For this week’s blog post we explored the possibilities of Minecraft specifically, MinecraftEDU!
MinecraftEDU is an adapted version of Minecraft in which users are categorized by either a student, or teacher. Teachers are the ones who can set the rules, for example, they can enable creative mode or survival mode at will, or turn on or off PvP (player versus player). The other users, the students, are the bulk of the users on the server who are subjected to the teacher and the rules they set. This is so teacher’s can set a focus on a specific task or objective and remove distractions from the students.
I was having trouble to understand what the academic benefits of Minecraft were, but this adapted version has taken away the distractions and now forces students to focus on a single objective. These academic objectives could be a variety of things from using the X, Y and Z coordinates of the game to highlight mathematics and graphing coordinates. Also, using scales and measurements in the unit of Minecraft block sizes to build things in an accurate scale. Besides math, the guest speakers we had discussed their Egyptian social studies project where they made the a seed of the game as accurate to the Egyptian Pharaoh times. They engaged in a project where they tried to survive during these harsh times like the Egyptians did.
This just kind of proves that although there are somethings that Minecraft can’t teach, it is really up to the teacher’s creativity towards how to formulate their lesson. The only thing that limits the lesson plans are towards age level. To keep students on task it needs to be at a higher level of maturity because some of these lesson are more advanced and require attention levels that might not be found in elementary schools.
Riley
