Introducing Minecraft Education’s AI-Powered Lesson Crafter
27 Nov 2024
Our team has been working on a way to bring the power of AI to Minecraft educators, and today we are excited to unveil Lesson Crafter!
Educators have been using AI tools in all kinds of innovative ways to personalize learning experiences, save time, and inspire creativity. Today, we are announcing a new, AI-powered tool for educators that helps any teacher generate awesome Minecraft lesson plans.
Lesson Crafter is designed exclusively for educators, making it easy to create lessons for Minecraft Education and make learning more engaging, personalized, and impactful. Key features include:
- AI-Powered Lesson Plans: Generate differentiated lessons for any topic and age group with ease.
- Standards-Aligned: Ensure your lessons meet curriculum standards or begin with a standard and build a lesson to support it.
- Effortless Implementation: Lessons start with a blank canvas and let your students' creativity shine. No complex setup or world-building required for you, the educator.
Lesson Crafter is now available in private preview for educators! This preview will allow our team to gather and implement user feedback and make improvements before we roll out the feature to all users in 2025.
THE STORY BEHIND LESSON CRAFTER
Hello, I’m Melinda, and I lead the Minecraft Education product team. We're the engineers and product managers who transform feedback from educators like you into exciting new features for the classroom. Today, I'm excited to share why we built Lesson Crafter, and how it can help you get started teaching with Minecraft.
When I meet an educator who is new to Minecraft Education, my first question is always, "What do you teach?" Because, rather than listing features or sharing case studies (though I'd be happy to do that!), the most important thing I can do is listen.
I believe Minecraft becomes truly meaningful when it solves a problem you're already facing or gives you a new tool to enhance the way you teach. That's why my goal is to help you find a Minecraft lesson that not only sparks excitement in your learners but is also easy for you to implement. I want to connect you with a project idea that you could try out tomorrow … using Minecraft as a creative engine for learning that your students will love.
Because the team and I can't meet with every educator individually (as much as I wish we could!), we've turned to AI to help us bridge that gap. Lesson Crafter is designed to generate high-quality, differentiated, and standards-aligned lesson plans for any topic and age of learner. We've made sure these lessons are easy to understand and implement, even for those new to Minecraft. And, of course, they are uniquely, wonderfully, Minecrafty.
Today, I'm thrilled to offer a sneak peek of Lesson Crafter, now available in private preview. Lesson Crafter taps into Minecraft's superpower as a tool for formative assessment. Each lesson takes place in a blank, flat world that is perfect for building---just like an empty document or blank PowerPoint presentation. This makes it easy for students to focus on creativity and collaboration, and means there's no need to spend time setting up a world before class starts. When you're ready to begin, simply share a link to the world, and your students can get to world crafting their responses to the lesson prompt.
The Lesson Crafter preview is open now, and we'd love for you to be a part of it. You don't need a Minecraft license to sign up, just an M365 educational account with faculty licensing (like your school-issued Entra/AAD account). The preview is available in English and is aligned with US curriculum standards and pedagogy.
Whether you're brand new to Minecraft or have been using it in your classroom for years, we hope you’ll give Lesson Crafter a try, share your feedback, and help us make the tool even better for you and your learners. This is the beginning of a journey and, as with all new functionality we add to Minecraft Education, we want it to be a journey we take with our community.
We hope Lesson Crafter inspires your next lesson, and we can't wait to see what you create.
Thank you for everything you do. Happy crafting!
This blog was written by Melinda Knight, Director of Product, Minecraft Education.
For additional details and resources to get started:
