Student Activities

This activity requires students to have Code Connection open and running with their Minecraft Education Edition.

This activity consists of 2 parts:

Creating Quadrilaterals

Coding Quadrilaterals

Creating Quadrilaterals

Lead a class discussion on quadrilaterals, specifically calling out that they always have 4 sides. It is recommended that students focus on squares and rectangles for this activity, but will be able to extend to parallelograms if advanced coders.

Have each student choose a Minecraft material (such as gold) and build a quadrilateral as a wall (height is actually moving upwards). To start, each student should be given a number between 15 and 30 and are only allowed to make a quadrilateral with that number of blocks.

Using the Area Worksheet, have each student work through their individual shape. You can lead this as a class discussion activity, or as an individual activity. Lead a discussion with the entire class, showing examples of different student’s worksheets and how there is a relationship between adding the number of rows over and over and multiplying the rows by the columns.

Coding Quadrilaterals

After students have completed the Area Worksheet, lead a discussion on the area formula and walk students through the mod that will create their shape AND report the area.

Here is the final code:

And the recommended steps:

• Create your quadrilateral with loops:

• Add parameters and create your quadrilateral with variables:

• Add in the “Say” blocks to explain the steps: