power, impact, and legacy.

Try out these lessons with your students and inspire a love for ancient history and civilizations! You’ll find all five in our History and Culture Subject Kit.

If you’re new to Minecraft: Education Edition, get started here.

The post Sift Through the Sands of Time with New Egyptian History Lessons appeared first on Minecraft: Education Edition.

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Sift Through the Sands of Time with New Egyptian History Lessons appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

Indigenous Peoples around the world are the stewards of incredible networks of knowledge and history. By accessing Indigenous wisdom, society as a whole stands to discover millennia of expertise and learn more about our connection with the land we all share. Louis Riel School Division in Winnipeg, the capital of central Canada’s province of Manitoba, wanted to provide students an opportunity to learn about the Anishinaabe Peoples, their cultures, and the histories of their region. So the division partnered with Microsoft Canada and Minecraft: Education Edition to create Manito Ahbee Aki, the world’s first Anishinaabe community built in Minecraft. The project was led by the LRSD Indigenous Council of Grandmothers and Grandfathers, Indigenous Knowledge Keepers from Manitoba, and LRSD’s Indigenous Education staff.

Manito Ahbee Aki transports students back in time to Manitoba as it existed prior to European contact in North America. They’ll live amongst the Anishinaabe Peoples in order to learn and understand how they thrived on this land together while living in harmony with Mother Earth. As a member of the Anishinaabe Nation, learners experience three different phases of the game that will build their understanding of this particular Indigenous worldview as they gain insights from Knowledge Keepers, building respect for the earth and her offerings.

The World of Manito Ahbee Aki

Part 1: The Forks
Students spawn at The Forks, a historic site in Winnipeg and the place where the Red and Assiniboine Rivers meet. This meeting place was also an important gathering site for the Anishinaabe Peoples. At The Forks, Indigenous Peoples would come together to trade and collaborate with each other. The Forks is still a significant meeting place in modern Winnipeg where people gather to explore the region’s history, visit the marketplace, or simply take in the area’s cultural teachings.

Part 2: The Petroforms
Next, students will learn about the Manitoba petroforms, which are ancient rock formations of animals and characters from the Anishinaabe Peoples’ history and culture. As they wander through the petroforms, learners will uncover information about each of these unique creations. Storytelling is a universal human impulse, and by learning about Anishinaabe stories, students will gain a greater appreciation for Indigenous knowledge.

Part 3: Thriving Communities
Finally, the world reinforces the importance of social collaboration and teamwork. Students establish a community by building their tipis, participating in a bison hunt, and establishing food sovereignty through farming. From the bison hunt to agriculture, working together as a team to ensure the community’s food security is an essential lesson in cooperation.

You can also extend the learning with additional activities that explore the Anishinaabe worldview, history, and culture. Learn about the Seven Teachings, Four Medicines, and even Anishinaabemowin vocabulary!

This world is available free in Minecraft: Education Edition’s in-game and online libraries. Explore guiding ideas, lesson plans, and student guides here.

Learn more about Manito Ahbee Aki and start your journey today!

The post Explore Indigenous History and Culture with Manito Ahbee Aki appeared first on Minecraft: Education Edition.

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Explore Indigenous History and Culture with Manito Ahbee Aki appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

Were you taught about money matters in school? Financial literacy is often overlooked in K–12 education, but it sets students up for success and security as they make decisions in adult life. Canadian Learning Experience Designer Blaise Patterson recognized an opportunity for learning and decided to create the Financial Literacy World, a city where students can explore everyday economic decisions. This guest post shares the inspiration for the world, the process of creating it, and how this open-ended activity can help your students explore financial decisions.

I work with Fair Chance Learning, a Canadian organization devoted to elevating learning experiences and opportunities for all students. We believe professional learning should be transformative learning. Our intentional, bespoke programming empowers educators to create impactful learning experiences through engaging and accessible resources.

As the connecting factor between the learner and the learning tool, we see our share of challenges and opportunities. On one hand, every school district we have the pleasure of working with has its own unique set of technical and curricular demands. However, we ourselves can also experiment with new learning tools and, after critical consideration, introduce them to learners. It’s something that’s often accomplished by the innovative few found in each organization, but it’s not as easily achievable district-wide.

When I was studying human development during my post-secondary education, I became aware of the abundance of people in the education space who believe that video games are detrimental to development. Having grown up playing video games, I felt there were many benefits that they weren’t considering: the ways gaming encouraged critical thinking to solve puzzles, problem-solving through the ability to fail and retry, and communication skills when playing with friends. I believed that a reform was needed and wanted to work towards making a change.

I discovered Minecraft: Education Edition while studying for my M.Ed., where I focused my research on best practices for implementing technology in the classroom. Minecraft seemed like a natural addition because of its open-ended nature. I learned about all the amazing tools for learning that had been integrated into this version of the game and began advocating for its use in the classroom. It became the focus of several projects, one of which spoke to the importance of blending communities of practice. Minecraft: Education Edition is a perfect example of how educators can work with game developers to create an engaging and effective tool for learning.

Within my current role, I have the exciting opportunity to build content in Minecraft: Education Edition and support educators with integrating it into their classrooms. This role allows me to examine areas in the existing catalog of Minecraft lesson plans and consider where there are curricular gaps. In my experience, most educators are interested in the game, but they need support with curriculum connections due to their unfamiliarity with the software. Seeing as my home province of Ontario recently introduced a new math curriculum, it seemed like an opportune moment to utilize Minecraft: Education Edition.

I began by creating resources that link the new Ontario learning strands to the amazing content that exists on the Minecraft: Education Edition website. The intent was to leverage existing content and recommended best practices to create an easy lift for educators who are new to Minecraft. Through this process, I discovered the necessity of a world focused on financial literacy. Not only is financial literacy a newly added learning strand in the Ontario curriculum, but it’s also a crucially under-discussed topic.

