Sunday, August 26, 2012

Updated Benchmarks

Made some tweaks to the first 2 phases of our Minecraft simulation. I felt the need to change/add more photos w/ brief explanations to help give the students more context. I can already hear my students asking me, "How old are those tools?" and "Where did they find this?" I have also decided to take out the column that asks the students to look for photos from today's world. I would rather have students focus on capturing images from Minecraft and making insightful, written connections.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Benchmark Assessment Sample

Our team has developed a rough idea of our first benchmark assessment. We both feel it is essential that we have a strong curriculum set-up beforehand to help guide us through this gaming simulation. The big idea or driving question for the entire unit is the following:  

How did humans progress from surviving to thriving? 

In order to gain the insight needed to address this question, we have created four benchmark questions that will be explored along the way. These are:

Phase 1- How did early humans accomplish their basic needs?
Phase 2- How did early humans learn to adapt, utilize, and reshape their environment?
Phase 3- How did early human settlements evolve into civilizations?
Phase 4- How did civilizations expand into empires?

In our first phase of the game, we want to have the students simulate what neolithic hunter-gathers would have experienced: lack of resources, fear of predators, limited resources and food. Using the organizer, students will need to make a connection to our world today

Feel free to post any comments or feedback.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Ziggurat of Ur I can totally dig this!

Welcome! My name is Jeremy Biddle I am 6th grade teacher who has just begun developing a curriculum unit that utilizes Minecraft to simulate/recreate/re-imagine the first civilizations built in the Near East. We have already constructed a rough outline of our 6th grade Early Human Unit and hopefully plan to beta test it this October. Our goal is simulate the challenges that the first Neolithic people had to overcome and then progress (through Minecraft simulation) to the dawn of the first great city-states. In the meantime, I have constructed a ziggurat in Creative Mode to help get a better idea of how the game works. I also needed to get an idea how long it will take to actually rebuild an ancient city. The Ziggurat of Ur has been constructed over the last week and I have spent roughly 10 hours. In October, I would like to have a team of 4 or more students collaborating on their own structure.

I am currently facing some problems in regards to taking screen captures. I can take the pictures; however, I cannot find them on my Mac. I may have to VLOG instead of document until I figure this one out.

Finally figured out how the screen capture function works!
Open Finder and select "Go" at the top. At the bottom select "Go to Folder". Then put in "~/Library/Application Support" (no quotes). Find the Minecraft folder, open it, and inside there should be a Screenshots folder.
Thank you Dave_X!