Minecraft is one of the most played, most loved, and most ‘blocky’ games ever released. For the uninitiated, Minecraft randomly generates a world filled with movable and makeable digital ‘blocks’. Many compare it to having unlimited Legos, yet the online component allows players to build together, fulfilling the innate desire to show others their work, which creates armies of Minecraft recruiters. It is an open-ended sandbox for play that ignites millions of players’ imaginations.
Normally, games and other entertainment media release to large sales and then fade away over time. Uniquely, when Minecraft was released as an independent game in 2009, it slowly gained steam until Microsoft bought it for a staggering $2.5 billion dollars1 in 2014 and kept it on track. Minecraft has sold over 144 million units and continues to host over 74 million players every month.2 Yet sales alone do not quite capture the whole picture of Minecraft’s adoption into schools.
Microsoft is appealing to teachers around the world. Microsoft also quietly acquired Minecraft: Education Edition3 and have built classroom tools into their delivery system to make headway into a grand vision of Minecraft being as common as a notepad in classrooms. It is working. They claim that MinecraftEDU now serves over 10,000 schools in 11 different languages.4 In combination with traditional classroom resources, Minecraft has remarkable potential as a digital platform for students to connect content with their own creations.
Yet for students and teachers alike, it is not necessarily about Minecraft in particular. It is about a simple, easy to use, classroom-only, multi-player design space. Imagine an art studio with unlimited space, materials and safety. That alone would be appealing, but Minecraft additionally provides a space for digitally savvy learners, creative cognition and authentic performance and assessment. These are all skills that are called for by educators, academics, practitioners and economic voices like the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (Trilling and Fadel, 2012). The goal is not just to play games, but to engage, motivate and excite learning for the next generation. Current research on video games, when balanced with other life activities, may have positive outcomes for learning (see Gee, 2007; Prensky, 2006; Squire, 2011). Sanford and Williamson’s 2005 work, for instance, summarises that games can enhance media literacy, exercise the brain, support problem solving, persuade and be designed or used for ‘serious’ purposes.
As a teacher, however, the proof is in the practice. My own interest in Minecraft is because it engaged my children and my students. As I began work on my book, TeacherCraft, I spoke with early adopting teachers (Dikkers, 2015), who were seeing the same engagement and learning that I was. In our conversations, I became more interested in what the teachers did with Minecraft than the game itself. What do they do between hearing an idea and using it with students in their classrooms? Minecraft may be a passing trend, but teachers will continue to find amazing classroom tools, and I want to know more about that process.
How exactly do innovative teachers go about innovating? I approach teaching as an act of design. Designers go through a more iterative process of validation, experimentation, appropriate, refinement and assessment of core ideas. They are lifetime searchers and seekers of innovation and solutions to questions they generate and pursuits they engage with.
Teachers as Designers
Based on the insights of thirty-two award winning teachers (Dikkers, 2012), excellent teachers are far more likely to think like a designer in that they have an ‘always on’ radar for ideas they can use for learning. Teachers as designers search out new ideas and tools, consider if they might work for them until they see student learning and enthusiasm that meets their own expectations.
A design framework does not shy away from diverse applications. Common teaching can be driven by common testing, yet many teachers, thankfully, still choose to prioritise innovation over assimilation. If this is the case, then even promising media like Minecraft will be used in a variety of ways. In seeing how different teachers use the same media in diverse ways, we can see practices that fit our own teaching, groom ideas and be inspired. Diverse uses are actually desirable in a community of designers, because they lead to a wider pool of ideas to pull from.
The following is based on conversations with seventeen teachers who were innovating classroom learning by using Minecraft as part of their classrooms. They share how they validate, experiment, appropriate, refine and assess the use of Minecraft in their classrooms. The results align with previous qualitative research and provide a unique lens to understand how effective designing teachers think and leverage learning tools.
Validating Minecraft
Often teacher professional development is organised by administration with the hope of teachers adopting new practices. Yet designing teachers tend to play with an idea before they invest in it. Personal testing and teacher impression more commonly lead these innovators to take the next step.
Teachers may hear about Minecraft somewhere and then 94 per cent of the teachers will take time to play Minecraft for themselves before they are willing to try it with students. 59 per cent of them go online or trade publications to read more, and 35 per cent of them have a child at home give them a tutorial. Validation requires personal and multiple confirmations that a new resources has potential for learning.
