Introduction
Digital games have not been favored by the educational researchers and often not looked upon as a powerful tool for education. However, Minecraft is different and the game is known to carry huge educational benefits for children. The children can learn numerous subjects and it is found that learning whit Minecraft is faster than the use of traditional methods of education. Moreover, students feel motivated with the new medium of leaning and show higher motivation. The aim of the paper is to look at different studies and researches related to the game and its use in the educational field.
Minecraft is a kind of a mystery for parents as they find is puzzling to play. Therefore, they find it difficult to see as to why their children can remain engrossed for hours in a game of Minecraft. Furthermore, it is difficult to understand as to how those game scan be used for education purposes. Minecraft constructions do yield educational and development benefits as one gets to build houses, bridges floating islands to fuel their creative genius in the world of Minecraft construction (Robertson). Making those bigger builds can motivate the player into real engineering and architectural territory.
Minecraft was created by Markus Persson and developed by Mojang, a game developer studio. The game was released officially in 2011 and has sold more than 4.5 million copies and boasts of more than 20 million users (Hausrath).
About the game
It is not surprising to see innovations such as interactive whiteboards, ebooks and computer games catching the attention of educators and finding favors with the students. (Brand et al). It has been a challenge to inspire younger learners, and Minecraft seems to fill the gap between the educators and their students, as they discover that the new fun in learning.
Video games and simulations are proving to be a great way to increase student learning. Minecraft is one such game that is fast gaining recognition in the field of learning. The first-person perspective 3D world of Minecraft is a huge one and allows multiple players. The world is made of cubes of different colors and simple patterns that stand for different kinds of organic and hand-crafted materials (Tromba 20). There are seeds, pick axes, wood in the game, and the players can mine for diamonds, emeralds, and stone and create different tools and material for their needs. Minecraft world is made of cubes of different materials such as rock, sand, dirt, lava, obsidian and many more. A few of these can also be refined into usable raw materials such as wood, iron, diamond, etc. The player has to build structure using the blocks and turn raw materials and combinations of them into items of use to get protections from enemies like skeletons, zombie, creepers, etc
The Unified Theory of Play aims to deliver a rounded examination of the domain that will
augment understanding of the play by transporting a triple framework for critical analysis of
a variety of computer games. Minecraft has emerged as a popular outlet for play and creative expression, and the voxel-based sandbox game offers multiple modes of play. The virtual world of Minecraft may seem simple, with no strict rules or structure, this is a game that allows players to create, destroy, and recreate. The Unified Theory of Play framework (Hooper et al) can be applied to the game that give God-like power to the players. Today, the game has found application in different avenues, and one of them is education.
It is essential to identify the suitability of games in the curriculum and educational development. A qualitative study was done on the use of Minecraft in a game-based learning lesson to teach English. The pre-service teachers designed an 11-weeks course in the game integration and game analysis. The teachers could make use of certain characteristics of Minecraft and subsequent learning activities in order to teach English (Shah et al 2646-2654).
How Minecraft Meets Educational Purposes
Minecraft is not about just building and destroying. One also has to be alert from hostile monsters and enemy players. Thus, one needs to develop a sound strategy to build a fort, create the right weapons, set mob traps to keep the enemy at bay. This often includes complex technical information and the players develops a sharp survival mode while playing the game. The game promotes logical reasoning, and the player has to figure out how to use a certain component to make complex contraptions. The learning experience, when playing Minecraft, is a very enjoyable one and offers one the opportunity to develop his logic. The player often has to make use of conversion rates, and they learn about distances in the process. There is lots of imagination and creativity going on in the game of Minecraft that is certainly useful in the educational field.
Architecture and areas Minecraft is all about architecture and building and thus teaches essential perspective on the area, perimeter, and architecture. For example, the player has to calculate as to how many blocks he would need in a certain area or to make a frame, on order to build a house. The game allows the player to be creative and dabble with Architecture.
The popular Minecraft game carries a 'creative play' option and can certainly be used for powerful literacy teaching by teachers. The game is easy to download and as an app and the teachers can make use of the Green's 3D Literacy model (Marcon 35-37) to facilitate literacy teaching. According to many researchers, the practice of the digital game literacy involves sophisticated interactions between player and gamer. One can develop their skills in science, architecture, geography, spatial mathematics, art, and circuitry when playing the game. The 3D view in Minecraft can allow the students to walk around and see their creations from all angles.
Creativity and Innovation
Communication and Collaboration
Minecraft is enjoyed more as a multiplayer game and in a collaborative environment. The game will require consistent teamwork to build meaningful, and thus it develops strong attitudes towards team building. There can be different groups of students to decide who would gather the materials, who would find shelter, who would gather food, who would grow crops, etc.
Critical Thinking and Decision Making
The players always need to have a plan B to manage activities and deal with the mobs and enemies. This is a survival/sandbox computer game that has many elements within.
Reading, Writing, and vocabulary
Mincraft can be a great platform to teach the younger students to learn new words and improve their vocabulary. As each item carries a tooltip and image which go together, the children feel motivated to read. As the players have to keep a log of their activities and communicate information to other players, children learn to write informational texts.
