Minecraft U

What we remember depends largely on how we organize it. Without skipping the
joy of building beautiful buildings, we are going to learn how to store and
remember data, using the age-old device of the memory palace.

We will divide our camp program into three challenges.

The first is to build a room that will hold images of objects we want to store and
remember. We’ll choose 10 objects (our favorite toys, for example) and decide on
a way to organize them that is logical (by ascending size, for example) and then
place images of these objects inside our storehouse.

The second challenge is to build a room that will hold images of words we want to
store and remember. We’ll choose 10 words to store (a list of members of our
family, for example) and decide on a way to organize them that is logical (by
descending age, for example) and then place images of these words inside our
storehouse. Because we are storing images of words, we will need to be extra
creative to make images that are vivid and memorable.

The third challenge will be to build a room that will hold concepts we want to store
and remember. For this challenge, we will specifically use the concepts that
comprise the ranks of biological taxonomy (domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order,
family, genus, and species).

We will learn about the logical order embedded in taxonomy (there are several
schemes of order used for various types of taxonomy) and create vivid imagery to
portray these abstract concepts, which we will then place in a storehouse.
This will help us learn how logical order is required for meaningful classification of objects, and concepts as well.

The three key features we will be developing in our Minecraft skills are organizing
data, storing it properly for memory and creating vivid images for challenging
situations such as abstract words.