Some mistakenly consider teachers ‘resistant’ to new ideas, but it is more likely that they are waiting for multiple sources to recommend an idea. They feel that new ideas need to be validated by master teachers before they try them willingly with students. Most of the teachers in TeacherCraft needed to hear a potential idea from multiple sources before giving it serious consideration for their classrooms. Once validated, teachers welcome new ideas and invest considerable personal time adopting into them. Then they move from personal validation of an idea or application, and they expand into small scale tests with students.
Experimenting with Minecraft
After validating, designing teachers find ways to experiment. Teachers find ways to ‘bounce’ ideas off of students informally, try new software during breaks in the school day, have interested students differentiate a project to use the application, or do an extra credit presentation. Some even start after school clubs to facilitate time to see students playing.
It takes some courage and flexibility to try something new, but this is mediated when tested in a smaller setting. In the first round of interviews, a number of teachers note encouragement from administration and fellow teachers as a key part of their willingness to try new things. They use their own children at home as play testers, or they find colleagues at work who can help them try out a technology for the first time. Interestingly, for some teachers, their students would embrace the role and start to bring in new ideas for the classroom.
- Show new ideas to reinvent an existing/past project
- Meet after school to give a tutorial
- Differentiate a current project using Minecraft
- Create extra credit work that highlights a current subject
Designing teachers routinely test with smaller groups of students wherever and whenever they can find them. They organise morning, lunch and after school trials and even ‘gaming clubs’ to test out new ideas. Then they listen, cultivate ideas and weigh the results carefully before appropriating it for the classroom. Their student testers become a kind of critical friend and become allies in the quest to innovate. For a number of teachers I spoke with, students first introduced them to Minecraft through these kinds of communities of practice.
Appropriating Minecraft
We assume that students have different learning styles, areas of strength and different developmental needs. Likewise, teachers also have different skills, talents and preferences for classroom design. This shines when we look at how they think about using a builder game like Minecraft. In my own interviews, teachers expressed great differences in how they wanted to use Minecraft. Here are a few general approaches to using Minecraft, representative quotes from the interviews and a few examples from various teachers for each:
Allow Open Play - Some teachers prefer to just let students play. Their role as a teacher is to maintain safety and order while students play. They feel that digital games like Minecraft are compelling because they do not control student imagination and cognition, and that students need to, have a right to and will naturally grow if they are allowed to play on their own. Philosophically, this is much like the rationale for recess or free time – it’s developmentally important to allow students time to explore and construct understanding.
“I don’t want to mess with the magic too much. The further I move my lessons away from the vanilla Minecraft experience, the further I’m getting away from something that millions of gamers know and love – which is dangerous.”
“Our primary goal isn’t to fill them with knowledge, but to create experiences from whence we can draw knowledge.”
“Participants were encouraged to join our weekly Friday server parties. In these sessions participants would populate the Minecraft server and join a group Skype call.” (Kuhn, 2015)
- After school clubs
- Indoor recess time for younger students
- Extra credit projects invented by students
- Encouraging enthusiasm for larger projects
Allow Open Play for Social Skills or Opportunities – Teachers allow time to play and encourage group work. Here we see a little more direction from the teacher to guide and encourage teams, challenges and work with students to assign rules of play and goals. This is less like open recess and more like a physical wellness or health class that has clear goals and developmental outcomes. They may not be seeking content goals, but place a high value on social and emotional skill building and development.
“I can point to academic standards and say this reaches that standard, but there is no standard for managing your time or for collaborating with the person sitting next to you or for organising a team and assigning jobs.”
“I was trying to tie it into the elections this year because we have all these girls on the server and they all want to do different things. Some of them want monsters and some of them don’t monsters and we have three servers because of that.”
- Social contracts and law (civics)
- Conflict resolution practices
- Open multi-player world to connect with other students
- Small group interactions
Design Experiences for Students – A small number of teachers in both studies take massive amounts of personal (or hobby time) to build experiences for their students. These teachers make games, role play, simulations and enjoy how students react. Their instinct with Minecraft is to build for the students. This also allows them to target learning around a particular standard. Eric Walker’s World of Humanities5 is a good example of a teacher building key elements in the ancient world for his students to explore. Another experience might be to act out a play… in Minecraft. The teacher only prepares the script ahead of time, but still plans the experience. This would be similar to a prescribed worksheet designed by the teacher that has a specific learning path in mind.
“...The first thing I did was create a border… I put a castle up on the hill for them too. It was a puzzle how to get inside.”
“We are teaching them how to think… We encounter a problem and there are things they have to deal with and sometimes they are looking at YouTube videos and doing how to’s and teach each other how to do things…”
- Puzzles
- Worlds to explore that fit with content
- Exploration and settlement
- Civic management and roles
Provide Design Targets for Students – The most common is the use of Minecraft as an editor for 3D constructions. These teachers give students a design target or narrative premise and ask students to work on that assignment in Minecraft without doing their own constructions at home. This would be less like the worksheet and more like a larger project assignment.
