Bud Not Buddy. Connecting English to Minecraft

One of the units that my 6th grade students LOVED was our Bud Not Buddy unit. They read the book in their ELA (English language arts) class and we reviewed the plot, story line, characters, and setting in class together. In groups, or working alone, I'm generally very flexible about this, they chose a part of the book to recreate in MinecraftEdu. The basic requirements of the project were:

Project requirements-

1. You will build a replica of all the elements of the scene- buildings, surrounding area, landscape…. Build some sort of boundary or border around your area so that players know when they are entering or leaving your scene. (Note- I ended up building border blocks around their areas to help with a few student's behavior choices)

2. You will spawn NPCs as characters in your scene. We should be able to interact with these people because their job is to help the player learn about the scene. (Note- NPCs are Non-Player Characters that players can create and program to be interactive)

3. You will create some chests with books, or a series of info blocks to teach players about the following (NPCs can also be used to tell about some of these)

1. A summary of the scene (who, what, where, when and how)

2. A description of the setting

3. Descriptions of the main characters and what they do in the scene

4. Two Text-to-Self connections - Connect your personal experiences to Bud not Buddy. Think about the following questions: ● What does this remind me of in my life? ● How is this similar to in my life? ● How is this different from my life? ● Has something like this ever happened to me? ● How does this relate to my life? ● What were my feelings when I read this? ● Have I changed my thinking as a result of reading this? ● What have I learned?

Like every project we do, they completely surpassed my expectations! I videoed a very small part of their world for a presentation I did, and thought you might be interested in seeing it. I narrated the video during the presentation, so the only sound on the video is background noise, sorry about that!

Bud Not Buddy video