#minecraftlab

Introducing: MinecraftLAB at Derby QUAD

Well, it’s been a while since we last posted and in all honestly it’s been due to the new Minecraft: Education Edition (M:EE) having a few issues. I’ll go into these in a later post, but I’m glad to say that we’re back up and running and have started with the first of our MinecraftLAB’s. 

MinecraftLAB is an opportunity for us to open our Minecraft activities out to those who we’re unable to accommodate for in our MinecraftCLUB. It allows us to engage with more young people interested in Minecraft and respond to our exhibition programme here at QUAD.

Our first MinecraftCLUB project “Glitched” started off well, but we soon found that it didn’t engage the club members enough to want to continue building after a few weeks. This lead to us leaving the world behind and opening the group to sessions that were free flowing in terms of creativity. This made a lot of the members happy (although some still weren’t because we were focusing on creativity and not UTTER WORLD DESTRUCTION!!), but it was not fulfilling the reason MinecraftCLUB exists - to respond to our exhibition programme using Minecraft. It was at this point we switched over to the licensed version of M:EE and it proved just as problematic at the trial version. However, it is important to note there have been improvements since. These issues meant that we were unable to start a new project and thus the sessions became a free for all for members to make whatever worlds they wanted. This was good. It gave everyone what they wanted and gave facilitators a chance to test out what was going wrong and where.

With issues surrounding getting an hour session once a week working properly, you can imagine our tension going into the first full day non-member workshop. But you know what? It worked really well. The session, inspired by and responding to the upcoming FORMAT International Photography Festival theme of habitat, contained two worlds using the same seed. This was intended to avoid any lagging or connection issues previously experienced, but it gave us a good platform to see how individuals and collectives responded to the theme. 

In an unintentional way, one group contained boys for around 11-14 and the other both sexes aged 8-14 and at first there was a clear difference in build types and skill. The boys built complicated structures and blended them together with each other and the surrounding environment, however, the mixed group later became more co-operative than the boys and collaborated more. 

The end result contained two worlds that considered builds on their internal and external aesthetics and functionality, as well as their place within their environment. This was a heavy session as well. Leaving out breaks, each participant had a total design and build time of around 5 hours. This focus on one project as a group made observing the building highly rewarding. You watched an idea be conceived, developed, built and refined in a habitat of creativity. This is what our MinecraftCLUB was missing. A drive to work together, with the freedom to create but still based on a collective theme responding to our gallery exhibitions. 

This has given us a good understanding of how we can make changes to the group to still make our sessions interesting to our young people, but also to ensure they’re responding to our exhibition themes, aesthetics and social context. 

In short, we’re back, we’re better and we’re building. Together.