The Financial Literacy World is a project I care deeply about because I’ve had to make many important financial decisions myself in recent years, and I felt my schooling inadequately prepared me to face them. We didn’t discuss things like buying a mortgage versus renting, financing versus leasing a car, and savings behaviors when I was in school. It took me a while to learn how to budget effectively so that I could feel confident with paying bills, paying off student debt, and buying the necessary items to survive each month—not to mention occasionally spending money on things for my mental wellbeing!

The world came together as an open-ended activity. Upon entering the world, students must approach the non-player character (NPC) in front of them, who will give them the option to start. From here, they’re free to explore the world and its various areas. There’s a shopping plaza, an auto mall, a model home display, a bank, a park, and a residential area, each with its own opportunities for spending, saving, and experimentation. They can choose to take a camera initially or return to the same NPC to get one later. The camera helps them take pictures to document their experiences and decisions. All of their purchases, income, and expenses are calculated in-game, so they’re free to explore the world and make decisions on their own.

Once the time you’ve allocated for the lesson is up, students visit city hall, where they must speak to an NPC to go inside. This action ends the passive income and expenses, and players can add up their remaining money. Learners who bought their house and car can sell them to receive additional money. Once everyone has added up and recorded their income, they can discuss crucial financial literacy questions.

What decisions did they make that led to their final balance? What were the pros and cons of using money out of pocket, from a savings account, or from a line of credit? What did they spend on essentials vs. non-essentials? Each of these questions introduces important financial variables and helps students work through critical ideas about spending, saving, and budgeting. Learners can replay this activity as many times as they like to compare their decisions and experiment with how those affected the results.

I tried my best to capture all the elements my education lacked in the Financial Literacy World, whether it was through an actual purchase the player could make or a piece of NPC dialog. I kept challenging myself to consider ways to elevate the experience for players. As aggravating as the debugging phase of the world’s creation was, I’m proud that I could integrate things like passive income, monthly expenses, and buying a home. The intent was to create an approachable world that educators didn’t have to worry about adjusting.

I made one interesting observation about creating a lesson for Minecraft: Education Edition. Many of the skills students develop when playing the game were also present when I was building the learning content: problem-solving technical issues, emotionally regulating when new problems arose, collaborating with others to help create the world, and communicating with the Minecraft: Education Edition team, who helped me with debugging. It speaks to the inherent learning that occurs when using the game, whether you’re creating or playing. I recommend making your own lessons to see what I mean!

What I loved most about building content in Minecraft—beyond being super fun—is that it has expanded my knowledge of the game. Creating the Financial Literacy World required me to learn more about in-game mechanics, which I wouldn’t have considered when just playing. I found that by the time the world was complete, I had a newfound understanding of the game, despite the many hours I had already spent playing. Developing a better understanding of the game through content creation has also supported me with my role’s training component. Having the ability to answer all Minecraft-related questions confidently has led to some trusted relationships between the educators that attend my sessions and me. This dynamic is also true for teaching students.

My team at Fair Chance Learning has seen incredible excitement from school districts considering how they can further integrate Minecraft in the classroom. For many Ontario districts, we have overcome the first obstacle: a willingness to try something new. With the dedication and bravery of those who have taken the first step combined with the outstanding educators who are already advocates, I believe we’ll begin to see Minecraft: Education Edition as a commonly used classroom tool. After all, creating an environment for innovators to collaborate is what Minecraft is all about!

***

Blaise Patterson is a Learning Experience Designer for Fair Chance Learning in Ontario, Canada. He creates programming in collaboration with educational partners and school districts, adapting teaching resources to create engaging learning experiences. Download the Financial Literacy World and access its supporting resources here.

Find more lessons on a wide array of topics in our online lesson library. If you’re new to Minecraft: Education Edition, get started here.

The post Teaching Financial Literacy Through Play with Minecraft: Education Edition appeared first on Minecraft: Education Edition.

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Teaching Financial Literacy Through Play with Minecraft: Education Edition appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

Today, Microsoft shared early progress and learnings on its 10-year strategy to become carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste, and develop a planetary computing platform. You can learn more about Microsoft’s sustainability commitments and read its first annual environmental sustainability report here.

As edtech providers, we know it’s not just the actions we take today that will change the world, but how we imbue learners with a sense of stewardship for the planet. To help you teach students about sustainability, we’ve assembled six new lessons in a brand-new Minecraft: Education Edition world. These lessons are designed to show sustainable processes at work in our daily lives and illustrate how some of the goals and themes in Microsoft’s Annual Sustainability Report might show up in a Minecraft world. Join us on a journey to Sustainability City!

The Sustainability City lessons explore everything a wide range of issues, including the components of a sustainable home, managing waste products, clean electricity generation, responsible forestry, and more. We’re hoping that students will gain the skills to look around them and realize that the fight against climate change and habitat loss isn’t impossible—building a sustainable future actually empowers the economy and quality of life. Enter this epic cityscape with your students!

Explore the Sustainability City Lessons

Sustainable Food Production
Beginning at the town’s grocery store and ending at a honey stand, students explore sustainable practices for every step of food production. By visiting a farm, a waste facility, and a recycling plant, they’ll learn that the food they purchase is made up of multiple products and services, and each should be sustainable.

Outflow Order
In this lesson, students will learn about the mysterious and interesting world of water treatment and what happens to water outflow. They’ll discover how water gets from their drains to the treatment plant, how biosolids contribute to fertilizer, and how treated water returns to their homes.

