Burn it Down!

I have not been able to post about Mindcraft in a while because of some major changes in my classroom.  In the past weeks, we have gained the glorious opportunity to be 1:1 with Chromebooks and received student Google Accounts.  As a result, we have been a little preoccupied with all of that and neglected Mindcraft!

This week, we got the opportunity to continue our experience.  The kids have been learning about Ecosystems.  They have each chosen one to "specialize" in and have written an informative report and a personal narrative involving their ecosystem of choice.  Our learning focus is shifting from knowing about the ecosystem to protecting it.  One major factor I wanted my kids to understand is that we must protect the environment now, not later, and not in the next generation.

The plan was to create a new world in Survival Mode and burn down the forest.  If you are not familiar, Survival Mode is where the player starts out with nothing and must use the resources around (and under) them to craft objects and survive.  For our purposes, we turned off the mobs of zombies since that is not really school appropriate.

The students had to chop down trees in order to gain a pickaxe, then mine until they came across flint and iron to create a tool called "flint and steel".  I'm sure you can imagine what that does.  The next step was to find a forest and burn it down to nothing.  They also were instructed to destroy all the grass and flowers in that area.  The final step was to rebuild it.

What the students saw was how long it took to regrow the forest to its original status.  Destroying it versus rebuilding it.  Now they are looking into ways that their ecosystem is under attack and writing persuasive letters to the EPA imploring them to help us protect that ecosystem.