Where did your phone, game console, or latest app come from? How did computing in the past evolve into what we experience today? Who were the great pioneers and what were the innovations that shaped our digital age? How can you make a difference in how tech can impact the world for better?
Have fun and learn in The Great Tech Story, the Computer History Museum’s world in Minecraft: Education Edition!
Immerse yourself in the amazing story of computing throughout history and interact with tech people and ideas that are changing the world today, so you can help shape a better future for all of us.
Through in-game experiences and build challenges, students ages 8-18 will be inspired as they explore the computing past and be empowered to build a better future with tech. Engage with key artifacts and innovators, teleport to immersive experiences to learn hardware and software concepts, meet a startup team, debate ethics in tech, and reflect on how tech is used in daily life. Solve a problem for your community or the world by applying your new knowledge and skills to complete a Build Challenge.
Game challenges focus on collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity to build players’ capacity as active problem-solvers, digital citizens, and future innovators.
Download Minecraft: Education Edition
Join CHM Director of Education Kate McGregor as she takes you on a tour through the Great Tech Story and offers tips on how to engage students with build challenges and other activities.
Building Fun and Accessible Technology
Technology is everywhere. Although we may not think about it, or even notice it, technology can help to make life easier and more fun. Tech tools can be used to build complex things like skyscrapers and medical devices. Software can be used to model the way something might work before it’s built, like simulations to prevent injuries in a car crash. Tech can also provide opportunities for all kinds of people to experience new things.
Design a summer experience, like a water park or fairgrounds, that uses technology to make activities more fun and accessible to everyone in your peer group, including people with different interests and abilities.
Building Technology To Learn
Technology is everywhere. Although we may not think about it, or even notice it, technology can help to make life easier and more fun. Tech tools can also be used to help people learn. A computer with internet access can help a student explore educational content that isn’t available at their school. A teacher can use technology to make a classroom or a lesson more interactive or more fun. Technology can be used to help students with different abilities to access learning opportunities.
Design your ideal school and include technology that helps every student succeed and provides teachers with the tools they need to engage students in learning. Consider students with different abilities.
Throughout history, technology has been used to solve problems and make our lives better. For example, some technologies have enabled us to heat our homes with solar power or to drive cars that do not rely on fossil fuels. But today, many technologies contribute to climate change.
As we look to the future, what can we do to make sure that the technology we use at home, school, and in our communities is safe, fair, and sustainable? We have to rethink how we design and make new tech, how we use it, and how we dispose of it when we don’t want it anymore. What can we do to save our energy?
Educators, parents, and students over the age of 18 may submit videos of their completed build challenge. Video submissions should show the finished build with student narration to explain: what they built, why they built it, and how they integrated concepts from the immersive experiences and museum content. Videos should be no more than two minutes long.
If you have questions about CHM’s Minecraft: Education Edition world or build challenges, please contact us.
Thank you to the following for providing initial support for the Great Tech Story:
