Why I Love Minecraft Education
1. With Minecraft Education, the only limit to delivering your lesson is your imagination and commitment.
Minecraft Education is the educational version of the popular Minecraft game. It’s a platform that promotes creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving. From the comfort of their homes, students can explore different worlds and learn about different forms of renewable energy, travel through the human eye, look into Greek history, and so much more. Oh and also, in light of the current circumstances, all of these worlds are free to download through June 30, 2020.
You can, if you’re willing to invest the time, create your own world too. Here’s a short video of the world a colleague and I worked on for my entrepreneurship class. By the end of the project, students got to apply their knowledge of entrepreneurship through the processes of:
budgeting
making a profit
assessing risks
trading assets
supply & demand
market competition
2. It creates a perfect medium for building empathy.
For our unit on World War 1, I chose to develop a 4-week lesson plan that included intensive background research, group collaboration, and first person point of view journal writing. Minecraft helped to make all of this possible. I divided the class into six groups of four - each group was either an Allied or Central power. In four weeks, I had a class full of military leaders, spies, nurses, doctors, and soldiers; and through building blocks and journals, each of them got to tell their side of the story.
But trenches, secret hideouts, hospitals, and convoys were not the only things the students built. During every stage of the lesson, they built a vast sense of empathy for the lives of those who fought the world’s first global war. And for anyone who knows me; compassion, empathy, and love are all pillars I’m trying to build with my students. Here’s what they had to say about it:
“I feel like when I build, I’m expressing what I feel by showing it to everybody in the class. Sometimes, using pencil and paper is not something everybody is good at. At least with Minecraft you can show more, it has more blocks and textures.”
