Melville Intermediate - Selwyn House in Minecraft Presentation

Earlier this term, inspired by 'Room with a View' from the Figure it Out, Mathematics Curriculum Geometry Level Three Books - although we adapted it slightly.  Those of you familar with the teaching resource will know that under the material listed it suggests a speaker phone.  We put a twist on it, and used our Aotearoa Quadblogging Buddies, Tawa Intermediate and Selwyn House to communicate with by leaving comments on their blog and then responding to them.   This allowed us to refine our questioning technique and also improve the use of mathematical language that our students were using, this worked for both us and our buddies that we were working with.

We started with a two dimensional grid model, refined it with responses from our buddies, converted our two dimensional grid to a three dimensional sketch, contacted our buddies about the sketch, built a three dimensional cube model based on the sketch, and finally constructed the finished classroom in Minecraft.

We then contacted our buddies to show them the results.  Elizabeth, one of the Room Five students filmed this video explaining the process.  You can see some of the screenshots in the process here.
 
  ElizabethMinecraftExplanation from myles webb on Vimeo.

From a teaching perspective a week long project stretched into four weeks however the students were engaged, they were collaborating with other students form across New Zealand and they used Minecraft in a constructive way.  The producing of the final Minecraft model was the quickest part of the whole project.  We completed models of two out of three of our Quadblogging buddies and will continue posting the results during our term break and early next term.