A whole week spent with children of primary for a new project on equal opportunities also integrating the coding in Minecraft. So let's see what it means to introduce coding in Minecraft within the school.

The aim was to stimulate the children of the Midossi school of Civita Castellana in reflections regarding equal opportunities and the contrast to gender stereotypes and during the days of the Minecraft laboratories we introduced the world of coding in Minecraft.

We introduce coding in Minecraft

During the development of the project "STEM is learned in the summer", the reflection has turned on the importance of the STEM disciplines: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics are fundamental pillars in the skills of every child.

Just starting from these reasoning was then introduced the coding solution integrated into Minecraft: the children got to know the little Agent, a robot ready to execute their orders just like a physical robot.

We command the Agent, the small robot

Only that our Agent has these characteristics:

• it is indestructible
• it moves forward, backward, right, left, but also up and down
• he can dig
• can place objects
• can detect objects
• he can fly
• can swim - even in the lava
• it does not discharge and does not need to be recharged

The most important aspect is that every child can manage his robot. How many physical robots is your school equipped with? When it takes - at most - one in the classroom what happens? A robot for 20/25 children.

Clear what happens with coding in Minecraft now? 20 robots for 20 children: each child proceeds with learning with his own time, with his own experimentations, with his own mistakes, with his own solutions.

Integrate teaching and coding in Minecraft

The guys worked together to create and create Minecraft worlds where it was possible to reflect, represent and unveil the most common and annoying stereotypes of our society and they did it also by exploiting the coding with Minecraft. 

So much has been the satisfaction for having discovered the coding in Minecraft, programming the small robot that can help them in the construction of the world through a series of instructions.

Children aged nine / ten began writing lines of computer code to represent their idea of Equal Opportunities, learning while "playing".

The robot is really a precious helper. He helped some guys to decorate the sky with fabulous writing on equal opportunities while for other guys he quickly built the basis for a house without discrimination.

Of course there were also errors and experiments: someone simulated the effect of rain by inserting chickens instead of small drops of water. The result ? Rain of chickens. And thank goodness they did not include the much larger cows.

The important thing is that they started to program in a real three-dimensional environment, beginning to understand - simply by trying - the concepts of the X, Y and Z coordinates.

The game is a serious thing!