Minecraft as a Teaching Tool

Minecraft as a Teaching Tool

Does video game playing in a classroom setting actually teach kids anything, or are they just getting more addicted to Minecraft?

If you have a child between the ages of 6 and 12, you’ve probably heard of Minecraft. Heck, you may even play it.

It is a video game created by Swedish programmer Markus Persson, and its seeming simplicity allows kids and adults of many ages to build virtual worlds, smash things, and attack zombies and monsters. Minecraft has quickly become one of the best-selling computer games of all time, with 70 million purchases since its 2009 release. It was recently sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion. Even 5-year-old kids can learn to play Minecraft on an iPad, phone, or computer.

The free-form, role-playing game is made of up textured blocks, similar to Legos, with the objective being to construct a 3-D virtual world. The options are wide open, allowing players to use the raw materials around them to build structures, scenery, and more. As the world evolves, building becomes just one component; other activities include exploring, acquiring and using resources, crafting, and combat. Players can play alone, or with others in multiple-player mode. The game has been rated by Common Sense Media with four out of five stars, recommended for ages 8 and up, and is noted as “really engaging” and having a “great learning approach.”

Recently kids, parents, and some teachers have been viewing Minecraft as more than an addictive video game. They are tapping into its potential educational powers in classroom settings. Surprisingly, these Minecraft-associated skills are not only the hard ones such as science, computer, engineering, math, and computer coding, but also the “softer” skills such as design, creative thinking, problem-solving, and working with others. Teachers like that kids who play Minecraft improved their spatial understanding, developed better reading comprehension, acquired conflict-resolution skills, learned to set cooperative priorities, and developed their math and science aptitudes.

It is no surprise that Minecraft has also entered the realm of summer camps and proved popular at an iD Tech camp at UC Berkeley. iD Tech is one of area’s largest tech camps and started in 1999 in Silicon Valley.

In July during a few hours at the Cal iD Tech’s summer camp, dozens of kids—some taking other courses such as robotics and photography—were engaged with their computer activity by 9 a.m.

iD Tech Camp director Trevor Doyle, aka “Irish Thunder” to the kids, said he sees many educational benefits to Minecraft and believes it can be used to teach standards aligned with Common Core, such as reading and problem-solving skills. Doyle is a math and technology teacher during the school year and teaches with Minecraft in a California foothills school.

“Minecraft can give kids the ability to make real decisions to solve issues,” Doyle said. Like the popular computer game Oregon Trail that predated it, Minecraft may soon be used more ubiquitously in the classroom as a teaching tool. “Minecraft will be used by all schools if they want to reach today’s kids,” Doyle said. There are multiple websites dedicated to using Minecraft as an educational tool, including MinecraftEdu, which sells Minecraft software adapted for classroom use.

In addition to building worlds, Minecraft has been used to create historical events as a world that students can virtually interact in. For example, it’s been used to teach about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. It’s even been used to experience art, such as in the Tate Gallery Modern in London, which created 3-D versions of paintings using Minecraft as a way to virtually engage users in works of art.

The kids at the iD Tech camp were all pretty stoked about being in a camp dedicated to Minecraft. When asked their favorite subjects, many did not all name science, technology, engineering, or math, the typical STEM subjects. Some talked about loving to read, write, and design. They also noted that playing Minecraft at camp was different than engaging at home. At home, they said, they usually play alone on tablets. At camp, they could play on computers in multiplayer mode.

“I think it’s great, mostly because I get to play a video game all day,” said Gareth Hooper, 8, of Alameda, who was creating a Star Wars map, complete with a Death Star. The different between playing at home and being in a camp, though, was that the kids were learning things like Java code and how circuits work. If they ran into a problem, they could ask an instructor, or their peers, for advice. They were creating and customizing the game itself by programming their own ideas.

“I get to interact with other kids,” Gareth later said. “It makes it more fun.”

Sitting across the room was Nigel Willacy, 8, of Oakland, who was learning how to command a block to move by using coding. “I like that you can build anything you want,” he said. Nigel became interested in computers recently and had taken a coding class through www.Code.org. Louis Willacy, Nigel’s dad, was looking for summer coding camps and came across iD Tech. “Nigel and many of his classmates are Minecraft fanatics, so it was a no-brainer to sign him up for that.”

Nathan, 7, and Sierra Judy, 9, of Oakland, are siblings who have been at iD Tech camps for the past two summers. For Nathan, who is on the autism spectrum, attending new camps and new social situations can cause anxiety, his father said. When they drove up to camp this summer, Nathan “jumped out the car and was excited to go,” Rick Judy said. Using Minecraft, he was building an intricate roller coaster that ran underwater. Instructor Olivia Conti, a recent college graduate from Orlando, Fla., said that Nathan was learning about circuitry through the roller coaster.

“I really see it as a great learning tool,” she said. She expanded by saying that a lot of science and technology concepts must be learned hands-on, but can be dangerous. Minecraft is one way that kids can learn science concepts without actually touching a battery or circuit, for example, she said.

But some have argued that using Minecraft as an educational tool is just hype. “Minecraft is not intrinsically educational. What is educational is having a passion,” wrote Hana Schank in the Atlantic. And that may well be true, although Minecraft is both alluring to parents and educators because there’s buy-in from kids, and the game can be cross-disciplinary, merging science, math, engineering, history, reading, and the arts.

Parents and camp staff do recognize that a lot of screen time isn’t good for kids. Being at a tech camp is the opposite of traditional summer camps, where children frolic outdoors. At this particular camp, however, kids took breaks and spent the afternoon playing board games outside or exploring the Cal campus, and there is an emphasis on group learning. At the end of the day, learning via computer is never a substitute for learning “in real life,” so to speak.

Once they go home, it’s up to the parents to regulate how much time they spend playing computer games. “It can be consuming, yes, like reading and many things,” Doyle said. “However, parents need to recognize that this type of learning is here to stay so we need to work with it.”

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Momo Chang lives in Oakland and is a freelance journalist who writes primarily on health, education, immigration, and Asian American communities.

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