Over the last two weeks, we’ve introduced you to the ins and outs of Minecraft in terms of its gameplay and its impact. These, when combined, help to create a game that thrives in an educational setting, one that The Center for Games and Impact boasts as one of its core games. We focus deeply on helping educators implement Minecraft, and other games like it, into their classrooms and curriculums.
Minecraft has joined the recent wave of games going educational, alongside Valve’s Teach With Portals initiative, among others, with the creation of MinecraftEdu. As a modified version of the original Minecraft game client, MinecraftEdu gives educators the power to harness their curriculum within the space of Minecraft’s geometric game world. With the click of a button, educators can create a local area network (LAN) server, easily accessed by students, to learn and play in a premade map space, or in a personalized one that teachers are able to quickly and easily create themselves. From inside the game, teachers are able to fully control all of the game’s functions, creating assignments visible while in the game and acting as a player alongside their students.
Interested in learning more about how MinecraftEdu works? Check out our MinecraftEdu game page!
The Teacher avatar in MinecraftEdu. |
Working with the teacher admin menu. |
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Since Minecraft’s launch in 2009, educators all over the world have come to fully embrace Minecraft for its versatility in educational settings. Through the connectivity that the internet provides, more and more resources for the use of Minecraft in education turn up almost daily. Check out some of our favorite examples below!
Minecraft as a Tool for Education
Ideas for Using Minecraft in the Classroom
If you’re thinking about using Minecraft in your classroom but aren’t sure where to start, check out this post by Andrew Miller, Educational Consultant and Online Coordinator for for Edutopia.com. In his blog, he talks about a few of the many ways that Minecraft can be used to touch all subject levels; history finds a home with the ability to explore player created models of monuments, English students can exercise their reading comprehension by acting out scenes and building settings from books they read in class, while math can be practiced in the highly geometric landscape Minecraft has to offer.
Check out more blogs in the Game Based Learning Series on Edutopia.com!
Massively Misunderstood Minecraft
Much of what we’ve already covered relating to Minecraft stems from the idea that Minecraft as a game and as a tool is incredibly misunderstood. Like many games, it is often branded as a waste of time when instead it is one of the most versatile teaching tools that games, as a resource, can offer. Kerilee Beasley, a digital literacy coach at United World College of South East Asia, agrees; in her blog post “Massively Misunderstood Minecraft,” she discusses some of the challenges with using Minecraft for the first time with students. Though she struggled initially with the client itself, she found that her students were learning in ways that they never had before, fostering their collaboration, creativity, and leadership skills, among other things.
Are you a teacher who is using or is planning on using Minecraft in the classroom? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!