My intuition is that the educational possibilities of a sandbox environments like this could be interesting, but I can't yet work out what sorts of tasks classroom teachers could get kids to do in Minecraft. Any thoughts?
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Minecraft in education?
I recently saw this video of a multi-day collaborative building project in Minecraft, which is a sort of game/online sandbox environment. All of the little whirling dervishes are avatars of users who are working together to assemble the building blocks that will eventually form the train station.
My intuition is that the educational possibilities of a sandbox environments like this could be interesting, but I can't yet work out what sorts of tasks classroom teachers could get kids to do in Minecraft. Any thoughts?
My intuition is that the educational possibilities of a sandbox environments like this could be interesting, but I can't yet work out what sorts of tasks classroom teachers could get kids to do in Minecraft. Any thoughts?
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I haven't thought about this myself, but you might talk to Cynthia Haynes at Clemson University. Her Serious Games colloquium looked at Minecraft last fall. A write-up of some earlier work on WoW as a pedagogical tool can be found at this link: http://www.clemson.edu/features/article.php?article_id=2220
lame
I'm wondering myself, David.... We have some folks here at Peabody who are playing in a variety of digital spaces (gaming -- Doug Clark, agent-based programming -- Pratim Sengupta, and virtual environments -- Melissa Grisalfi, joining us soon) and I'm watching their work with interest. I think the key is the nexus of thought-full autonomy and responsibility that I mentioned in my post -- but the how is not yet coming into focus.
Good idea
There are TONS of educational opportunities for MineCraft. Look at this video of a 16 year old who made a fully functioning scientific calculator on Minecraft. He had to learn binary, sine, cosine, and all these things to make it. I KNOW he knows more about trig the anyone in a high school trig class. Besides, having minecraft makes a child want to learn programming, servers, and all these valuable skill that would result in a 6 figure income if he goes and pursue a computer science degree.
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