Teaching with Minecraft

Using Creepers and Crafting to teach anything your heart desires.

Imagine a tool that could assist students in learning history, geometry, programming skills, critical thinking and visual/spatial intelligence. Now take that really boring package and wrap it all in an immersive gaming experience that students already enjoy. What you end up with is any educator’s dream: the perfect connection between engagement and learning.

Why Minecraft?

Until recently, the social phenomenon that is Minecraft has not really been leveraged as an educational tool. For a variety of reasons, schools haven’t viewed video games as an essential tool for student learning, and students haven’t viewed games as learning opportunities. Of course there are several exceptions (I remember Math Blaster and Reading Rabbit) but as a whole, the gamification of learning has been lacking across the nation. That is until recently, when many educators began to see the usefulness of Minecraft’s open-ended environments.

The complete freedom of Minecraft allows you to build whatever your mind can imagine. From the Taj Mahal to the Death Star, people across the world have been creating intricate structures using the open building environment that Minecraft provides. Users can even collaborate with other players to create structures and cities together, allowing for rapid creation of massive environments. These worlds which users create can then be packaged up and shared with others through a number of websites, allowing millions of people to download and explore amazing environments. Many educators have seen this as a fantastic tool for teaching new concepts and have begun creating world sharing environments exclusively for educators.

Minecraft in Schools

I was introduced to Minecraft as a learning tool through research that I was doing for an upcoming programming course at Velocity Indiana. We were seeking a way to engage students in learning about JavaScript programming, which is the language that Minecraft was built with. As I sought out more and more resources, I kept finding teachers that were introducing their students to difficult topics through the lens of this game.

The process of creating and sharing lessons and environments has really been enhanced by the creation of MinecraftEdu, a collaboration between educators and the Minecraft development team. Using knowledge from both sides, this team has created an easy opportunity for any educator to begin to get involved in using Minecraft as a teaching tool.

Need a way to engage students in learning about the colonization of America? Then have them explore a historically accurate reproduction of the Jamestown Settlement. Need to teach your students about economics and the relationship between supply and demand? Create an entire economy within the game, where students can create goods and sell them for in-game currency. Have an upcoming unit on plotting lines on the coordinate grid? Create massive graphs using different types of blocks within the game.

The possibilities of what can be done with this game as an educational tool are numerous and there are more ideas being cultivated every day. One of the things that makes this experience so successful for educators is the growing community of teachers who are passionate about implementing this tool in their classroom. Teachers are actively sharing the ideas that they come up with for lessons that use Minecraft with other schools. This has allowed educators and parents who are new to the tools to easily explore the learning opportunities before trying to use them. This has also grown the community of individuals who are excited about using Minecraft as a learning tool for students.

As you can tell, I am a huge proponent of increasing the use of this awesome game as a tool to teach a variety of skills. As I embark on teaching students basic programming skills through Minecraft, I will be sure to share my experiences and learning. I would love for you to share your experiences as well and join the growing community of people who are teaching students through Minecraft. Also be sure to check out our parent resources for the JavaScript course we are teaching starting next week!