In this hands-on session, participants will explore ComposionCraft – a music composition Minecraft modification (Mod) designed by the University of Arkansas’ Music Education and Tesseract programs. The modification provides music teachers with necessary crosswalks between students’ experiences playing Minecraft and learning to compose and create music in a new and unique way. Additionally, CompositionCraft provides a unique experience for students to connect to STEAM initiatives and the artistic processes in the National Core Arts Standards. For children, Minecraft is a fun and addicting video game where users play alone or together with friends. For educators, it can be a learning environment, design tool, and activity that fosters 21st century skills of critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity. At its core, Minecraft is about placing and mining blocks. This is similar to ways composers place and mine musical elements to create a new piece of music. The game world consists of 3D objects—mainly blocks—that represent building materials. Players gather material blocks and use them to form various constructions. In music, musicians gather musical elements and use them to form various constructions within music. Incorporating Minecraft into music classrooms provides students opportunities to connect two types of “architectures” - spatial-visual structure (building an online world using Minecraft) and musical structure (composing music). Both “architectures” share similar artistic processes within the National Core Arts Standards. An example of CompositionCraft may be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXR9kqwpauY.
Participants will need be have Minecraft Java Edition which can be purchased at
https://minecraft.net/en-us/ for $26.95 and Minecraft Forge version 1.8.9 (free) from
https://files.minecraftforge.net/. I would like those attending my hands-on session to be able to play the mod and then discuss their experience.
Google Drive link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BxoAIzy9tsLbTkxUa1E0NzBicVE?usp=sharing
