Minecraft: A Learning Environment
We can help unleash the power of our students’ minds. They are interesting people.
As schools set their “June outcomes” during the previous June, educators and administrators frequently design predetermined outcomes that potentially limit student growth and creativity. The rhetoric of meeting students where they are is often at odds with the diagnostic tools used to determine that location. What if we met them inside of Minecraft? At the November 2021 International Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) conference, I will present these ideas. Come discuss actual student work examples created during a pandemic year of remote learning. There are wide-reaching implications for reimagining school.
Minecraft is currently the most powerful learning environment available for creating and collaborating together both in synchronous and asynchronous time. Working in a Minecraft world, students can informally learn specific subject matter at rates that might not be possible to document. A worksheet or test might reinforce knowledge of a few mathematical concepts. What documented value can be placed on an immersive play experience where the student interacts with those very same mathematical concepts? It seems odd to compare a worksheet against standing inside of a virtual three-dimensional coordinate geometry system. The two are vastly different learning experiences.
Using Minecraft as the playground for student thoughts to coexist and commingle provides rich opportunities where innovation undoubtedly emerges, and educators can both join the work and also observe in order to provide useful guidance. Instead of the once-a-week “one and done” Minecraft computer class, we will need to revise our expectations. One hour in Minecraft per week goes so quickly that it will not be a terribly productive or meaningful experience. But if classes played there on a daily basis and tracked their ideas and questions, they would find new focal points to explore outside of the game. And that work outside of the game would dovetail back into what happened when logged in again.
It would not fit the purpose or philosophy of computers in education, to take the child’s most powerful tool, and have any educator or researcher dictate or predetermine exactly what lessons or actions should happen when kids play in Minecraft together as part of school. The same goes for anything that students might create with a computer. They will figure things out that teachers never thought of doing. Would any educator tell students to mimic their every move with cotton balls, glue, paper, and crayons?
Computers today have incredible processing power far beyond most of the utilitarian purposes they serve in schools today. This is not entirely surprising given the history of teaching machines and learning machines, which were created as rote learning devices reliant on behaviorism as the main teaching strategy. Presenting students with stimuli to which they must respond represents the majority of both the historical and the current usage of computers in classrooms. Missing are the expectations that when students work with computers that they can create original content and explore problems or develop critical thinking skills through the process of following their own inquiries. The growing mismatch and divide occur as a direct result of top-down decision-making that disregards available data. The rhetoric of meeting students where they are is at odds with the diagnostic tools used to determine that location.
Maybe there will be something else better than Minecraft in the future, but we have not yet fully explored what is possible with what we have now. And with this engaging opportunity to move students and teachers alike toward constructivist principles, there resides great potential for classrooms and colleagues to engage in reimagining the classroom, let alone run a self-study of working together in a Minecraft world and further the cause of research. Truth be told, the questions that students ask in this learning environment are impossible to script in advance and place before them as test questions. With Minecraft as a learning environment, we can help unleash the power of our students’ minds. They are interesting people, and we can listen to them. They live in the world, too, and will naturally encounter and explore through game-based play all of the ideas we have for decades split up into artificially disparate classes and curricula. Let’s put it all back together.
My published chapter — “Could Minecraft Be a School?”
Description of my session in the Emerging Learning Technologies strand
This conference presentation discusses real examples, with videos and images, of the presenter’s teaching experiences with students working inside of Minecraft in the 2020-2021 school year. These examples are particularly poignant given that they were all created during pandemic-forced remote learning and had heightened value as Minecraft served as our only place to be together “doing things” in real time. Students were connected on Zoom both in large group meetings and smaller breakout room meetings with the teacher present. Some of the work explored in this presentation comes purely from student imagination, some comes from students responding to questions posed by global competitions, and some comes from students extending their core academic studies into game-based play. All of it shows student innovation, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and communication inside of an immersive three-dimensional learning environment. The future of school is possible.