Minecraft Math!

Recently, Mrs. Yollis' class has become a BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology) room. During our geometry math unit,  students were building in Minecraft.

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Guest Post by Shayna 

During math,  students were allowed to make solid figures on Minecraft. First I made a cube, and then set my goal to make a square-base pyramid with five flat faces. However,  there was a problem. In Minecraft, it will not let you tilt a single cube, so I could not get the flat triangular faces I wanted.  I ended up with a stair-step square-base pyramid.  

As I was building it, Mrs. Yollis mentioned that it was hard to count how many cubes were on each level because they were all one color. She recommended that I make each cubic unit a different color, so the other classmates could count how many were in each layer. 

I started out with three colors, diamond, iron, and lapid lazuli. Then when I was almost done, two of the same colors were side by side making it difficult to count. So, I tried adding a fourth color, black obsidian. It worked! 


I took these pictures as I got closer to being done. When I finished I took a final screen shot. My pyramid had seven layers. 

As you can see, I am starting to color each layer. The top cube is diamond colored. 

The top layer is one cubic unit. 
The second layer is a 3 x 3 = 9 cubic units. 
The third layer is a 5 x 5 = 25 cubic units.

The fourth layer is a 7 x 7 = 49 cubic units.
The fifth layer is 9 x 9 = 81 cubic units. 

How does the pattern continue? 

What is the volume of my pyramid?

We noticed that the even square numbers (2 x2 and 4 x 4) were skipped. 

Later, we built my pyramid with the one inch blocks that Mrs. Yollis had. We also build a pyramid using all the square numbers. Then I took a picture of that and put it with the others.

In Minecraft, each square face must line up with another square face. That was the reason I could NOT build the pyramid on the right.   

Have you ever built a solid figure in Mincraft?

Your pupil,

Shayna