Minecraft Hour of Code 2020

Minecraft began supporting the Hour of Code movement several years back and has continuously released its versions of the event based in the blocky, grid-based environment that so many students are familiar with. In the Spring of 2021, I volunteered at Plato Academy St. Petersburg to guide a class of six fifth-grade students through the 2020 "Tale of Two Villages" lesson. Rather than building a small farming homestead in survival mode or plotting the biggest fantasy castle in creative mode, students would attempt to bridge peaceful ties between two villages using block-based or Python code.

Preparing to host Hour of Code meant contacting the school's IT and jumping through several technical hurdles to connect students online - though once students' devices were connected to the network and had the software installed, it was a very straightforward process to get everyone loaded into the map. (Fortunately, Minecraft: Education Edition supports a wide array of platforms and devices, including the commonly-used-in-schools Chromebook laptops)

At the mercy of their peers' observations, I asked for a volunteer among the students to come up to the front of the classroom and connect their device to the smartboard. To my surprise, without any sort of prompting, one of the students came forward and volunteered to play through the event on his device. This particular student had previously worked with Python, and was comfortable taking a leadership role in guiding the class through the event. Throughout the hour long lesson, the student would pace themselves to their peers' rate of progression, offering to replay coding quests for any struggling students.

Students had the liberty of choosing the language which felt most comfortable, though I encouraged any students who were interested in Python to try their hands at it with the opportunity to work under a guided and supportive environment. While most students opted to use the block language (rearranging pre-arranged blocks of code into the correct sequences), two students were resolved to use Python to traverse through the villages. Minecraft: Hour of Code approaches Python from a beginners persepctive, and much of it is self-paced. When errors did arise, I would guide students through the issue and do my best to explain how and why the error occured.