Learn to Code with Minecraft this CS Ed Week!

Are you ready to join millions of educators and students around the world next week in celebration of Computer Science Education Week, December 6-10? Everyone can learn to code, and we’re committed to providing the tools you need to make your coding journey fun, approachable, and confidence-building. This year we’re proud to offer a host of live lessons, a Flipgrid Live event, educator trainings, and a game-changing Hour of Code lesson to help you bring computer science into your classroom no matter what you teach.

HOUR OF CODE

Our new Minecraft Hour of Code lesson, TimeCraft, is a great way to begin or continue exploring coding with your students using MakeCode blocks or Python. TimeCraft is available as a free demo lesson in Minecraft: Education Edition. As long as you and your students are on PC, Mac, iPad, or Chromebook, with a wi-fi connection, you can access Minecraft Hour of Code! The lesson and immersive Minecraft world can be downloaded even if you don’t have a log-in from your school.

In this lesson, students will travel back in time to help some of history’s greatest innovators in science, architecture, music, and engineering by solving coding puzzles. From a 1920s New York jazz club to the Great Wall of China, computer science is truly everywhere this year, and for everyone!

To help you facilitate an Hour of Code, we’re offering more educator resources than ever, including an educator guide, solutions guide, and extension activities to continue learning across subject areas. Check out more resources, including presentation slides for small and large group classes.

LIVE LESSONS + FLIPGRID LIVE

New this year, educators can sign up to have a Microsoft Education Expert lead their classroom through an Hour of Code lesson. Participating in a live lesson makes leading an Hour of Code with Minecraft even easier. Register to join classrooms around the world next week via Teams Live, where you can rely on trained facilitators to run Hour of Code and CodeTown lessons while you manage the classroom and learning.

You can also register to join Flipgrid Live: Behind the Game on December 8th to meet two inspiring Minecraft game developers who use Computer Science to build new creatures, features, and more. Your students will love hearing from Minecraft Game Director Agnes Larsson and Senior Developer Afeez Bello about exploring coding careers in gaming and what it’s like to work on Minecraft – with fun stories from the game studio and the opportunity to ask questions live.

EDUCATOR TRAININGS

If you’re getting ready to bring Hour of Code to your classroom, take our free one-hour Facilitator Course on Microsoft Learn to prepare for an effective lesson. This course is for all K-12 educators and doesn’t require any background in coding or Minecraft.

You can also register for the last live Hour of Code Educator Training of the year on December 1st to prepare to run your own Hour of Code next week.

CS CURRICULUM

Discover over 200 hours of engaging curriculum in our Computer Science Subject Kit to continue learning and coding with Minecraft into next year. If you loved TimeCraft, you can check out Hour of Code tutorials from previous years, like A Tale of Two Villages, a coding lesson on empathy and inclusion. Or, engage your students in other fun, one-off lessons to spark and solidify their interest in coding like Museum Heist, an exciting adventure inspired by Wonder Woman 1984. Or, Code Town, a fun lesson challenging students to reassemble a missing mural. And Seymour Island includes opportunities for collaborative learning, featuring captivating coding problems that can be solved using MakeCode Blocks or MakeCode Python.

If your students are just learning to code with blocks, we recommend continuing with the Coding FUNdamentals curriculum. This learning path showcases the coding journey from learning about algorithms, sequencing, and loops to practicing conditionals, operators, events, variables, and functions.

From there, the Coding with Minecraft curriculum will teach students conditionals, functions, coordinates, and more in block-based coding and JavaScript, and is designed to take around 30 hours of instructional time.

Finally, advance to text-based coding with Python 101, a ten-lesson progression where students learn to write code while helping out at the fictional CodingMine software development company. This mini-course teaches the absolute basics of Python with the MakeCode code editor and takes students from knowing no syntax to defining functions and creating their own mini-games.  To continue learning with Python, learn to write code using a notebook-style editor with the Python Islands mini-course.

Beyond Minecraft, Microsoft MakeCode offers fun coding activities, resources and game jams to engage your students in computer science.

We can’t wait to see coding come to life in classrooms around the world next week as educators around the world celebrate Computer Science Education Week. Computer Science is truly everywhere, and for everyone!