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After discovering the educational aspect of Minecraft, I ask: Can Minecraft be used to teach music? Musical MinecraftIn the fall of 2017, I will studying to become a music teacher. In order to prepare, I am constantly writing essays about education and different ways to approach new teaching methods. Recently, I discovered that the fictional game Minecraft can be used to teach students. In fact, I found hundreds of Minecraft lesson plans covering a variety of subjects, including math, science, and even history. With this knowledge, I began to think: how could Minecraft possibly teach students about music? First of all, there are hardly any tools that actually play music. In fact, there are three. One, the note block, plays a single note when hit. The second and third tools are the music disc, which literally plays music, and jukeboxes. A jukebox’s only purpose is to play the music discs. Pretty boring, right? Thankfully, Minecraft breaks up this monotony by allowing you to change the note played by a note block. By right-clicking the note block, you raise the pitch by a half-step. If you constantly right-click it, it will play up to two octaves. Also, depending on the material you put under the note block, you can make the note block sound like a different instrument. Wood sounds like a bass guitar, sand and gravel sound like snare drums, glass makes it click, stone is a bass drum, and anything else sounds like a piano or harp. But this is boring. In order to really play anything, you’d have to run around and hit every block one at a time. That is when you find the interesting feature about note blocks: when you apply electricity, they play as if you hit them. With this knowledge, you can build a music circuit! Minecraft’s fictional mineral Redstone works like wires, allowing you to attach note blocks to switches and repeaters. Repeaters are tools that can slow the reaction of the electric current, therefore allowing a rest in between the notes. These circuits, however, could only play one song at a time. In order to play another, you’d have to build a whole new circuit. Unless, of course, you could build something like a piano. One Minecraft gamer, Kimundi2, designed machinery and explains how it works in a silent Youtube video titled “Pistons: A revolution for Redstone Circuitry.” Using these concepts, a man named Jon Hook wrote an article on WonderHowTo.com about how to create a “programmable piano” in Minecraft. By using different conductors, the article informs us that we can allow electricity to activate some note blocks and not others. By using these concepts, you could have students build a working piano in Minecraft to teach them about how an actual piano works, as well as how pitch, timing, and instrumentation can affect the sound of a song. Based on this research, I have discovered a totally new way to use Minecraft to help music students. And not only will these students be learning musical matters, but also about electricity and machinery. Such lessons could even inspire students to inspect their own instruments to see how they work, and even how to build them. It is amazing how technology is now being used as teaching tools, but even more amazing is the fact that we are using video games to help inspire students in the real world. Thank you for reading this essay for the 2016 Minecraft Scholarship. Anyone have any deeper understanding about music and Minecraft? Comments are encouraged!
1 Comment
ZebraD
7/25/2016 06:13:25 am
Did I peek your interest? Here is the site that prompted me!
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AuthorZebraD is currently a high school senior in Florida. She is constantly writing essays for school and scholarships. Archives
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