It’s Good to Be Green
Learners visit the local recycling plant, then explore the landfill and waste-to-energy plant. Through these experiences, they’ll find out what materials are recyclable and what happens to materials that aren’t. Students will also learn about energy generation with recyclable material and sustainable landfills.

Dependable Forests
Students step into a sustainable forest, starting at a lumberyard where they’ll see stored lumber intended for buildings, paper, or yard material. Then they hike into the woods to see what a 40-year sustainable forest cycle looks like. The journey continues down a trail where learners encounter a conservationist and a local hiker. Throughout their trek, students will come to understand the social, economic, and environmental impacts of responsible forestry.

Sustainable Home
This lesson visits a home built using sustainable materials and explores the features that contribute to efficiency. Students make connections with other areas of the city where the house’s materials originate. Throughout the experience, they’ll come to understand the complexities of creating a sustainable home and what they can do to contribute to energy efficiency.

Alternative Energy
Students begin their exploration at a hydropower plant, learning how it works from friendly non-player characters. Once they‘ve passed through the plant, they climb a ladder to explore wind power and even have a chance to restart one of the turbines for the plant’s workers! Finally, learners hop into a minecart to travel the power lines and see how the plant powers the entire city.

We hope these lessons will inspire your students to seek out sustainable solutions and build eco-friendly habits in their everyday lives. You can find all of these resources for Minecraft: Education Edition in our Science Subject Kit. To make sure as many learners as possible can access this awesome world, Sustainability City will be releasing today for other versions of Minecraft in the Education Collection in the Minecraft Marketplace at no additional cost. Join us in building a better world!

Find more opportunities to teach and learn about sustainability with our Earth Day resources. If you’re new to Minecraft: Education Edition, head to education.minecraft.net/get-started.

The post Sustainability City: Explore Energy Efficiency in the Urban Space appeared first on Minecraft: Education Edition.

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Sustainability City: Explore Energy Efficiency in the Urban Space appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month are important opportunities to teach students about the history of Civil Rights and the ongoing struggle for social justice and racial equity. To celebrate, we’re offering four new lessons and a free demo experience to support teachers as they address these critical topics. Students can learn about the life and activism of Dr. King, investigate ideas behind identity, experience important moments in the American Civil Rights movement, and learn how Black Lives Matter is continuing the work of racial justice.

We want everyone to be able to engage with equity and inclusion, so we’re making our Good Trouble world available as a free demo from January 14 to February 28. This immersive experience is based on the life and teachings of Civil Rights leader and US Congressman John Lewis. It invites learners on a journey through historic and present-day social movements around the world, from the Victorian Suffragettes and the struggle for Indian independence to Malala’s Yousafzai’s fight for women’s education in Afghanistan, and more!

Plus, we have two new accompanying lessons on the modern Black Lives Matter and US Civil Rights movements that will help you support conversations and learning around Black History Month. Anyone with a Windows device, Mac, iPad, or Chromebook can access this world as login-free demo. Just download Minecraft: Education Edition and enter the free demo experience to explore the impact that stirring up good trouble can have on the world.

To help educators prepare for leading Black History Month lessons with this new content, we’re also hosting two virtual lesson jams. These free, online playthrough parties featuring the creators of the Good Trouble world will introduce the key concepts behind the learning content and how you can use it with students. They’re also a great chance to connect with other educators! Register now to join our team on February 4 at 9:00 AM or 4:00 PM PT.

Four New Lessons on Social Justice, Identity, and Civil Rights

Who is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?
Students work together to create museum galleries depicting different aspects of Dr. King’s identity. This lesson unpacks the social factors that contributed to his identity, his personal characteristics, how he influenced others, and more.

The “I” in Identity
In this lesson, students reflect on who they are, what shapes them, and how they might appear to others. Learners build and curate a museum collection to represent aspects of their identities and share them with their peers. They’ll also come to understand the visible and non-visible elements of identity.

Good Trouble: US Civil Rights
Meet the activists of the US Civil Rights Movement as they march, ride, sit, and stand to act as catalysts for Good Trouble, racial justice, and equality. Enter the Good Trouble world to visit famous moments in the history of the movement. Destinations include the confrontation with police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-Ins, and Rosa Parks’ protest against public segregation.

Good Trouble: Black Lives Matter
Head into the Good Trouble world to join activists in Black Lives Matter Plaza as they stand together as catalysts for good trouble and seek racial justice for the Black community. Learn about some of the key motivations for the movement, its cultural context, its outcomes on society, and how de-centralized activism can be a powerful force for change.

These lessons were authored by educators with support from Teaching Tolerance. A project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to support social justice and anti-bias education in K-12 schools.

We’re proud to provide ways for students to activate their passion for empathy and inclusion. We hope that getting to know key figures in the fight for social justice will inspire young people to build a better world for everyone through the power of play.

If you’re new to Minecraft: Education Edition, take your first steps into game-based learning at education.minecraft.net/get-started.

The post Celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month with New Lessons and a Free Demo World appeared first on Minecraft: Education Edition.

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month with New Lessons and a Free Demo World appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

When teachers use Minecraft: Education Edition for lessons, they usually operate in creative mode so students aren’t bothered by scarcity and the business of resource gathering—not to mention monstrous mobs prowling in the night! But Canadian educator Jim Pedrech encourages his students to lean into the challenge of survival mode as a tool for writing fiction in his English classes. Read his story in this guest post.

You know you should not be here. It was a risky decision to explore so far into the wilderness, so far from your makeshift shelter. That pile of wood and stone is not much, but at least it offers some protection from the creatures that hiss and moan in the darkness. You can still see the faint glow from the last of the lights you planted to indicate your path home. But with every step, that glow grows more distant. A few more steps and one wrong turn are all it will take for you to lose sight of them for good…

Why is Writing Fiction Hard?

