In February half term 2021, we teamed up with our friends over at Megabyte Club to provide online Minecraft sessions focused around Greek Mythology. On Monday we looked at the Olympian Gods and Hayley told the kids the story of Kronos swallowing his children whole to ensure none of them would overthrow him (don’t worry, Rhea outsmarts him by giving him a baby shaped rock and hiding Zeus deep in the earth so he could eventually enact revenge and get his siblings thrown back up into existence). On Tuesday we looked at Hercules and his labours and on Wednesday we heard the stories around the Trojan War. Most importantly though, we had a super time!
Megabyte Club is usually an after-school club using Minecraft and Coding as a way to engage kids with a variety of educational topics. We both believe that kids learn best through play, and they certainly all love Minecraft! With schools closed and parents homeschooling during the pandemic, Megabyte moved to Zoom to offer online sessions. The kids were so well behaved, muting themselves and raising their hands to speak… most of the time anyway!
Pixel Art of Hercules – you can see his club and the Nemean Lion!
Each day consisted of 3 solo activities and then a group activity using Minecraft realms (an online shared world we host privately so the kids are all kept safe). Lots of them already knew plenty about Greek Mythology and were reading the ever popular Percy Jackson series, and getting them to tell us the stories they knew was great fun. Activities included building a temple to our favourite gods, building Greek ships (to launch an attack on Troy), creating Trojan Horses that you could go inside, as well as several tasks to create a challenge for a Greek hero to undergo. The kids came up with ideas from horse races to parkour challenges to building coliseum style areas and filling them with baddies – called Mobs – to battle. On Hercules day, the kids teamed up in the realm to defeat the Ender Dragon, a truly herculean task!
An arena and Greek Ship from the previous task in the background.
Each day we asked the kids what their favourite tasks had been and it was clear that they had loved the Greek Mythology theme. One of them asked me how I knew so much about Greek Mythology – when I told them I had studied it at University, I was reliably informed that since they had studied it at Primary School, we were on equal footing.
From all of us here at Helicon Storytelling and Megabyte Club we hope you all had a wonderful February Half term. Keep an eye out for future online Megabyte Clubs with other themes – they’re sure to book up quickly after success in February!