Minecraft Education Edition: Redstone Engineering Basics: Grades 3-8

About this course

Minecraft builds are created by placing one block on top of another, but it’s Redstone that can really bring it to life! Redstone is the electrical circuitry of Minecraft, and learning the basics of Redstone will allow you to create incredible moving pieces to your builds, from traps, to teleports, to secret passages, to minigames, while fostering essential problem-solving and critical thinking skills that are essential in many different careers today.

In this class, aimed at beginners to Minecraft Redstone, we’ll be learning about the basics of what Redstone components do and creating some simple circuits using these new skills. We’ll also be enhancing these skills by learning some of the essential coding and commands for Minecraft builders. Then, we’ll travel to our shared world to work on putting these new building skills to work in our epic Minecraft bases.

Each 1.5-hour class will be broken down into 2 main sections:  

30 Minute mini-lesson on an element of Redstone for Beginners, including:

• Redstone components
• Circuitry mechanics
• Coding
• Command blocks
• Basic farms
• Logic Gates

One hour in our shared world to work on our Redstone-powered bases.

What you’ll learn

By the end of this course, students will....

• Learn the basics of electrical circuit design, including input, output, and wiring.
• Begin learning more advanced circuitry elements like logic gates
• Apply design thinking and problem solving skills to automate elements of their Minecraft bases.
• Use creative thinking to determine how to apply different types of circuits to solve practical problems.

Materials

Students will be provided with all course material during each lesson, as well as their own personal section in our Class Notebook, which they are strongly encouraged to use for planning and reflection.  Students are expected to have a high-speed internet connection in order to conduct effective online classes.  Each student should come prepared with a notepad and pen, as well as a growth mindset!  Students are encouraged to have their own testing worlds to test their designs in between sessions on the group server, and to watch and learn from experts to enhance their own skills in many different aspects of design and engineering.  If students are using Macs, screen sharing must be enabled for Teams and Google Chrome.