Coding with Minecraft: Education Edition

Publication date: July 17, 2020

by Fatma Bouaziz, Computer science teacher, Minecraft Global Mentor and Europe Code Week Ambassador from Tunisia

Minecraft: Education Edition is an open-world game that promotes creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving in an immersive environment where the only limit is your imagination.

“Minecraft gives us the opportunity to engage more fully with our students.”

– Marie Lindsay Principal, St. Mary’s College, Northern Ireland

Minecraft: Education Edition helps prepare students for the future workplace, building skills like collaboration, communication, critical thinking and systems thinking. The open learning environment gives students the freedom to experiment, encouraging creative self-expression and problem-solving.

Learn to Code in Minecraft

Code Builder is a feature that allows students to learn coding in Minecraft using tools including Code.org, Tynker, Scratch and Microsoft MakeCode. Students can use blocks of code or JavaScript to build and create in Minecraft. Minecraft Hour of Code also offers a free, one-hour introduction to coding basics.

The success of Minecraft Education Edition is due to the educational offer which turns out to be quite engaging for computer education thanks to the large group of features designed to help students learn the basics of programming and therefore to apply coding on STEM subjects, and the curriculum contributes to the development of computational thinking skills. In the online platform, it is possible to discover conditions, functions, coordinates and everything that can be realised through Coding with Minecraft for students of different ages. Many lesson plans are available to everyone besides manuals explicitly designed for students, and there is no lack of assessment guides and Minecraft worlds. With Minecraft Education you can stay up to date with the rest of the world of game-based learning, and that’s why the dissemination is now global. Several objectives can be achieved. For example, you can immediately start programming in Minecraft EE as an educator by merely installing the Code Connection plug-in on each student’s computer. This gives them access to the program while leaving space for imagination and creativity to give life to very particular objects, the result of the genius with which they are certainly equipped.

I presented two simple examples in TeachMeet, Agent moves, and Agent builds:

The first example, students must use code builder to move the agent in a labyrinth, then they must code its movements: forward, left or right. So what happens is that the students are going to write a program to test it in the Minecraft world.

In the second example, the students will use a code builder to build, let’s say a house. Then they will try to write a program so that the agent will construct this house.

In conclusion, I encourage all teachers in different disciplines to try with Minecraft Education Edition, and the best method to teach coding to our children is when they are playing. You can find the ressource here.