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31 Merchant Taylors’ Prep School Newsletter - 14.10.2022 MTP Computing Last term we introduced Minecraft: Education Edition to school. Microsoft have invested huge sums into producing a game-based learning environment that enables collaborative and creative activities for learners. It has been a huge hit, not least because boys can work together in a hosted world, designing, building and interacting with a vast range of cross-curricular subjects. There are ready-made and curriculum mapped challenges covering all the main subjects. Boys can also design and build solutions from scratch, producing exportable notebooks with text and images based on their work. Year 8 have studied Macbeth, while making a multimedia project about the work of the Greek historian Thucydides. They compared his book on the Peloponnesian War to modern day accounts. Year 5 explored how individuals can have their privacy invaded, while Years 6 and 7 started learning to code in Python. As a school we entered a national competition run by UNESCO and Microsoft. Teams had to identify a local sustainability problem, research how these linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, build their solution in Minecraft: Education Edition; and finally, record a video explaining what they did. The UNESCO Peace With Nature competition was open to any students aged 9-18. We were delighted to hear in September that two of our Year 8 teams had been awarded joint second place, losing out to the winners by just one point! We are immensely proud of their achievement and of the hard work all boys made. We produced 30 films in 15 days, a remarkable feat. We will receive some 3D printed models from the winning worlds, and the two winning videos have been placed on the Minecraft Education YouTube channel. You can watch them here: https://youtu.be/ZpM8UYImlrk https://youtu.be/vkYjNuK42MI Mr van Straten Head of Computing & Digital Learning Minecraft: Education Edition Exploring the Acropolis in Ancient Athens