Code Week Minecraft Live Lesson Review

Publication date: February 8, 2022

Held on the 26th of January 2022, the EU Code Week Live Lesson Minecraft: Education Edition allowed students to be part of an interactive programming lesson by playing a choose-your-own-adventure game, and exploring key moments in human achievement.

Using their coding superpowers, students helped save the future, while solving mysterious mishaps in time.

For this live lesson 39 teachers from 18 countries joined, with around 150 students.  100 were present in their classroom, while the rest joined online. The pictures showing classrooms in this article were taken by Tea Horvatic, teacher from Croatia and Martina Teichman, Leading Teacher and Ambassador in Czech Republic.

With everyone connected via Teams, the live lesson started with a brief presentation of the goals of this live lesson – delivered by the  EU Code Week team and Code Cosmos.

To warm up the atmosphere and raise the level of excitement for the challenges that were about to come, the participants introduced themselves in an interactive Kahoot (game-based learning platform).

The “mine-crafting” started with the timecraft activity, where every participant could interact with the program and choose their own path, according to their coding skills. Beginners could choose a block based programming language, while the more advanced learning had the option of doing the activity in Python.

This activity consisted of two main challenges, and a third optional one.

The first one was a time-split challenge called ‘Big Band Jazz’. Guided by Frank Claikens – creative member of the pedagogical team of CodeCosmos  – students had to save jazz by helping a jazz musician recover his lost trumpets.

For the second challenge students had a different mission: making Mona Lisa smile again! Helped by their teachers, students coded their Time Agent in order to turn Mona Lisa’s frown into her trademark smile.

Besides these two challenges, the participants were invited to solve a third challenge of their choice, among a list of optional challenges:

1 – Great Pyramid of Giza

2 – Mission Moon

3 – Great Wall of China

4 – First Flights

5 – First Programmer

6 – Humans Best Friends

7 – Paleontology Puzzle

8 – Elements of Discovery

With around 30 minutes reserved for each challenge, students had the option to try and solve both challenges and move on to the third optional challenge, or just focus on the first two and make sure to complete them by the end of the lesson.

In the end, most participants completed both challenges, and their hard work was rewarded with a Code Week Certificate of Excellence!