The debate on the relevance of games in education has raged for nearly thirty years now, but has a game finally appeared that can unite teachers and students through exploration and creativity? It’s possible, and the game is Minecraft.
What is Minecraft?
Minecraft is a difficult game to describe in a few sentences. Some describe it as a world-building game, as Lego in virtual form, or as an adventure game dotted with dungeons, monsters, swords and magic. In reality Minecraft is all of these things, and more. Moreover, Minecraft can be what you want it to be.
The blocky world of Minecraft
In the past, games such as Second Life have come to the fore of the games in education debate, promising to use digital spaces to revolutionise the way we learn. That revolution never came, for a number of reasons. Second Life was difficult to run on most school computers, but more importantly, though Second Life allowed the users to explore and interact with its world, creation and the act of creativity was stifled by a complex and cluttered interface. The magic of Minecraft lies in its freedom for the user to express themselves creatively in countless ways, and to any scale.
Loading up Minecraft for the first time will see the user dropped into a world, a world where everything is made of blocks. This Minecraft world is unique, no other exists in the universe quite like this one. Whats more, this world is over eight times the size of our planet. So what do you do know?
Do you begin building a house? Climb the mountain range in the distance? Explore the deep caves beneath the ground? Begin mining for more useful and exotic minerals? Start a farm? Build a castle? A railroad? A giant, working computer? The possibilities really are endless in Minecraft. Add the ability for your class to play together on the same Minecraft world at the same time, and the number of educational opportunities begin mounting up.
How is Minecraft relevant to education?
The open-ended nature of Minecraft is what makes it so useful to educators. Whether you’re trying to teach English, history, geography, science, maths, design and technology or even PSHE, there is nearly always an opportunity to use Minecraft thanks to its myriad features.
Take the simple task of building a house in your Minecraft world. What material will you use to build your house? There are numerous different materials available to you, including stone, cobblestone, bricks, wood, wood logs and dirt to name but a few. How will you test which material is the strongest? If you want to have glass in your windows, how will you make it? What kind of state change has occurred in transforming the sand into glass?
This kind of scientific investigation is the sort of thing that Minecraft players engage in constantly, without even realising it. A simple activity such as this can be expanded in any number of directions. Introduce planning and evaluation stages to the experiment to include Design & Technology, data collection and interpretation from the material strength experiment to include Maths and data handling. Ask your pupils to work together to build their houses and you begin to add in elements of PSHE and Citizenship. A task as simple as building a house has yielded a number of teaching and learning opportunities, yet there are so many more available to you in the world of Minecraft.
Make history come to life with historic building recreations in Minecraft. This is a Roman Villa
A quick search of Minecraft in YouTube can tell you so much more about the game than this blog post ever could, and will deliver a dizzying array of constructions, contraptions and artwork ranging from the small to the astonishingly huge and ambitious. If, like me, you were overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of some of the Minecraft communities’ projects, you’re probably asking “What could my class do in the world of Minecraft?”
Dan Birchinall is the Lead Designer at Inspyro (http://www.inspyro.co.uk), a creative learning company developing cross-curricular projects for primary schools. He can be found on Twitter at @DanMB_
We are currently using Minecraft at our school with grades 5 – 8. We have plans to introduce it to younger students later this year.
http://morrowcraft.wikispaces.com
We work with several carefully selected virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) to help students develop and array of essential skills needed in today’s world. We have developed highly successful programs using Second Life, Open Sim, Quest Atlantis and LEGO Universe. However, Minecraft has become a star platform for the following reasons:
- Extremely engaging – kids are CRAZY about this game
- Learning to build is easier than most virtual worlds
- The open nature of play makes it extremely flexible for designing curricula
- Settings are flexible and platform can be hosted on a private school server
- Each account is a flat fee (no subscription fee) and can be shared between classes
- Nature of game excellent for community building
As educators, we have been blown away by the creativity of our students. They are researching on their own to learn more about the game and the what other players are making. Students are creating their own challenges, maintaining a wiki, designing meta games and keeping their teachers running just to keep up!
I have to agree whole-heartedly with Mr. Birchinall, Minecraft just may be the game that will unite teachers and students through exploration, creativity and…. PLAY!
Thanks very much for this comment – really interesting. I have to say I’d never heard of Minecraft before a week or two ago and you and Dan have really opened my eyes. I think I’m going to need to take a look – that way I can play it during the day and claim that I’m doing important research. Who knows – maybe I will be!
Hi Marianne,
It’s great to see you have built such a successful Minecraft community in your school. I love the wiki and am very impressed at the creativity your students have shown!
I think yours is a fantastic example of what Minecraft can achieve when implemented in a school environment.
Good luck with introducing MInecraft to your younger students!
Dan Birchinall (Twitter @DanMB_ )
My son loves this game. He is building a pyramid and used a formula he learned in AS level Maths to calculate how many bricks he would need – and thus how long it would take him. His Maths teacher was very impressed that a student had applied his learning to an out of the classroom context. If that’s not a hit on a teaching goal…
Absolutely. Maybe next year he’ll use Minecraft to teach the topic first time round!
Thanks for the article – fascinating stuff. The next couple of decades will tell a lot about how technology changes the modern classroom.
This looks really good I am trying to find a way of introducing minecraft in our lower school computing and digital media lessons but we are finding it difficult to find information on educational licencing. The only system I have found available at the moment is American do you have any additional information of how we could implement it in UK school?