Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

MinecraftEDU House Spanish Labeling Challenge

Today I co-taught a lesson with one of our middle school Spanish teachers called the “MinecraftEDU House Spanish Labeling Challenge.” Students worked with a partner to build a house in MinecraftEDU, and then labeled items in Spanish using Minecraft signs. To keep the focus on building and labeling items in Spanish, students worked in a pre-configured MinecraftEDU world which I’ve used before in another project, the “MinecraftEDU Treehouse Challenge.” We gave students signs so they didn’t have to craft them, in addition to the materials pre-positioned in chest in their group building area. (When you sign into MinecraftEDU as a teacher, you have “super-powers” like the ability to give unlimited resources to players.)

Labeling in Spanish in Minecraft by Wesley Fryer, on Flickr
“Labeling in Spanish in Minecraft” (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer

The full lesson is available as a Google Doc, which I embedded into a new page on my STEM curriculum website on the MinecraftEDU page. Check out all my free MinecraftEDU student lessons which include:

  1. MinecraftEDU Breakout Challenge
  2. MinecraftEDU Redstone Engineering Challenge
  3. MinecraftEDU Treehouse Challenge
  4. MinecraftEDU House Spanish Labeling Challenge
  5. Geometry Building Challenge
  6. Orienteering Challenge
  7. Perimeter / Area Building Challenge
  8. Introduction to MinecraftEDU

All of these MinecraftEDU and other STEM lessons are FREE and licensed by me under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. That means you’re free to use, remix and modify these lessons, just please give me attribution credit and let me know via a comment or Twitter reply @wfryer that you’re using a lesson with your students.

This was the first time this Spanish teacher has seen or participated in a lesson in MinecraftEDU. As I hoped, he was very excited and got lots of new ideas about how students could continue using Minecraft to support his curriculum. We discussed the possibility of borrowing library iPads, and asking students to video record “virtual tours” of their labeled houses in Minecraft in Spanish. I suggested if we do this, we provide students with a script and they rehearse a lot before recording! If we further extend this lesson like that I’ll probably write it up on our school “learning showcase blog.”

This type of classroom technology integration project is a “simulation or game,” which is included as a project type on the ShowWithMedia.com digital literacy matrix.

Simulation or Game by Wesley Fryer, on Flickr
“Simulation or Game” (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer

Here are the steps and links for the “MinecraftEDU House Spanish Labeling Challenge,” copied from the Google Doc into this post for easier reading/sharing.

Student Instructions:

With a partner, build a house in MinecraftEDU which includes as many things that you can label with Spanish words as possible.

  1. Use the word list below to identify items to build and label.
  2. Create a Minecraft SIGN to label each item you create in the house. Your team will receive 1 point for each correctly labeled item in Spanish.
  3. Do NOT spend time mining for resources. Build with resources in your group chest!
  4. Use the MinecraftEDU Recipe Reference Sheets for items you need to build.

 

Items You Can Include in Your House and Label:

  1. La puerta – the door
  2. La ventana – the window
  3. Las vietrinas – the windows
  4. La planta baja – ground floor
  5. El primer piso – the second floor
  6. El cuarto – room
  7. El apartamento – apartment
  8. El baño – bathroom
  9. La cocina – kitchen
  10. El despacho – home office
  11. La escalera – stairs, stairway
  12. El garaje – garage
  13. La sala – living room
  14. El sótano – basement
  15. Mi cama – my bed
  16. El jardin – the garden
  17. El refrigerator – the refrigerator
  18. La estufa – the stove

Teacher Instructions:

Download this modified version of the “Group Building Areas” world as a zip file to load in MinecraftEDU. This is the same world used for the MinecraftEDU Treehouse Challenge.

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