Treasure Island .mcetemplate File (recommended)
To use the resource you need to already have a Minecraft licence installed on your device. You can then upload our templates and play. For help with this, watch this short video.
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson was our first-ever Minecraft world-build. We chose this text in large part because of the iconic map and its centrality to the text and because it is a great classic work of children’s literature. We took the map from the first edition of the book (1883) and made an accurate scale-map of the island in Minecraft, including the ship, hidden treasure, the blockhouse, and Ben Gunn’s cave and lookout. In LITCRAFT: Treasure Island the children re-enact the activities of the boy narrator Jim Hawkins as he runs around the island having various adventures (e.g. finding Ben Gunn and his cave; digging up the treasure).
The main aim of the resource is to re-engage children with literature by creating a positive loop between the experience of reading, the immersive experience within the game-world and the return to the text. Children follow instructions given at the starting point in a series of chests and readable books. They can also write in-game. Trials of the resource have clearly shown that Litcraft enhances comprehension, engagement and empathy with the main character in a first person text.
All of the lessons are structured in such a way that pre-reading and preparatory tasks warm up the children and prepare them for the in-game activity – then they enter the world and play the in-game task – then they come out and undertake a follow-up writing activity.
There are usually between 4-6 tasks for each world that correspond to key chapters and passages within the book. We recommend children working in PAIRS or THREES using the worlds on an ipad.
Litcraft has already been used in a range of ways: