ISS CHALLENGES Winner Evgenii Permiakov: Minecraft Virtual Campus

“What new practices should schools keep or implement as a result of our experience with online learning?” We recently posed this question to educators around the world through our innovation platform ISS CHALLENGES. The response was tremendous, and we’re excited to share the winning ideas with you.

In this feature, Evgenii Permiakov of Al-Bayan Bilingual School shares how to recreate a full-scale campus virtually.

Minecraft Virtual Campus

 

With physical campuses not being accessible, it is important to have a virtual replica of a school to host such events as graduation ceremonies, virtual tours, renovation planning, etc. Minecraft Education Edition provides you and your students an opportunity to create a full scale replica of your school campus.

This video trailer tells more, as well as this is a project launch. You can also read this blog article.

Why is this idea important?

This is an unprecedented opportunity to tap students’ gaming skills to make a meaningful contribution to the community. Once finished, virtual campus can be further used for PR purposes and by community members to suggest innovative iterations to the existing infrastructure.

What key tasks would need to be completed to get a prototype up and running?

We come together as a community three days a week to piece the map of the school together block by block. Students accessed some of the original building plans in the BBS archives to guide them, but are mostly building the interior entirely from memory, which shows how much these spaces really mean to them.

How easy would it be to grow this idea across multiple schools or contexts?

Minecraft Education lends itself perfectly well to cross-school collaboration. A few days ago, I was in contact with teachers from Spain and Hong Kong to plan multinational Minecraft Education Entrepreneurship Project. While this is a different project, it underscores how Minecraft Education can connect communities across the globe. See a preview here.

When it comes to Virtual Campus Project, the first steps for a school will be:

  1. Gauge students’ interest and create an application form.
  2. Ask students to show samples of their previous work in Minecraft.
  3. Create Minecraft Education accounts for them.
  4. Figure out what conversion scale to use to give the campus the most realistic feel possible. (We created this using Worldpainter)
  5. Determine what communication platform you are going to use for coordination.
  6. Host a server and start building.

This project has a potential to be an amazing intercultural distance learning opportunity – to see how students from diverse backgrounds collaborate and strategize.

As a starting point, students from various schools can build models of learning spaces present at their school. Students can then tour each other’s sites for inspirations.

This is an example of remodeling learning spaces using Minecraft.

What might be the tangible outcome/s of your idea?

When this mammoth of a project is done, we are hoping to rethink what educational spaces can mean for the future of schools. Some of these possibilities include:

  • Seeing our school’s annual events transform into virtual community experiences.
  • Giving virtual tours for students or staff who would like to visit the campus.
  • Preserving and displaying the virtual campus as an artifact in the school’s digital archive.
  • Hosting online classes on the server.

Thank you to Evgenii for sharing this idea! Keep an eye out for other ISS Challenges winners, plus continue to share your own school initiatives and inspiration with #ISSedu.