The Solar System and Minecraft

This upcoming Friday is a fieldtrip for my class to a science expo.  So the past 3 Fridays something has robbed me of the one and only geography class I have per week.  Also on Friday is one of the three science classes the students' have.  I had high hopes this week for our lessons on the solar system but seeing as I'll have them only once, the material will be interrupted and disjointed.  Therefor I've got to rearrange things. (They have science three times a week, twice with me and once with their Thai teacher)

Minecraft.

Say the word and they raise their hands, close their eyes, sway back and forth, sing hymnals, and tears streak down their faces with eyes pinched tightly shut like the loony congregation of Jimmy Swaggart's mega churches.

All you need to know about the game Minecraft is that it's a world where the player makes...the world out of cubes.  The cubes have different textures for different surfaces and 'materials'.  The game has an old school look with new school capabilities.  What's new is the game's ability to have more objects being processed at once.  In plain English because computers are better than they were in the past the game can handle more going on at once.

Here is a link.  I went to youtube and just searched "what is minecraft", I watched a few seconds of the video and it seems to give the gist of things.  So give a click and skip around for a minute to understand what the game is about.

What is Minecraft

If I only have them for science once this week, I got to make the lesson count.

My plan is to give them a lesson on the first four planets, the inner planets.  For each planet they'll fold oragami cubes, we'll need 8 in total for each, and then tape/glue them all together to make one larger cube planet.  They'll be little minecrafters. Except haha, you're learning at the same time.  For each smaller cube we'll list one fact about that planet and create a list of those facts for everyone.

For the next class we'll do the same thing for the outer planets.  I'll then review with them all of the information we've covered thus far for the solar system, bring them to the lab and show them the great Bill Nye video I found about the solar system. 

I'd like to give them a creative project too.  When I was in 5th grade the project we had was to invent an organism that lived on one of the planets and use what we knew about the planet we chose to ensure that the organism could or would inhabit such a landscape.

Awesome.