During the 2018-19 school year, The Town School’s Lower School Science teacher and I ran a Minecraft Club for 1st-4th graders. The Club met before school once a week for just 30 minutes, with each grade attending in 5-7-week blocks. Because of this schedule, we had to come up with projects that participants could work on in small groups and in short, spaced-out bursts. No experience with Minecraft: Education Edition was required to join the club, and the variety of expertise turned out to be a real boon, as students learned an impressive amount from one another in a short amount of time.
4th-grade members of the Minecraft Club were challenged to create a series of treehouses (or structures whose foundations were trees)–one that was a library, one that was for players to have snacks, and one designated a play/chill area. We also had a group for constructing outdoor features (e.g. entrances, exits, and connecting walkways) and another responsible for showing school pride.
Apportioned building areas for the different treehouses 
Some school-pride building on the back of the library and on the surrounding landscape 
A view of the Library, Snack (right), and the Chill/Play (back-center) treehouses 
Inside the Library treehouse 
Another Library floor 
A view from just outside the Play/Chill treehouse
3rd graders were challenged to create a statue for a hero who never existed. Small groups started with their ideas–both textual and design-related–on paper for the first couple of sessions and then began building (and writing signs and books) in Minecraft.
2nd-grade members of the club were tasked with building farms:
1st-graders, most of which were new to Minecraft, built giant versions of their initials, connecting them to the initials of other members of their small group:
Matthew McGowan - portfolio 