Minecraft in the Classroom

I tried to avoid showing any interest in Minecraft despite the fact my daughter and students seemed to be obsessed with it.  In the end I decided that rather than try to avoid it I would endeavor to harness it's 'educational' benefits (if indeed it had any).  Suffice to say that I am a convert,  and now regularly use it in my classroom.  The above is an example of how we used Minecraft to model the human digestive system.  Students worked in groups inside Minecraft, where they worked on creating the different parts of the digestive system.  There were very interesting conversations going on such as 'Can you please get out of my pancreas and work on the liver?'
In the above example, once they had finished their digestive system, they took a screen shot of it and imported into PicCollage where they then labelled it.  One of the great things about Minecraft is the 3D aspect, which you can't appreciate from these examples. Students could navigate through their digestive systems in a walk through of their creations.  Highly engaging and I can attest to the fact that they all had a thorough understanding of the different parts of the digestive system at the end of it!