Jaxson’s Minecraft World

Like many children, my son LOVES to watch Minecraft videos on YouTube. These channels, both adult- and child-ran, include things like:

• tutorials and tips
• world tours
• narrated walk-throughs of challenges, battles, etc

This week he asked if he would be able to make his own video and I, of course, said yes! Given the nature of my job and personal interests I feel like we were in a good position to get started with this with a solid foundational understanding. I asked him to clarify what he wanted for his video and I decided to utilize the following platforms:

• Minecraft Education Edition
  • Jaxson and I already had full access to the program through MVSD and this is the version of Minecraft that he uses
• Microsoft Stream
  • Part of our Office 365 suite, this platform allowed for use to easily screen record his game progress
• Canva
  • There are multiple YouTube intro templates that we could select from to create a title and conclusion slide
  • We also used Canva to create the video itself as we could storyboard the intro, video, and conclusion in a manner that is visually simple for a Grade 2 student
    • I use WeVideo for my video creation but it is currently beyond the scope of understanding for Jaxson and it utilizes more bandwidth

We had a lot of fun creating this together, the following are some notes based on this preliminary experience:

Trial and Error

• What will the computer microphone pick up?
  • Where do the other members of the household need to be if I am recording? Is it fair to record other people’s conversation in the background without them knowing? How does our environment affect our sound quality?
• What visuals do I include?
  • We discussed if our video should be just a screen recording or a picture-in-picture inclusion?
  • What about copyright? Can we record the game? Can we include game screenshots? Can we use the Minecraft logo?
• How do we organize what we want to communicate?
  • We set up the world before we started recording so that our video time-limit wasn’t spent on the loading time
  • Jaxson tried a few times to narrate as he played and he realized that, for him, it was challenging to do both at the same time
    • He asked if he could record an audio narration overlay after the game recording has been made and was able to do it in one shot!

Parental Considerations

• Privacy
  • If we included a picture-in-picture that would mean Jaxson’s face, and the background of the video which was our home, would be in the video. Should this be public? What are we comfortable with? What would be safe?
  • We decided that the video would include an audio of his voice only but that the video would be public on YouTube
  • He agreed that his commentary wouldn’t include identifying information
• Channel Settings
  • The YouTube channel was set up under my Google domain
  • Public channel
  • Designated as “for Kids” within YouTube with comments disabled
• Digital Creation and Footprint
  • We talked about how once we publish something on the internet that anyone could see it, save it, record it; it could be there forever
  • Is he ok with people he knows, and doesn’t know, seeing this?
  • As we grow, change, learn more, what we create will change and be different

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With one video under his belt he is quite excited to create more so, as we learn more, I will be sure to share any updates!

In the mean time, please check out his YouTube debute!