Minecraft and Education: A Totally Unscientific Exploratory Study

Introduction

James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (2007),  is about as close to a rock star as a college professor of literacy studies can get. In a 2016 interview, he said, “I don’t tend to play educational games. The only time I play them is because loads of people send them to me, and the vast majority of them are terrible” (Wan, 2016). Along these lines, some educators are asking themselves, what if instead of trying to create games to meet educational objectives, we figured out how popular commercial games could be used to transform education?

Minecraft – described alternately as a world-building game (Crafti, 2016), multiplayer sandbox building game (Nebel, Schneider, & Rey, 2016), or digital virtual environment (Egbert & Borysenko, 2019) – is one of the best-selling off-the-shelf video games of all time (Nebl, Schneider, & Rey, 2016).  Despite its relative lack of story and objectives and simple graphics, children and teens may spend hundreds of hours engrossed in the Minecraft universe (Crafti, 2016), using blocks to create structures, environments, and machines. According to Nebel, Schneider, and Rey (2016), Minecraft has been employed in many educational contexts to teach a range of subjects and skills including:

In Egbert and Borysenko’s (2019) compelling study, Minecraft was used as the medium of instruction in a 12-week graduate level course on computer-assisted language learning (CALL) for pre-service language teachers. Each week, students in the class were assigned a different language-learning related task to complete using MinecraftEDU, an edition of the game tailored to teaching and learning contexts. Here’s one task students particularly enjoyed.

Create something in Minecraft. Print a picture of it in color…. Complete an information gap activity where one partner is looking at the picture created in Minecraft and the other has to build it [in Minecraft] with just an oral description. Swap roles.

(Egbert & Borysenko, 2019, p. 120)

All 15 participants in the study felt their experience using the Minecraft environment was beneficial to their learning. Eleven of the students stated that they would definitely use the game in their language teaching after completing their graduate program.

The Study

Methodology

The present (totally unscientific) study seeks to discover what is so great about Minecraft and what, to borrow Gee’s phrasing, it has to teach us about teaching and learning.

The method of convenience sampling was employed through which two participants were recruited. Both participants happen to live in the same house as the father-researcher (me). The first participant – let’s call him Kid 1 – just turned eleven and is in 6^th grade. The second participant – we’ll refer to him as Kid 2 – is turning nine next week and is in 4^th grade.

In this interpretive exploratory study, an open-ended interview was conducted with each participant separately (mainly so Kid 1 wouldn’t constantly interrupt Kid 2). They were asked to describe Minecraft, and the conversation went from there.

The researcher audio-recorded the interviews and listened to them a couple of times to form a very general impression of the game and its meaning to the participants.

Findings

There were three significant findings. The first finding was that interviewing my own kids was pretty fun, and it was interesting to formally step outside the parent role and just listen to their trains of thought. (However, this finding is kind of irrelevant and beyond the scope of this study.)

The second finding was that these two participants were able to describe aspects of the game world in detail using specialized vocabulary. For example, when describing the game, Kid 2 described it as “a pixelated game.” I was impressed with both children’s ability to articulate differences between modes of the game: creator, survivor, and adventure. By the end of each interview, I realized I was listening to specialists describing their field as I struggled to keep up. They had developed expertise about something that really interested them.

The second finding was that they like the game because it’s fun. This is a fairly obvious finding, but a deeper dig into their reasons for enjoying the game provided some valuable data. While Kid 2 had difficulty explaining why the game was fun, Kid 1 was able to explain the reasons with some degree of cogency.

Kid 1 specifically discussed how one update had made it possible to design more realistic elevators. He specifically described how changes to the blocks had made this possible. While most of this went over the researcher’s non-expert head, it was clear that Kid 1 knew exactly what he was talking about, and that he was appreciative of the designers’ efforts.

Parsing Kid 1’s points, I would say there are four important aspects of Minecraft that account for its success, at least for this participant.

1. Activity – You are always doing something.
2. Freedom – You do not need to follow a prescribed route in the game, even in modified play.
3. Design – The game is visually appealing.
4. Continuous improvement – The game is not a finished product, but one that is evolving and improving with each iteration.

Discussion

Obviously, the results of this study cannot be generalized in any way, shape, or form. But there may be some lessons that resonate with those looking to improve their teaching and learning environment.

• Students want to do stuff. Sit and receive is not going to cut it. (Did it ever?)
• Students like choice, if not about what to study, at least in what order and at what level of challenge.
• Students enjoy things that look cool. Putting time into making materials look good is worth the effort.
• Students recognize improvement. When teachers update ‘glitches’ in their materials, activities, and methods, students may take notice and are likely to appreciate the effort.

Minecraft has a lot to offer educators. Affordances of the game seem to lend themselves to “transformational play” promoting “active knowledge construction within constructivist approaches” (Nebel, Schneider, & Rey, 2016, p. 359). Perhaps the important lesson of Minecraft, however, is not so much that it can be used as an educational tool, but that the principles of gameplay and development in Minecraft are precisely the principles whose application could serve to invigorate teaching and learning. Minecraft does indeed have something to teach us about educating children.

References

Crafti, J. (2016). Unearthing learning potential: Using Minecraft in the classroom. Screen Education, 82, 80-85.

Egbert, J., & Borysenko, N. (2019). Standards, engagement, and Minecraft: Optimizing experiences in language teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 85, 115-124.

Gee, J. P. (2007). What video games have to teach us about teaching and learning (2^nd ed.). New York: St. Martin’s.

Nebel, S., Schneider, S., & Rey, G. D. (2016). Mining learning and crafting scientific experiments: A literature review on the use of Minecraft in education and research. Educational Technology & Society, 19(2), 355-366.

Wan, T. (2016, September 6). What video games like Doom teach us about learning, according to GBL guru James Paul Gee. EdSurge. Retrieved from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-09-06-what-video-games-like-doom-teach-us-about-learning-according-to-gbl-guru-james-paul-gee