Digital game based learning

I have now been working with Minecraft regularly in my lessons for roughly a month. When I first started doing my personal research,  I made a note of examining my own learning process, to see how much effort would have to go into bringing this game to a classroom setting. If games ever are going to be the chosen tool for teachers, I see it as important that they are made accessable to teachers. - Also teachers who don’t necessarily have a personal interest in gaming. This is what the minecraftedu mod so conveniently does, letting the teacher focus on creating the learning environment, and not on overcoming technical difficulties.

My own advantage has been a personal interest in pc games and my experience in working with IT based learning (on a windows platform!). This can unfortunately also be a decisive factor because simple network and pc problems can, at many schools, be a greater hindrance to teachers than using the actual software.

So I would like to contribute this guide to getting started with Minecraft in the classroom -  for teachers that are interested in starting but don’t feel they have any idea where to start. The many possibilities within the game can seem quite daunting, but thats also what makes this game a rich learning environment. The almost endless possibilities and yet the the games’ simple interface and rules make it challenging to young and old, novices and superusers.  

The general principle here is that you as the teacher needn’t be the expert in the content but sooner be the person who understands the potentials of the game and which frameworks it allows you to create for the students to act and interact in. 

Here are my suggestions to what you can do if you’re intested in bringing Minecraft to your classroom:

Before you buy a licence check out the classic version on minecraft.net. This will give you a basic idea of some of the features Minecraft has to offer. You may already here be able to spot some potentials just using this version. It’s also possible to host your own classic server; it’s free, but I suspect you will need some more technical skill to get this working.

As I’m writing I just discovered that there is a pc demo out now available at minecraftwiki.net. So that might be a better option for testing.

Minecraftteachr’s youtube channel and blog hold plenty of documentation and inspiration. The minecraft wiki is the point of reference for any beginner - but actually I haven’t done as much reading here as I could have. I found that the more I poked around reading different articles the more confused I got, so I decided to start up with the basics, and concentrated on reading about crafting and some basic gameplay - and that was enough to get started.

Now is about the time to decide whether you’re ready to upgrade your account - you can either get a personal account to run further tests or if youre sure that you’re going to get minecraftedu licences for your school, then get the licences through minecraftedu.

I gained a lot from watching some lets plays on youtube. There are many ways to start the game, so thats up to you to explore. (Try this). I’d say that playing 1-2 hrs would be enough, but of course playing longer would give more experience - but this isn’t strictly necessary right now.

For the official explanation see this link. Seeds are a great tool for a teacher since it gives you control over which worlds you choose to work with in your lessons. I wanted to work with an island in my lessons to create some natural boundaries, and I found a seed (“FireCrotch”) that gave me a perfect setting to work in. I did some googling and found forums where there was some seed sharing - so in this way I could easily generate a world that served my purposes. Here is a place for seed sharing…

You can read how here and see how here. Navigating to the .minecraft and the Minecraftedu folder and pasting a loaded map has been quite necessary in my lessons. The only difference when using minecraftedu servertool is that you open the folder named “Minecraftedu” instead of “.minecraft”. Then you navigate to >ServerTool>MinecraftEduWorlds>savedMaps.

Initially, I was curious whether other players’ worlds might become useful, so I downloaded some worlds from here and found this to be a great inspiration. Having the ability to load premade worlds gives so many new opportunities to the teacher. Again I simply made a note of the potential and became familiar with how it was done, I didn’t actually spend ages exploring different worlds.

Being able to see your whole world together with a class can be very practical when preparing a collaborative building project. There is a long list of mappers available at the wiki, and after testing a few, I found that Cartograph G worked best for me. It allows you to generate maps in overhead, isometric and oblique view.

 7. Embrace chaos

When it comes to talk on new technology in teaching I’ve heard the slogan “Its not the tech - its the teach”. By this I understand that when using technology in a classroom, the tech shouldn’t dictate the goals of the lessons, but rather be the means by which the teacher reaches his goals.

With so many technologies becoming available to teachers there is a concern that the tech will take the teachers’ focus from didactics.

In practice this means that if you tend to overplan a lesson, you might find yourself trying to force an activity on the students, and of course, this wouldn’t make sense in a playful, creative environment. So adapting your plans to the interests of the students and collaborating with them in planning your activities definately makes sense when using Minecraft.

The nature of the sandbox game, and Minecraft in particular, means that predictabilty and top down planning becomes unrealistic. The danger for a teacher is that he might think that he now has found the perfect tool to make the students engage in playful learning, but this can be a pitfall, since students always will pursue that which captures their imagination when put in such an environment.

Perhaps one should adopt the leadership principle practiced by Joi Ito, leader of MIT Media lab. In this interview (42min48sec) he talks about leading his employees as he would his clan in World of Warcraft.

- he says.

Don’t make the students think they are going to play if you’re using Minecraft as a tool. I would say it’s important to know whether you are either playing in one of Minecrafts’ gamemodes, or using the environment to serve a purpose, for example using blocks as centicubes in maths.

Let the students know what the goal of the lesson is, and make a contract or an agreement with them about what you expect them to do. I think it’s crucial with guidelines for students, not necessarily to restrict, but more to focus the efforts of a class in a certain direction.

Thats it for now, I’m sure there are other ways to discover how Minecraft works, but this basically maps out my experience until now. Coming soon I have some more video documentation on writing english in Minecraft.