Welcome to Minecraft: Education Edition’ s Active Citizen world which explores the incredible stories of Nobel Peace Laureates and how, as humans without superpowers, they achieved truly amazing things.

This Guide for Teachers is designed to provide you with all the information you need to help your students have an enjoyable and successful experience of this unique learning experience.

Active Citizenship has been designed as a fun and creative introduction to how to build a better world. This experience will provide your students the skills they can use to participate in their society actively and successfully.

It offers additional opportunities to replay and learn more about the Nobel Peace Laureates and the changes they created in the world, building strong and effective role models for society.

All students can participate in this game, so let’s get started!

If you’re new to Minecraft: Education Edition there are many resource to help you get started. Many teachers find that their students know how to play Minecraft, so it’s possible to involve them in helping you understand the game.

Here’s some simple steps you can take to get started with Minecraft: Education Edition and the Active Citizen world.

• Install Minecraft: Education Edition by visiting https://aka.ms/download
• It’s free to download and can be installed on many different types of device.
• Watch our introductory video to the Active Citizen game, which will walk you through the game.

Game Overview

The Nobel Peace Prize has the power to change peoples’ thoughts and actions thus make the world a more peaceful and better place for everyone.

Alfred Nobel could be tough and cynical in his business dealings and was in his own words at the same time both a misanthrope and a "super idealist". He loved literature, had written poems and a play in his earlier years, and built up a large book collection. Here lay the seeds of his decision to set up a literature prize to be awarded to the author of the best work "of an idealistic tendency".

But, Alfred Nobel also supported those who spoke up against militarism and war, and wanted to make a contribution to work for disarmament and the peaceful solution of international conflicts. He was very interested in cultural and peace-related issues, and the prizes he established reflect this: ."...to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." The Nobel Peace Prize is known throughout the world as the prize that recognizes those humans who make the biggest difference. The people who are awarded it are incredible people who achieved their goals without superpowers. Instead, they used human capabilities, like communication, diligence, empathy and collaboration to dramatically change the world.

Through this Minecraft game students will explore some the amazing people who have previous ‘conferred the greatest benefit on mankind’. Students will then build their vision, big or small, that could make a benefit to people in their community. A vision that can be acted on democratically and bring about change for the better. They will learn and start to become active citizens.

Age range

This game can be played across a broad age range and standards of learning.

However, the themes and content of the game, including some of the extended learning exercises make it best suited to ages 8-15.

Creating the Best Experience

To increase student access to the Active Citizen game, there are three ways to use the game:

• Teacher Facilitated
• Student Self-Guided
• Remote Learning Experience (Supporting COVID safety restrictions)

Teacher-Facilitating (Face to face)

This type of learning experience is going to provide students with the highest level of teacher support. As the teacher, you will be providing explicit instruction and modelling before releasing students into independently working through the activities in Active Citizen.

Student Self-Guided

This type of learning experience is going to provide students with the least amount of teacher support. As the teacher, you will make sure your students are able to log into the Minecraft: Education Edition application. You will provide students with the Active Citizen Presentation to assist them with their self-paced and self-guided experience for game play. The presentation will provide students with explicit directions on how to participate in the game. You should also provide students with a copy of the Visual Glossary located at the end of this Guide.

Remote Learning Experience

COVID-19 pandemic has meant many students having to learn remotely. This type of learning experience can be facilitated synchronously or asynchronously. If you are having students participate in a synchronous (live) virtual session, you will facilitate the session just like the in-class experience (with teacher facilitation). As the teacher, you will be providing explicit instruction and modelling before students independently work through the activities.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded 102 times to 137 Nobel Prize laureates between 1901 and 2021. We only have time to feature six in this game, four which students will directly interact with and two who introduce the building area for the students vision.

The four featured during game play are:

• Malal Yousafzai
• Fridtjof Nansen
• Wangari Maathai
• The 14th Dalai Lama

These have been chosen to represent a broad cross section across the history of the prize, geographies, religions, gender and ethnicity. The four also represent a diversity of specific skills, which are all skills still useful in today’s world.

These prize winners will introduce the build area, where students will build out their own vision using Minecraft.

Active Citizenship Learning Goals

Students enter the game located at the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo. Introduced to the Nobel Peace Prize by Alfred Nobel himself, they will proceed to venture through history to learn about four previous Nobel Peace Prize Laureates and the amazing work they did. They will achieve this through game play and challenges presented to students by the Laureates.

At the end they will build a visual representation of their vision for peace, something big or small that they can act upon in a democratic way for the betterment of their community.

Learning Goals

By the end of this game students will be able to:

• Know the purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize.
• Understand and articulate the range of skills used by Nobel Laureates to achieve their cause democratically and peacefully.
• Set out their vision, no matter how big or how small, for peaceful progress in their community. They will do this by building a visualization in Minecraft.

This game is not a multi-player game, but many of the learning activities in the extended learning are. Please consider how learning goals can be achieved in group as well as independent study.

Extending Beyond the Game

Becoming an Active Citizen does not end with completion of the game. On this site you will find lerning materials on the characters the students meet in the active citizen gameplay:

• Malal Yousafzai
• Fridtjof Nansen
• Wangari Maathai
• The 14th Dalai Lama