Rethinking Educational Spaces
Last month, a group of elementary, middle and high school students embarked on a mission to build a full-scale replica of our school campus in Minecraft.
In 2015, Minecraft was bought by Microsoft for 2.5 billion dollars. Since then, it’s been used to create a safe haven for journalists, build full-functioning cell phones and, now more than ever, it’s providing a path for thinking differently about educational spaces.
If you’re not familiar with Minecraft, Boston Magazine gives a great explanation: “You and your blocky friends explore a blocky world and build things, out of blocks. Think LEGO, but digital.” Inspired by MIT, Stanford, Columbia, Brown, and UC Berkeley’s initiative to build their iconic campuses, we decided to give it a go with ours.
To sum things up, the first part of our plan was:
Gauge students’ interest and create an application form.
Ask students to show us samples of their previous work in Minecraft.
Create Minecraft Education accounts for them.
Figure out what conversion scale to use to give the campus the most realistic feel possible. (We created this using Worldpainter)
Host a server and start building.
With many schools considering the safety of a fall 2020 return to campus (and epidemiology modeling suggesting we may have to go into open and close waves until 2022), I worry that students might lose what they value most out of school: a sense of community and connection.
But by coming together online, students have been able to connect on a somewhat “meta-physical” level. During our building sessions, we read and hear things like: “Come check out the desks in Ms. Farah’s classroom” and “What do you think of the tree I built in the front garden?” and my favorite: “I’ll do the principal’s office. I've been there so many times with my mom.”
We come together as a community five days a week to piece the map of the school together block by block. Students accessed some of the original building plans in the BBS archives to guide them, but are mostly building the interior entirely from memory, which shows how much these spaces really mean to them.
Minor details are crucial to the overall look and feel of the campus, like this view of the main lobby from the entrance of the Elementary school gate:
Buildings are not only replicated on the exterior, but on the interior too, with fully-detailed hallways and classrooms:
When this mammoth of a project is done, we are hoping to rethink what educational spaces can mean for the future of schools. Some of these possibilities include:
Seeing our school’s annual events transform into virtual community experiences.
Giving virtual tours for students or staff who would like to visit the campus.
Preserving and displaying the virtual campus as an artifact in the school's digital archive.
Hosting online classes on the server.
While nothing is a replacement for real life and being able to physically see everyone on campus, being able to work on a massive project like this can provide students with something that everyone is craving right now: a way to reach across social distance and have meaningful social interactions.
While on the server, students are interacting with people they otherwise would not have interacted with under “normal” circumstances, and all with the goal of building the spaces they miss the most.
When all of this is over, I can’t wait for the students to meet up in school and say “Hey! Remember eight months ago when we got together to build this hallway?”
I’d like to quote Andrew Guo, an undergraduate major in mathematics who is building a replica of his campus at the University of Pennsylvania:
“I love creating things and in a certain sense, building in Minecraft is an expression of the soul’s freedom, to wax poetic about it. I think giving people an outlet to vent and display their creative talents through building is very important during these times.”
