27 Aug 2024
As students return to school, educators will be looking for an exciting way to kick off the year and get to know their new classrooms. Build Challenges are a great way for classmates to introduce themselves to one another and brush up on rules for good digital citizenship in the fun and creative environment of Minecraft Education.
Minecraft Build Challenges offer a great way to engage students in creative projects, problem solving and to celebrating your community. Our wide variety of Challenges present an opportunity for educators to use Minecraft to inspire students with real-world problems, local issues, and core school subjects.
Minecraft Education build challenges start by posing a challenge prompt to students and inviting them to design solutions: For example, build a futuristic car, design a sustainable version of your school or a new park for your town, architect an energy-efficient home, or recreate a scene from history or local landmark.
Challenges don’t have to be competitive; they can be an exciting way to bring your community together to solve a problem and celebrate the ideas and creativity of the students. Adding a layer of competition can be motivating, so this is an option if schools want to conduct a judging process to evaluate submissions and select winners.
For August we launched Museum of Scale where students can explore the grand halls of a Minecraft Museum and learn about scale and ratio. Within this world you will be challenged to complete scaled up and scaled down versions of Minecraft builds. After some practice, students will build their own creation and share with a partner to create a scale model.
Look out for Mushroom Mission: following the great storm, the people of the mushroom forest need your help to fix their damaged village. As you learn the story of the Mushroom Forest you will be challenged to help the villagers there rebuild three structures in their town. Help the mushroom people by building a new bridge, repairing their homes, and creating a brand-new mushroom house!
Engage your students with our two new guides: the Minecraft Education Build Challenge JumpStart kit created to help educators easily implement existing Build Challenges or take your journey a step further with our Custom Build Challenge Toolkit, which will walk through how to create your own challenge, layer elements of competition, and learn how to assess student learning outcomes through your program!
Follow Minecraft Education on LinkedIn, X (Twitter), and Facebook and join the Minecraft Educator Community to learn more about what’s coming throughout the year.