Math and Geometry
Cobblestone crafting system can help teaching basic math and multiplication. The players will need to do their math very well in Minecraft to calculate amounts of materials they will need. The players can use the cubes to create other geometrical shapes such as cuboid, cube, based pyramid, tesseract, etc. Structures made with cubes also help the children to learn x, length, y, height, z, width coordinates (Bos et al56).
The students playing Minecraft can also learn about notes, octaves and chords when experimenting with Note Blocks. The Redstone circuitry offers an interactive environment to build basic logic circuits.
Laws of nature The computer-generated Minecraft worlds carry the same features as Earth. There are more than a dozen biomes including forest, swamp, jungle, ice plains, desert, plains, mountain, and ocean. Each biome has specific weather and climate, as well as the duration of the day. There blocks for wood and dirt and minerals, precious metals, water, and many others. The basic principles for physics and chemistry are adhered to basic principles (West and Bleiberg). The player can build functional coal-powered engines or electrical circuits in the game.
MinecraftEdu
There are several features in the game that serve as a teaching tool, and MinecraftEdu mod allows the teacher to conduct a lesson in a virtual world (West and Bleiberg). A community of teachers and educators is already using Minecraft as a teaching platform that carries a tremendous potential in geography and social studies. Students could recreate scenes from literature, or encounter the same challenges as the engineering students. Teachers can teach science subjects in real time and keep the students engaged in constructivist learning. The Minecraft simulations prove to be an intellectual playground for the students that encourages them to gain useful information from their environment.
A good example comes from a science teacher at the Crescent School in Toronto (West and Bleiberg), who asked his students to create a sustainable city model using Minecraft. The students built a sustainable city that used very little energy. When building the city, the students were given different responsibilities of farmer, builder, or miner. A survey done at the end of the experiment revealed that the majority of students wanted to use the game again in school and felt that it was a great learning experience for them.
A professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology asked the College and graduate students to make new terrains and non-player characters in Minecraft (West and Bleiberg). A common programming language Java was used as a code. The professor found that the students responded better to Minecraft as compared to other software platforms used in the past. The game also increased motivation among students for artificial intelligence.
Minecraft allows seemingly boundless creativity. The world uses a retro pixilated style that may be graphically simplistic, but is operationally complex. Players can create new resources by using different material and create useful structures, or defend themselves. Educators are using the potential of Minecraft to enable educative experiences and are introducing Minecraft into their classrooms. For example, Joel Levin, a computer teacher at the Columbia school in New York City, is using Minecraft to teach with his student’s creativity, responsibility, community building (Freedman), creativity and internet research skills. According to Levin, as the students are playing the game together, it teaches them is social responsibility. He finds that in his classroom, the students are ignoring their behavioral boundaries and feel responsible for their actions in the imaginary world.
Conclusion
Computer gaming has always been a challenge and opportunity for educators. However, experiments with Minecraft suggest that what is most admired about Minecraft is building. One can look up famous historical places and can recreate the complete architecture in the Minecraft world (Tromba 20). The community of Minecraft has grown into tens of millions, and most of them are children. The Minecraft world allows children to work together to build, explore, and learn. They improve their social skills and teamwork in the process. Plus, they also learn about Internet etiquette and collaboration.
The advancing technology is making dramatic changes in education content, its delivery, and accessibility. It is seen as a powerful tool to improve communication and learning. Today, educators and education faces unique resource problems apart from financial issues. Students are seen to take lesser interest in those mundane classrooms and teaching gets complex for the teachers all the time. Minecraft is a highly successful computer game that carries no gameplay objectives. Although being deceptively simple, the world of Minecraft is very huge and unique. The cubic volume of a Minecraft world can expand (West and Bleiberg) to sixty-two quadrillion, one hundred and forty-four trillion “blocks.”
Works cited
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Freedman, Aaron. "Exploring the Validity of Videogames as a Source and Tool for Value Creation." SOKA UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA (2012). Print.
Hausrath, Zachary. "Minecraft." Hausrath 15.4 (2012). Print
Hooper, James, and Penny De Byl. "Towards a Unified Theory of Play A Case Study of Minecraft." Authors & Digital Games Research Association Di (2014). Print.
Robertson, Andy. "Educational Solution To Children's Minecraft Obsession." Forbes. Web. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/andyrobertson/2014/03/19/minecraft-addiction/>.
Marcon, Nerissa. Minecraft' as a Powerful Literacy Prompt in the Secondary English Classroom. 2nd ed. Vol. 49. St Helena Secondary College, 2013. 35-37. Print.
Shah, M., Foster, A., Scottoline, M. & Duvall, M. Pre-service Teacher Education in Game-Based Learning: Analyzing and Integrating Minecraft. In M. Searson & M. Ochoa (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference, 2014. 2646-2654.
Tromba, Peter. "Build Engagement and Knowledge One Block at a Time with Minecraft." Learning & Leading with Technology 40.8 (2013): 20. Print.
West, Darrell M., and Joshua Bleiberg. "Education Technology Success Stories." Centre for Technology Innovation (2014). Print.
