Guiding+Activity+(Joel+Crowley)

=Guiding Activity: Joel Crowley=

** PURPOSE **
Students will explore the world of Minecraft. Students will learn through experimentation and exploration how to find or harvest resources and how to use these resources to improve their chance of survival.

** GUIDING QUESTIONS **
What do you need to survive? What items or tools will make survival easier? What situations make survival more challenging? What are your natural advantages? How can you use your advantages to increase your chance of survival?

** OBJECTIVES **
The students will make mistakes and learn from them. The students will generate questions and ideas about survival. The students will record in their “survival journal” a daily recount of what they learned to help future travelers survive in this world. Students will complete a KWL chart about the basic needs of survival.

** ACTIVITIES **
Before the day of the lesson the teacher will need to procure the necessary licenses for students to log on and access the Minecraft website.

Before turning on the computers students will complete the K & W parts of a KWL chart (which will later be added to their Google drive as part of their survival journal)

On the first day of the activity student will receive a slip of paper with this written on it:

You don’t remember much. A ship. A storm. And waves. Big, curling waves that washed over the deck of your ship. The captain steered the ship as best he could but the storm was too fierce and the night too dark. With a bone-breaking crunch, the tall ship mast snapped and all control of the vessel was lost. The screams of your fellow passengers echoed in your ears. One final wave slammed onto the deck and swallowed you whole. Your world disappeared in a sea-green blur. Then all went black.

When you awoke, you found yourself on a beach. Around you, stood your fellow travelers. A word floats through your mind: . You recognize it as your name. That is all you can remember. You do not know where you are. This land is yours to explore. But you must hurry. It will be dark soon and there is much to do. What you do and where you go is up to you.

Welcome to Minecraft.

[|Retrieved from Messy Learning]

On the first day the teacher allows the students to explore this new world and make mistakes that might lead to their characters death. Student will be encouraged to learn from this failure and be sure to include the learning in their journals to help those who will follow in their footsteps. After a set amount of time students will save their games and then access their online story journals to recount their stories of survival and record the information they learned. As a class students will revisit the KWL chart to share their ideas with others about what they learned.

After several sessions students in the class will then work together to create a wiki in the form of a how-to survival guide for Minecraft. This will later be published on the web.

** Links and Extension Resources: **

 * [|Minecraft] **
 * [|Minecraft Wiki] **
 * [|Messy Learning] – Inspiration & source of intro passage **