I use Minecraft in the classroom a lot. When used properly, students can make wonderful things to demonstrate their learning across the curriculum. Previously my students have made things such as tours of a virtual city, bases in 'extreme environments', 360º Virtual Reality tours of a conservation park built for endangered animals, dreamtime stories and virtual reality tour of the school using a Vive.
A few years ago I spent quite some time building a life-sized creeper with my year 1 class and some other students who were staying behind at school to work in our homework centre which is run alongside what was then my classroom.
If you don't know what I mean by 'life-sized creeper', let me explain.
In the video game Minecraft, a creeper is a hostile mob. A green creature that sneaks up on players before exploding, killing them and taking all of their items.
Using Minecraft for teaching and learning as much as I do, it would seem very appropriate that I have a life-sized Minecraft creeper for my classroom.
You can read more about the process behind building him here:
https://leehewes.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/my-giant-arduino-and-aurasma-enhanced-classroom-creeper/
It took ages!
He's cool, too, because I've added a PIR sensor to him, which plays the exploding creeper sound when students approach him and he has Aurasma (now HP Reveal) triggers on him which show some of the student videos I mentioned earlier.
Anyway, it was with great sadness that I returned to school at the beginning of 2017 to find that rats had eaten his feet during the school holidays! And being incredibly busy throughout the year as are all teachers, I didn't manage to find the time during the school year to rebuild him.
Last year wasn't the best teaching year for me, and I felt like it was almost due to the bad omen of not having Creepy McCreepface around with a full 100 health points.
So last summer holidays, I took him home and built him new feet. I also repainted his entire body, firstly with house paint, then with specially mixed and matched paints I bought from the art store. I felt like a real artist, haha.
Some photos of the process are below.
So it is with great pleasure that I can finally say that Creepy McCreepface has made his triumphant return to my classroom. My teaching partner finds him kind of annoying, but the students love him and he makes our reading corner look (and sound) absolutely epic. You can see a video of him in action below via a link to one of my class' Instagram posts. It's so cool to have him back.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BfO0bjVBUDB/?taken-by=56narwhals
Order has been restored to the universe.
@(* O *)@