Martian Perchlorates in Minecraft Education – Moving at the Speed of Creativity

My middle school computer science students are wrapping up the last project in our “Minecraft Mars” or Coding Mars” unit this month. (In April 2025) In this unit, my 6th, 7th and 8th graders use Microsoft MakeCode for Minecraft to make a “robot” (their “agent”) autonomously farm different kinds of plants, build protective glass domes (“terrariums”) over their farms in a Mars-like Minecraft world, autonomously “mine” for resources under the Martian surface and return those resources to a centralized location / warehouse, and finally (this is our lesson currently) co-create a Martian outpost in a shared world including landing pads and roads, with different types of habitats inside protective dome structures. This is a short video (75 sec) I created last month with some short screencasts students created of their Mars “terrarium farm builds.” Students are creating these MakeCode scripts in both the “block-based” coding language of MakeCode (similar to Scratch by MIT) as well as javascript, depending on their coding skill level and individual preference. (The previous links are MakeCode script examples by different students.)

A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to share an updated presentation about this project at the NCMLE ‘Middle School Matters’ Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. This Saturday morning, I’m listening to an audio podcast version of “The quest to figure out farming on Mars,” an article originally published in the MIT Technology Review in October 2024 as, “The quest to figure out farming on Mars” by David W. Brown. (paywall free version) This podcast and article is encouraging me to consider new possibilities for additional lessons in our Coding Mars unit, including the ways my students could simulate some of the chemistry involved with Martian regolith and perchlorates, using the specialized chemistry, periodic table blocks available in Minecraft Education. I’ll share a bit more of my thinking in this post.

I’ve been using MinecraftEDU and Minecraft Education with upper elementary and middle school age students since 2013-2015, when I taught STEM at Independence Elementary School in Yukon, Oklahoma, before serving as the Director of Technology at Casady School in OKC for 4 years. For the past six years, I’ve been teaching middle school STEM classes, and finding ways to creatively use Minecraft Education has become a major “passion project” for me as a STEM and computer science teacher.

One of the special features of Minecraft Education which I have not previously explored in-depth is the periodic table / chemistry blocks and block functions, represented (in part) in the 2018 Minecraft Education lesson, the “World of Chemistry.”

Use chemistry to create new Minecraft items like helium balloons and sparklers, view elements in the periodic table and build a custom laboratory.

Here’s what I’m thinking:

1. I can use AI (ChatGPT and/or Flint AI, which our school licenses) to create some basic lessons which will familiarize students with Martian regolith and perchlorates.
2. Students could potentially use a “custom Mars laboratory” in Minecraft to create these organic and inorganic materials, similar to the way Space Resource Technologies creates different variants or “simulants” of Martian regolith.
3. Again, using AI to help me better understand the science and “translate it” for my middle school students, they could potentially explore some of the chemical reactions involved in transforming perchlorates into non-toxic / plant friendly soil components which could support rather than destroy organic plant growth and farming processes.

The last few months (and even the past couple weeks) I’ve been amazed by the power of AI to serve as my personal lesson planning assistant, to not only format and draft my lessons for students in Canvas (our learning management system) but also discover / recommend new videos, web tools, and other resources we can use. My new assignment on creating a 15 to 30 second audio advertisement, part of a unit on podcasting for my middle school web design class, is an example of an AI-augmented lesson.

My own knowledge of chemistry is fairly limited. I had a bad experience with chemistry in high school, with a nice teacher who was unfortunately very ineffective, and this set me up for a bad experience when I went on to the US Air Force Academy. I was able to “test into” a higher level of chemistry, so we covered a year’s worth of material in an accelerated semester, but I struggled to understand the content and barely emerged from the class with C. I never took any more chemistry in college and became a “fuzzy” PoliSci / Geography major.

I contrast my own bad experiences in high school and college with those of two of our kids, in (respectively) a public magnet school and private school in OKC. One graduated from the Colorado School of Mines as a mechanical engineeer and now works as a contractor for NASA supporting the International Space station, and the other is majoring in Astronautical Engineering at the US Air Force Academy. Both LOVED chemistry in high school and used those experiences to fuel and propel their academic and professional journeys in STEM, which are ongoing.

I share this reflection and background because I am acutely aware of how important POSITIVE experiences are for students in STEM fields. I don’t entirely blame my high school chemistry teacher for arresting my own STEM studies in college (we still had to take a course in about 8 different engineering disciplines as part of the Academy’s ‘core curriculum) but I definitely remember the bad experiences of NOT learning helpful “concept development” in high school, and how that hurt me in my subsequent college studies.

I’m energized by the way AI can help give me some “lesson designing superpowers” with both topics I’m very familiar with (like podcasting and family oral history interviews) as well as topics I have a strong interest in, but not a deep background, like cutting-edge agricultural methods and farming off-world. Some of the articles and resources I might plug into AI tools like GoogleLM, ChatGPT or Flint AI include the November 2022 article from Arizona State, “What will it take to grow food on Mars? Anca Delgado says microorganisms and bioremediation could make the red planet’s soil usable” and Google Scholar referenced publications by Anca G. Delgado.

These possibilities for learning, and potentially TRANSFORMATIVE learning for my own middle school students this semester, are extremely exciting and motiving for me as a classroom teacher! Coding + Space Education + Minecraft + “Design – Create – Share” lesson planning Creativity = “My Pedagogical Happy Place!” I can’t wait to continue developing and co-creating these lessons with and for my students!