6-7 yrs old
8-10 yrs old
11-13 yrs old
14-18 yrs old
Art and Design
Geography
History
A collaborative, social and creative project where students learn about a country's geography, monuments and culture through Minecraft.
July 20, 2017
Minepark @ Wordpress
A blog documenting the Minecraft activities that students participate in at PaRK International School.
My country, your country @ YouTube
Short video of the learning process and way of working throughout the project.
Pictures
In-game screenshots of various locations and projects.
How can we all work together in groups inside an online world and establish a sustainable and productive workflow for implementing and completing projects?
Can Minecraft help us explore our country's culture in new and original ways, as well as help us demonstrate our learning through the construction of monuments?
Minepark is a Minecraft student project, part of a global educational project called "My country, your country". In “My Country, Your Country”, students from schools around the world get together to create their country geographically through Minecraft. The objective is to offer students an interactive and fun way to study the geography of the ASEM member countries. By setting up public servers, the students communicate over the platforms themselves, where they can also visit each others worlds. In addition, the students document their workflow and post screenshots of their creations on Facebook and blogs.
Some of the objectives of this project include to know the landscape of ASEM countries, foster collaboration among the students and exchange and share information on technology through various discussions. Expected outcomes include the creation of a digital landscape map and images, as well as the understanding of spacial orientation and landscape image. With this contribution, the project expects to build understanding among the participants and minimise stereotypes.
Workflow:
Through a carefully and strategically constructed lesson plan students not only learn about their country's geography and monuments, but are also involved in interdisciplinary learning through disciplines such as Geography, History, English, Engineering and Architecture. The pedagogical impact of this project extends to areas such as the 21st century skills, project planning, team management and research, stimulating the curiosity of the students in unexpected and surprising ways that go beyond simple block placement, such as learning how the game works, working with in-game commands and further investigating their current objectives independently.
The students are given the opportunity to choose their group members as well as the project they want to work on, either a monument or a natural habitat of the country. The students have the liberty to move freely inside the virtual world, as long as they respect the rules and practises defined in the very beginning of the project, such as only change their group and move to a new project when their current one is completed.