Writing fiction can be hard. Very hard. In fact, for some learners, writing a work of fiction is incredibly daunting. Imagine what they might be thinking: “So, I need to craft a story, use compelling words, generate tension and stakes, and then achieve some sort of resolution. Oh! And we know authors can take years to craft their stories, but you want me to accomplish all of this in 3 days. Great.”

Even if students come up with an idea that intrigues them, it doesn’t mean the story will work. Over the years, I’ve found that students can fixate on a big narrative motion at the expense of the smaller moments that make good stories memorable. They try to frame entire epics in a thousand words, jumping between narrative points that lack the connective tissue necessary for compelling stories. Because they’re focused on telling the story, they cannot focus on how to tell the story. Plot points that show promise are not fully explored. Characters’ thoughts and emotions are summarized, not revealed, and thus lack the power to impact the reader.

How Does Playing Minecraft help?

Imagine that Minecraft isn’t a game, but reality. You wake up in an unfamiliar world, full of wild animals, lush vegetation, and, inexplicably, oversized mushrooms. Or perhaps you awake alone in a barren desert with massive stone mountains in the distance. Maybe you’re jolted from sleep by frigid water, and, steeling yourself against the cold, you swim slowly and deliberately for the icy shore. Wherever you find yourself, the game has already provided you with an essential element of storytelling: a setting.

Once you’ve got your bearings, what do you do? Explore the region? Scavenge for food? Build a shelter? Notice how these activities are really a series of much smaller tasks. Building a shelter, for example, requires you to collect resources, think of a layout, and stack wood—or, if you’re lucky, stone. Normally, you might skip these elements in your storytelling because you don’t see them fully; you might describe the process of building in a single sentence and move on. This time, however, you see these steps because you’ve played them. Essentially, your experiences are your brainstorming. Now that you have a sequential series of events, you can start writing. You can describe the materials in detail using a series of prompts you find in the classroom. Handy, right? Your story feels a lot more like, well, a story.

It’s nighttime now, and life is suddenly a lot more complicated. This world, which had once seemed so peaceful, is crawling with monsters. Strange, moaning creatures shamble through the night. Eight-legged monstrosities jump out of nowhere. Ominous hisses echo through the cave just steps away from your shelter. Of course, you are prepared. You have your trusty sword and armor, crafted in your very own forge. Using all the cunning you can muster, you evade the monsters throughout the night, reaching a nearby hilltop just as the sun rises and sets the creatures aflame. Now that is a story you can tell.

Or maybe you’re not prepared. Maybe you are petrified of these creatures. You spend the night huddled in your shelter, desperately waiting for the sun to rise. Perhaps you’ve ventured too far from home. Those torches you planted? Lost to the night. You are alone, with no way home. Suddenly, you see movement in the distance. Panic. You bolt, running wildly across the plain, desperately searching for anything that can shelter you from that fleshless thing and its deadly arrows.

Can you write that story? Of course you can. You just played it.

The Writing Tasks

Over four periods, students in my English class played Minecraft to help them write survival fiction. Essentially, they had to imagine that the gameplay was real. They wrote about their experiences in the first person, imbuing their work with descriptive adjectives and powerful verbs from a list tailored to their mission for the day. Those missions, ranging from building a shelter to dealing with monsters, served as their brainstorming. These experiences freed the students to focus on the how of the storytelling because the what had already happened.

It can take a few periods for the students to find their voice. But when they do, good things happen. There are still moments that need development, maybe a sequence that is rushed instead of fully explored. However, there is also emotion and compelling storytelling, the kind of storytelling that makes you want to read more.

At the end of the fourth task, my principal and I asked my students how they felt about their writing. The overwhelming consensus?

• The students had written more for these tasks than for any they could recall.
• Despite the length of their responses, the students felt that writing had been easy because they had so much to work with. Their gameplay had been their brainstorming.
• They were proud of their work. Many believed that it was the best writing they had ever done.
• Several said they felt more confident about their writing.

That, I think, is a story worth telling.

Jim Pedrech is an English and Canadian and World Studies Department Head in Southwestern Ontario. His goal is to provide rich and meaningful learning experiences for his students. He’s particularly interested in the roles that technology, especially video games, can play in education. In collaboration with his students, he has created video games designed to teach students about Victorian England, Ancient Egypt, and even grammar. He uses Minecraft to generate writing and for historical recreations such as archeological digs.

For the last four years, Jim has been working on the Scanning History Project, which encourages students to scan historical artifacts and add them to a virtual museum that uses the Unity game engine. He has presented at conferences in Toronto, Ottawa, Seattle, Budapest, Monterey, and Salzburg.

***

Find more opportunities for teaching writing in the English Language Arts Pack, created in partnership with the National Writing Project. If you’re new to Minecraft: Education Edition, begin your odyssey at education.minecraft.net/get-started.

The post Using Minecraft to Write Survival Fiction appeared first on Minecraft: Education Edition.

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Using Minecraft to Write Survival Fiction appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

A resourceful team from Teesside University in the UK came together to help new students connect during the pandemic using Minecraft: Education Edition. Read how they created a beautiful forum where incoming students could meet and build relationships in this guest post by one of the project’s leaders, Dr. Helen Tidy, Principal Lecturer in Learning and Teaching at Teesside’s School of Health and Life Sciences.

Teaching in the COVID era has led to challenges for all of us in education, whether that’s arranging students in onsite classrooms to conducting meaningful and interactive distance learning experiences. A particular problem facing institutions is how to induct students into their university world safely and securely while still providing opportunities for them to meet other new students to form those start-of-term connections that are so important.

This was the problem we faced at Teesside University, based in Middlesbrough in the UK. How can we carry out a completely online university induction and still get the students to talk and interact with each other and establish connections? We all know that teaching online can be a challenging experience, with a virtual classroom of students who refuse to turn on their cameras or answer any questions. Traditionally, we do the “getting to know you” induction session based on some activity or game where the students work in groups to undertake a task. The main aim of the session is remembering classmates’ names and having a giggle. But capturing it in an online environment presents difficulties. And that’s where we thought Minecraft: Education Edition might be the answer!

Firstly, it’s important to provide some context on how we use Minecraft: Education Edition at Teesside University. We are privileged to have Dr. Helen Carney on our staff, who has been innovating with the use of Minecraft in her teaching for about five years now. Dr. Carney has developed the most wonderful virtual field trip that examines biodiversity using Minecraft: Education Edition, which was used this summer by the British Ecological Society. The field trip allows groups of students to interact with each other and their environment within the virtual world. It is this interaction and innovation that we thought we could utilize in establishing a Minecraft-based induction activity. With those thoughts at the forefront of our minds, we established the Teesside University Minecraft Education Induction Team:

• Helen Carney, our team leader and innovator
• Callum Anderson, one of the university’s outdoor activities officers
• Alex Wood, a Ph.D. student who has worked with Dr. Carney on previous Minecraft: Education Edition projects
• Me, Dr. Helen Tidy

We spent the summer of 2020 developing a range of resources to be used in the induction. We wanted something that would be novel, fun, and engaging—an activity students could undertake as part of a team with little or no knowledge of Minecraft to help them get to know their peers and introduce them to Teesside University. The answer was to develop the Magma Challenge, an interactive activity where students work in groups to build a bridge across a pit of lava that has mysteriously appeared on the Teesside University campus. We used a combination of Minecraft: Education Edition and Microsoft Teams to run the sessions, allowing students in each group to talk with each other and their staff mentor while undertaking the task in Minecraft. To help prepare, we provided seven training sessions to approximately 45 academic members of staff to allow them to lead the sessions confidentially.

The activity was designed to be split into three distinct sections. Students undertook the first independently; they were able to wander around our wonderful campus in Minecraft while getting to know the controls. The second is where the use of Microsoft Teams combined with Minecraft: Education Edition came into play. Students would meet with their supervising member of staff in small groups in Teams to be briefed on the activity. Once they were briefed, students joined their groups in the Magma Challenge world, where they worked as a team to build a bridge across the lava while competing against up to three other groups. Verbal communication took place within each group’s Teams channel.

The last part of the activity took place once the challenge had been completed. The supervising member of staff chatted to the students through Teams, discussing how they found the task and bringing the session to a close. In total, students on 15 courses ranging from Dental Hygiene to Airline and Airport Management to Sport and Exercise Science used Minecraft as one of their online induction activities.

To say we had a blast is an understatement! There was plenty of laughter and conversation in all the sessions as students were drawn into the task—and we ran this induction with many students across a variety of courses. I led a session with a group of Animal Sciences students, a particular highlight for me. When they arrived virtually in the Teams group, they were quiet and wouldn’t turn their cameras on. 30 minutes later—and one lava pit successfully conquered—the students were back in our group Teams meeting with their cameras on, animatedly discussing what the best show on Netflix was. We accomplished exactly what the session had set out to achieve: students got to know peers on their courses and began to feel comfortable with them.

The student feedback itself reflects the general feeling of fun and laughter the session created. One Airline and Airport Management student described their experience: “I thought this was really creative and fun. I was laughing quite a lot!” A Business Management student appreciated the game-based aspects of the induction, saying, “It was great building the bridge and falling in the lava lol… it was a good giggle.” Other students’ feedback focused on how helpful it was to get to know the people on their team and put names to faces. The staff were just as keen. One of our staff members described their groups’ reaction to the sessions: “Groups really enjoyed their session, and it really does encourage the students to communicate and work together. Equally, it was a fun activity. I also loved the sessions!”

Minecraft: Education Edition was the perfect solution to our induction problem. It allowed us to create a safe, secure environment where students could get to know the campus and each other. More importantly, it allowed us to accomplish this in a fun and engaging manner. I can’t wait to see where Teesside University’s Minecraft journey goes next!

Find out more about ways to use Minecraft to support students during remote and Hybrid learning. If you’re new to Minecraft: Education Edition, start your journey at education.minecraft.net/get-started.

The post Teesside University Welcomes New Students in a Virtual Campus appeared first on Minecraft: Education Edition.

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Teesside University Welcomes New Students in a Virtual Campus appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

In the spring of 2020, Canadian schools were in the midst of closures due to the global pandemic. Teachers were looking for ways to engage students virtually. The Canadian edtech trainers at Logics Academy came up with a plan: a countrywide storytelling challenge for students with Minecraft: Education Edition as their medium! Read this guest post about the competition from the team at Logics and experience the incredible student builds.

When schools first closed due to pandemic restrictions, Canadian teachers were looking for ways to connect with students in their newly virtual learning environments. To help fill this need, Logics Academy partnered with Microsoft Canada to engage with educators and students using Minecraft: Education Edition. Between March and June, we facilitated Minecraft educator training classes and sensed that there was an opportunity to take these learnings to the next level by creating a contest directed at students, supported by teachers. After discussing the concept with some local Minecraft ambassadors, Logics determined that a Canadian storytelling theme would allow students from across the country to tell their local stories using a specialized world with Canadian settings and scenes from the Northwest Territories to Newfoundland. The Canadian Storytelling in Minecraft contest would be a fun and remote-friendly way to close out a tough school year.

Our team created a website with instructions and FAQs, which included information about a series of virtual drop-in training sessions conducted through Microsoft Teams. During these sessions, teachers and students could learn more about Minecraft: Education Edition and the contest. Logics also partnered with Mindshare Learning Technology to provide prizes for the teams as part of the Schools of the Future Challenge. Their contribution helped to create a more competitive environment, which resulted in some fantastic applications.

With just under four weeks to announce the contest and gather submissions before the summer break, students and classrooms all across the country participated. Some students developed stories independently, and others worked together as a team. Most learners received guidance from a teacher or mentor in addition to the Logics drop-in classes to help their work progress. Students used Flipgrid to record their final videos, and those videos were submitted to a jury who would assess the content.

At the end of the summer, after hours of difficult deliberation by the jury, we selected three winners from across Canada. The prizes varied from podcasting equipment to educational robots and laptops, but more importantly, the students’ accomplishments were celebrated in their schools and greater communities. Take a look at the three winning entries and hear what the teachers had to say about their students’ amazing work.

Third place went to Harman Patel from Williams Parkway Public School in Brampton, Ontario. Harman decided to tell the story of Terry Fox, a famous Canadian athlete and advocate for cancer research. His virtual story follows Fox on the first Marathon of Hope, tracing the cross-country journey that has inspired millions of people worldwide. Watch a video of the submission here.

Harman’s teacher, Dilip Banerjee, had this to share about the experience: “The Canadian Storytelling in Minecraft contest was the perfect extension to offer my students, as it tied in extremely well with their lessons in language and social studies in a manner that they would find fun and stimulating. We were in the midst of distance learning—a difficult time for many students—and the contest was an ideal activity for them to focus on independently. Harman embraced this opportunity and took the initiative to research Terry Fox, producing a detailed, creative, and moving account of Terry’s courageous run across Canada.”

In second place, Alexander Coghill from Woodcrest Public School in Thunder Bay, Ontario, produced a recreation of the Fort William Historical Park in his home city. This fort was an important part of early Canada’s colonial history. Alexander made sure to include an acknowledgement of the First Nations in the region and efforts to reconcile settler Canadians with the country’s First Peoples. His submission is a fascinating and immersive dive into the fur trade in the early 1800s! See his highly detailed work here.

Kris Sandberg, Alexander’s teacher and a Global Minecraft Mentor, had this to say about the experience: “Alex is a tremendously gifted Minecraft player and amazing storyteller, capturing the history of Fort William Historical Park. It was my honor to be a part of this project where the teacher was definitely the student.”

And finally, a team from Millidgeville North School in St. John, New Brunswick, took the first prize! This team was made up of five students: Annika Roderick, Hejin Wang, Jonathan Corscadden, George English, and Sam Kikuchi. Their build told the story of Stephen Blucke, a Black loyalist in Nova Scotia. This project addresses tough issues of slavery, colonialism, and the difficulties that have faced the Black community as modern North America took shape.

Matthew MacTavish, the team’s teacher adviser, shared this about the experience: “I’d like to acknowledge the exceptional Minecraft building skills of Jonathan Corscadden, George English, and Sam Kikuchi, which allowed the story to take shape in a vivid and detailed setting. I’d also like to thank Hejin Wang and Annika Roderick for the leadership, vision, and hard work they displayed while planning the project and filming and editing the final product. It was an absolute pleasure to teach and support this team of exceptional students who—even after the 2020 school year had officially ended in June—still came together to collaborate on this fun learning experience. Way to make all of us teachers and your fellow students at Millidgeville North School very proud!”

The experience was rewarding for both students and teachers, and even garnered attention from national news outlets. Alex Coghill’s project on Fort William Historical Park appeared in a story about Lakehead Public Schools, his local district. His work was eventually broadcast across Northern Ontario on CBC north, part of Canada’s national broadcaster! The historical site was so impressed that they honored him and his school at an outdoor presentation, awarded him a prize pack, and gifted all the grade 7 students a free day trip—to take place after lockdown restrictions are loosened, of course. He was also named youth ambassador and spokesperson for Fort William.

His educator mentors for this project created a Minecraft Club during the pandemic as a way to encourage students to stay engaged and creative. They had embraced Minecraft as a teaching and learning tool early on, and when the contest was announced, they promoted it to their members. Alex was a keen and talented adopter, and as a result of his win and the related fanfare, the club has taken off.

Kristopher Sandberg outlines the value of their Minecraft Club in a remote and hybrid learning setting: “Minecraft continues to be an integral part of our learning in the class. Students anxiously wait for me to put Minecraft on our daily schedule. We’ve used it to help understand circuits as we did some Redstone builds and then made our own roller coasters. We’ve studied Indigenous treaties and rights through time using Minecraft as a place to showcase learning and understanding. We also took part in the #BeeCreative challenge in September. Students enjoyed making a variety of bee-friendly habitats for these important pollinators. Finally, we had quite a few students participate in the Minecraft Global Build Championship. They were very eager to try and put a winning submission into the contest. Starting next month, we’ll begin a Minecraft Club at recess time. Very rarely are we able to entice students to stay in on their lunch break, but the Minecraft Club is always popular, and students can’t wait to get their creativity on! I’ve recently been asked to help our teachers set their students up with Minecraft lessons and ideas to help engage them during remote learning. We know it’s a great way to help engage students, especially when taking part in distance learning, where connecting and collaborating with peers can be hard.”

This contest gave students the opportunity to get creative and enhance their Minecraft skills during the pandemic months when they couldn’t be in class. Their teacher mentors encouraged participation in the challenge as a way to use their own learnings from recent Minecraft: Education Edition trainings, working alongside their students to apply new concepts in the virtual space and promote collaboration. It was a win-win for everyone, and we look forward to continuing the tradition with another competition in 2021!

If you and your colleagues would be excited for an opportunity to get trained with Minecraft: Education Edition, explore providers in your region. You’ll find plenty of engaging Build Challenges to spark creativity and collaboration for your students here. You can find out how to download and start using Minecraft: Education Edition at education.minecraft.net/get-started.

The post Canadian Storytelling in Minecraft: A Creative Response to Teaching During a Pandemic appeared first on Minecraft: Education Edition.

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Canadian Storytelling in Minecraft: A Creative Response to Teaching During a Pandemic appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

2020 has had its ups and downs for sure, but in spite of all the challenges facing educators and students, incredible things have been happening around the world. As we round the corner into 2021, we want to enter a new year with a spirit of hope and celebration by looking back over some of this year’s most exciting moments. Follow along with us as we share the Minecraft: Education Edition highlights of 2020!

The Move to Remote Learning

No review of the past year can ignore the massive impact of the global pandemic. Lockdowns and social distancing restrictions made the conventional classroom experience impossible. Educators worldwide had to find creative ways to keep learning going, even when students were staying home. In response to lockdown measures, we announced that Minecraft: Education Edition would be available through the end of the 2019–2020 school year to anyone with an Office 365 Education account.

Many educators discovered that Minecraft was an ideal tool for creating a virtual and hybrid classroom experience, giving students the chance to connect and collaborate as they learned from home. You can read stories about the innovative ideas for remote learning solutions that dedicated teachers dreamed up, including virtual re-creations of schools in New York State, architectural exploration in Wales, and citywide collaboration in Canada.

We knew that graduating students would be upset about missing the opportunity to celebrate their achievements. Many university students decided to take matters into their own hands by re-creating their campuses to host virtual ceremonies in Minecraft. Inspired by campus builds like Berkeley University’s Blockeley U, our team decided to create the Graduation World as a space for educators and students to celebrate the end of a tough school year together.

Remote and hybrid learning continue in many places, and we hope you’ll take advantage of our resources and training to help support your students in or out of the classroom.

Big Moments for Minecraft: Education Edition

2020 wasn’t all about lockdowns and remote learning. There were some massive announcements from our team as well! The biggest came in August when we revealed that Minecraft: Education Edition would be available on Chromebooks for the first time. This announcement meant that millions of students would be able to access Minecraft for learning. We’ve even made it possible for learners to use their Google for Education credentials for easier access through single-sign-on. And we couldn’t resist a bit of fun with our Back-to-School Update, so we brought bees into Minecraft: Education Edition to help teach students about pollinators!

For another first, October marked the launch of the inaugural Minecraft Education Global Build Championship. This international competition invited students to reimagine a world where humans and animals can coexist safely and happily in a school, home, workplace, or public space situated in one of five habitats. We received over 1,250 entries from students sharing their exciting ideas for an ecologically sustainable future. In the end, a team from Canada took the top prize with a truly epic turtle research habitat. You can see their entry and the rest of the winners here!

One handy update made it easier than ever for teachers to get lessons and learning content to their students. Educators now have the ability to share worlds and lessons to Microsoft Teams from within Minecraft: Education Edition!

We also wanted to ensure teachers felt supported with the right resources to keep them on the cutting edge of game-based learning and pedagogy, so we assembled two new training resources. The newly updated Teacher Academy takes educators through an 11-course learning path designed to build a foundation for using Minecraft in the classroom. The brand-new Coding Academy takes the learning a step further, outlining the ways you can use Minecraft: Education Edition to teach computer science. Our brand-new Community Hub contains mountains of helpful support materials and a place where educators can connect with colleagues to share ideas, get help from peers, or just chat about all things Minecraft.

A Whole World of New Teaching Content

2020 was one of our biggest years ever for new lessons and learning material. We tried to make sure there was something for everyone, across almost any subject you can name. Here are some of our most exciting highlights:

• Hour of Code: A Minecraft Tale of Two Villages explored empathy and inclusion through the power of code as students attempted to smooth over the grudge between Villagers and Illagers.
• The Build with Bees lessons helped students understand the secret—and fascinating—lives of these apex pollinators, from their anatomy and life cycle to how they collect nectar and produce honey.
• Conversations around race, equity, and inclusion came to the forefront in 2020, so we worked with educators and Teaching Tolerance to create Good Trouble: Lessons in Social Justice. The first lesson came out in October, and there are more on the way in 2021!
• In a year like this, student well-being is an essential focus for educators. Social-emotional learning content laid a foundation for building mindfulness, self-expression, digital citizenship, and more.
• It was a big year for computer science learning. We wanted to provide students with a path from the beginning of their coding journey to more advanced programming challenges. Our updated Computer Science Subject Kit now includes more than 150 hours of coding content arranged in a helpful progression from beginner to advanced lessons. Coding FUNdamentals progresses through three imaginative adventures as students learn to code. Artificial Intelligence lessons help learners engage with this exciting realm of computer science. Finally, two sets of Python lessons offer activities in a more advanced programming language. You’ll find all of these lessons and more in one epic resource: the Computer Science Subject Kit.
• Earth Day offered a chance to explore sustainable energy and urban design with the Lumen City and Power Challenges across two massive worlds, one set in a sprawling city and another amidst a series of power facilities.
• With Esports igniting students’ imaginations, we released a fantastical set of worlds where students could take part in competitive and collaborative build battles.
• The English Language Arts Pack included ten lessons designed to help students work on their reading and writing skills, from setting to character to narrative structure.
• If history fascinated your students, they could experience an in-depth look at the background, conditions, tactics, and technology of World War I in a new lesson pack.
• Learners had the chance to strap in and blast off to the International Space Station where they could explore space science in ten lessons, including physics, engineering, botany, psychology, and more.

