MASHFIQ AHMED: [MUSIC]
March 2020 after the pandemic
and we all went remote,
I got this random notification saying Microsoft is
offering Minecraft Education Edition
free to all students.
I was like, "We only have a couple of months left now,
but I want to plan this out for next year."
That's what I did.
I started the Minecraft Club and
my goal initially with this club was students need to
have a place to de-stress and
relax and just have a good time.
That's all my goal was and
Minecraft Club became something
so much bigger than that.
The last time I played Minecraft
was in high school in 2014.
It was foreign experience to
me coming back into Minecraft after all these years.
That's the beauty of Minecraft Education Edition.
It leverages student expertise and they can
become the teachers and that's what we've been doing.
I'm going to let my lovely Minecraft team
take care of this professional development.
Take it away team.
NANCY WOODS: When our teachers allow
the students to know
more than them
about something
that's powerful.
The teachers have the pedagogy.
They know what the chemistry standards are.
They know what they have to teach all year long
and where the students need to rise,
but if the students know
technology a little bit better than they do,
the teacher allowing that to
happen and the students to teach them something
or to embrace a technology in
the classroom that's truly powerful.
SPEAKER 1: I love the game, but I'm new.
HEATHER ADELLE: It starts inside the club
with their problem solving,
which is a huge real world thing for
them to work on and to figure out.
We leave them with that.
We don't give them answers.
Then the facilitation is, "Okay,
what can we do with this to make this
bigger outside of the walls?"
NANCY WOODS: It's really hard
in the classroom
where it's just PowerPoints and
lecture to really teach
kids to care about the environment.
The idea for getting the Minecraft Club involved in
the beach cleanup since
researching the Net-Zero Challenge,
they need to go and wade in the creek,
get those waders on,
giving them that experience,
that hands on experience in the water so that
they can understand what it's like to be in the creek.
To see what they're going to be building
in Minecraft is important.
SPEAKER 2: Welcome, John Dewey.
Raise your hand if you've been to Castle Park
before. That's great.
MEREDITH MCDERMOTT: Sustainability is not much
without action, not only at
the science level and
the policy level,
but also just community engagement as well.
It's really the students themselves that are
wanting more and more ways to engage in it,
take action, and learn about it.
SPEAKER 2: Hybrid,
but they on from there.
Good job.
NANCY WOODS: It's really important that
the surface level knowledge
goes much deeper and we're building for
a conceptual understanding and that students
see themselves in green careers in the future.
MEREDITH MCDERMOTT: We have 1,859 schools
in New York City,
just the Department of Education.
We are the largest public school
district in the country.
We're one of the largest, if
not the largest in the world.
If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere.
MASHFIQ AHMED: We're bringing the interest
to them rather than
having them just do
some lesson on
sustainability.
Having it involved in Minecraft,
it's going to get students a lot more interest in.
It's going to have them way more
engaged than they normally would be.
It's not just simply let's
recreate a building and then call it a day.
Let's instead think about what
can improve that building,
what can we do to make it more sustainable.
SPEAKER 3: Over here, we have charging
stations for electric cars because
they're more sustainable for
the environment and we're here.
We have a lake with windmills for clean energy,
and we have these little robots that
clean litter out of the lake.
SARAH HOWELL: I think that's
one of the things
I've seen them
be most excited
about is a lot of times in their climate lessons,
they only see the negative side,
but the work we're going to do
in Minecraft allows them to really
focus on the positives and be able to create
their own climate solutions in a way
that actually brings them more hope than fear.
NANCY WOODS: Minecraft and
these challenges bring
a voice and choice to our students,
which is really important.
When students own their learning pathways,
they'll put 10 times the amount of
effort in rather than if the teacher
prescribes every step of the way what
they're learning and what the end result is.
MEREDITH MCDERMOTT: The more that we can inspire
and motivate
other groups of students from other schools,
then we're rolling and we're going to
actually make progress towards our climate goals.
The Minecraft Club, Dewey High School?
That's it. That's like living it.