Minecrafting a Medieval Village

My design team

Part 1 – I have a plan

This semester we will move part of our class into a virtual classroom using the game Minecraft. I have several students that are experienced “crafters” within the game and they are hard at work preparing our world for occupancy by my history classes. We will have five medieval cities in our world: Canterbury, Oxford, Winchester, York, and Norwich.

Using maps.google.com I have laid out a medieval version of each city and have handed it over to my designers. They are hard at work developing each village, complete with homes for every student in every class. My classes are role playing characters based on the feudal social pyramid. Each class has a duke or duchess, two barons, four knights, four freemen, and the remaining students are “peasants” that are working the land for the village nobles.

We are getting used to role playing and the layout of each village before venturing into the Minecraft version. We are using MinecraftEdu, a version available for teachers. It features a GUI interface that allows the game to be customized extensively. Eventually, content will be embedded within the game and students will complete “quests” to learn about medieval life.

View Medieval Room 144 in a larger map