There’s something for everyone in our 2020 content, and we know these lessons will continue to inspire students in the years to come!

Striking Stories from the Global Educator Community

It’s always educators who inspire us most, especially in such a challenging year. We heard from passionate leaders across the globe about the ways they use Minecraft: Education Edition to empower and delight their learners.

• In Atlanta, the Minecraft Student Ambassador Program gave students the chance to lead learning for their peers and teachers alike!
• More than 1,000 students from 31 schools participated in the first national NAIDOC Minecraft Education Challenge in Australia, blending Indigenous knowledge with modern technology to envision a different world.
• At Villanova University in Pennsylvania, a Classical Studies professor explored Roman ruins and scenes from the Iliad with Minecraft.
• The Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Centre partnered with our team to conduct research into how Minecraft supports math learning in Australian classrooms. The results were fascinating—and very encouraging!
• For Safer Internet Day, the Microsoft team in Croatia hosted a competition in a Minecraft world to teach students about online etiquette, safety, and digital citizenship.
• Girls Who Game empowered female students to pursue STEM through a country-wide build challenge in Canada.
• Wales launched a series of educator-led Minecraft Learning Centers to help teachers across the country build their game-based learning skills.
• Regional build challenges were all the rage, with national competitions in Germany, Norway, Turkey, and many more.
• When faced with the challenges of the worldwide pandemic, educators in Victoria, Australia, developed creative solutions for teaching in remote and hybrid learning environments using Minecraft.
• The Minecraft: Education Edition China Summer Camp invited students in China to take part in a summer of learning, with free lessons, online workshops, and a build challenge that produced some fantastic creations.

When you’re working with educators, you don’t have to look far to see the passion and inspiration that drives their work day-in and day-out. Nothing makes us more grateful to support their work than hearing amazing stories like these!

Now that we’re finally leaving 2020 behind, we want to thank every teacher who’s gone the extra mile for their students and innovated new ways to use Minecraft: Education Edition. We know you’ll continue to do great things in the coming months and years. Here’s to a great 2021!

If these stories have inspired you to begin your Minecraft: Education Edition journey, head to education.minecraft.net/get-started to take your first steps.

The post Minecraft: Education Edition’s Bright Lights of 2020 appeared first on Minecraft: Education Edition.

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Minecraft: Education Edition’s Bright Lights of 2020 appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

To correspond with Native American Heritage Month in the United States, our November Build Challenge was all about Indigenous Stories. We invited students around the world to celebrate the rich and diverse cultures, traditions, and histories of the First Peoples in their regions by researching their stories and building them in Minecraft: Education Edition. It was interesting to see different traditions represented in so many different ways. Take a look at this month’s student creations!

The traditional culture of India was very well-represented in this month’s challenge. Namya Joshi decided to tell a story from the Ramayana and created an entire city to house her narrative! Her walled complex contained space for wildlife, homes for the people, and an enormous palace. She used non-player characters as storytellers that would reveal parts of the Rama’s adventures as the player moved throughout the world.

Simar Mohanty also shared a story of ancient heroes and their exploits by representing the Punjab tale of Chirri and Kaa, a small bird and their not-so-helpful neighbor, a crow. She set her story in a giant jungle and created enormous models to represent the main characters at different stages of the narrative. Her world operated like an immense virtual comic book!

Chinmay Jagga started his story in a fantastically large library and shared information about the Gondi people, including their ancient astronomical knowledge, aspects of their religion, and their place in modern Indian society.

Piyush Bhange chose the story of Ganesha. He created colossal statues of Ganesha and an elephant, and provided a magnificent view of his build. If you haven’t heard the story of why Ganesha has the head of an elephant, Piyush’s Build Challenge is an excellent way to learn!

Here’s one that will sound familiar to many people around the world. Punit Bhange shared his own take on the classic fable about the tortoise and the rabbit. His build includes statues of both characters as they’re about to set off on a race and the immense racecourse where they’ll compete. It’s interesting to see how some stories emerge in many different regions in the world.

Our final entry in India comes from Avina, who represented one of the many tales about Akbar and Birbal. In this story, Akbar bets Birbal that he can’t find someone who will spend the night in an ice-cold lake, and the story unfolds from there. Avina used the Book and Quill to record the text of the story and engaged Immersive Reader to narrate the story to her audience.

In the United States, a group of Liz Bradley’s students decided to depict a variety of stories from Indigenous cultures in their region. Liam told the story of a troublesome bear that couldn’t be caught, while Shaun shared The Fox and the Stars. Three different students depicted The Star That Does Not Move, a story about how the misadventures of a mountain goat led to the creation of the North Star. Each version, including work from Sailor, Mitchell, and Ryland, re-created the tale just a little differently, displaying the power of a good story to be told and retold.

Finally, we head to Malaysia, where Goh Kok Ming’s students depicted emblematic animals from the cultures of China and Malaysia, including lions, elephants, and tigers. Many cultures attach significance to creatures in the natural world, and it’s fascinating to see both the students’ sculptures and descriptions of what each creature represents.

We appreciated seeing each and every entry for the November Build Challenge. Our team certainly learned a lot from reviewing these builds. If you’re looking for more challenges to engage your students, you can find all of our past activities here. If you’re new to Minecraft: Education Edition, begin your journey at education.minecraft.net/get-started.

The post Students Around the World Shared Indigenous Stories for the November Build Challenge appeared first on Minecraft: Education Edition.

This post was originally published on this site.

The post Students Around the World Shared Indigenous Stories for the November Build Challenge appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.