Participate and share: Interactive session 
Recorded Session
While elementary STEM programs often excel in the areas of science, technology, and math, many find it harder to design meaningful engineering experiences for young learners. This session will explore engineering activities on a platform that is already popular with many elementary students - Minecraft. Minecraft provides an avenue for creating both simple and complex powered and working machines. Even simple redstone engineering activities can be used to teach topics like the engineering design process and algorithmic sequencing. Moreover, these activities can be used to teach, explore, and reinforce content from other subject areas - from science and math to art and music.
Teaching engineering in elementary grades is especially important for achieving equitable outcomes for students in STEM areas. Barriers in access have historically led to significant underrepresentation for many student groups. Moreover, stereotypes threats about what type of people make good engineers are established as early as age six. As a result we see impacts such as those reported by the United States Census Bureau, stating that even though women make up half of the workforce, they only make up 15% of engineers. Researchers and education leaders agree that access to high quality engineering activities in elementary school are needed to overcome these barriers.
This fun and interactive session will give educators an accessible and highly engaging option for facilitating engineering activities in elementary classrooms. They will see an elementary student demonstrating and explaining these concepts, inspiring them to empower their own students to do the same. And they will leave with not only a deeper background on engineering concepts and Minecraft functionalities, but also a variety of video and lesson resources to support facilitating these and other activities with their own students.
1. Overview of Minecraft app and its use in education (8 min).
2. Importance of teaching engineering in elementary grades, especially for achieving equitable STEM education (8 min).
3. Introduction to Minecraft redstone engineering and its basic components (8 min).
4. Overviews and demonstrations of at least 3 elementary engineering design projects. Each project exemplifies the use of an iterative design process and algorithmic thinking, as well as a clear integration of redstone engineering with cross-curricular subject area standards related to topics such as coordinates in math or rhythms and melodic patterns in music (30 min).
5. Wrap up, Q&A, and Additional Resources (6 min).
There are many, many publications that emphasize the importance of STEM education in elementary classrooms and beyond. Here are 4 examples of recent articles with research that supports the use of engineering lessons like those we propose in Minecraft to accomplish the purpose and outcomes of this specific session.
Stereotypes in STEM Fields Start by Age Six (2021), https://uh.edu/news-events/stories/2021/november-2021/11222021-stem-stereotypes-study.php.
A Framework for Incorporating the “Learning How to Learn” Approach in Teaching STEM Education (2023), https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/13/1/1.
Rethinking the Ideology of Using Digital Games to Increase Individual Interest in STEM (2022), https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/8/4519.
The effects of digital game-based STEM activities on students’ interests in STEM fields and scientific creativity: Minecraft case (2021), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1297836.pdf.
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