“I had a basic idea about a group of kids being stranded on an island, inspired by the book Lord of the Flies and I said well there is a disagreement and one part of the group goes to one end [of the island] and one part of the group goes to the other end and take it from there. I just said what are you going to do? What are you going to do? They just set off building. That was basically the story.”
- Building cities, monuments, farms, anatomy or physical items
- Modelling inventions or ideas
- Representing geometry concepts or electrical circuits (using Redstone)
- Theatre or acting out scenes using screen capture video
Refining Minecraft
The ways that Minecraft is used varies impressively. Designing teachers consistently watch their students for evidence of learning. They see the first few times with a new activity as ‘play testing’ and use it to refine and make functional changes.
“I did change things… You could pick and choose features of the game to add and subtract… I also wanted to minimise distractions in the game… What I did was that I made it so that players couldn’t die. They could not be hurt or killed in the game. I turned off monsters.”
Refinement is not only about fixing elements that need repair and improvement, but the softer touch of adjusting elements of an experience to encourage the positive outcomes that the teacher imagines when they first validate the idea. Primarily, it is about seeing students become excited about learning.
“It is really powerful when you hear a kid say, ‘I used to hate waking up in the morning and coming to school, but [now] I can’t wait to get there.’”
“It is good to see that situation where kids who are exasperating to a typical teacher, they aren’t in this situation. They end up being the teachers themselves.”
This process assumes that the tool has potential and that the teacher’s design is under scrutiny. Refinement is intimately related to students and seeing how they react and respond to learning, even how students exceed expectations.
“We would never have seen what the kids would do if we had [micro]-managed… instead of stepping back to watch where the kids would go with it.”
“It wasn’t a matter of them measuring up to our expectations, they totally exceeded them…”
Designing teachers look to all of their students and ask if the activity has ways to hook both struggling and advanced learners. The assumption is that all students need to grow, and when adopting games, simulations or any other classroom activity, the feedback from all learners is essential. For some, differentiation is assumed and even has enough value to warrant additional preparation time.
“I wanted to create activities for each of these player types.”
“They are motivated to become experts on the game. They do their own research at home. They figure out their own strategies. It really takes on a life outside the classroom walls.”
In a design process, another assumption is that students will struggle and have questions. For designing teachers, this cannot be avoided and they do not see it as a negative event. Rather, they look for student reactions, account for them and allow time for student-generated questions, initiatives and suggestions for improvement. This includes involving both students who struggle and identifying students that excel and who can support the activity as experts.
“[A few] were overwhelmed by it. Like, ‘What are we supposed to do?’ ‘What is the assignment?’ ‘Why are we here?’ ‘What is the goal?’ ‘Where do I find the treasure?’ You know, stuff like that.”
“I’ve found is that there are always one or two students in my class who, if they aren’t experts, they are pretty close and they are definitely one or two students in each of my classes who knew more than I did.”
Assessment with Minecraft Projects
For the latter appropriations of Minecraft, content growth and learning is one of the primary goals. Using Minecraft has no value if teachers cannot assess and document that learning has happened and content is being retained. Traditional testing for project-based learning mismatches creation and synthesis cognition with knowledge and understanding assessment instruments, so Minecraft projects lead teachers to explore assessment tools that allow students more ownership of the presentation. Assessment focuses on showing and telling.
Individual work with Minecraft is easily shown with visual evidence using screen capture or video capture software. Students document finished work and send it to the teacher. Some teachers allow student presentations where the student shows and explains their work to the class. Class ‘gallery’ walkthroughs allow students to see each other’s work and the teacher can quickly assess at the end of a larger project. Galleries can also be put on display for external and authentic feedback – for parents or at a local library. Also, depending on the work, students act out scenes from plays/books/history and use Minecraft as a digital theatre space.
By using screen names, students can post videos online and keep their identity private. Online videos will garner various ‘hits’ that provide further external feedback on student work. For grading, project-style assessment in the form of traditional rubrics or lists of requirements suit most of the teachers I spoke with. They have teacher-created things to look for in the work that relate to different elements of student growth:
- Did they accurately demonstrate content knowledge? What?
- Did they represent # or more aspects of X?
- Did they work together and build collaborative and social skills?
- Did they conduct independent research that is evident in the work? And cited?
- Did they encounter problems and find creative solutions to overcome them?
- Did they demonstrate quality in all aspects of their work?
- Did they endeavour for greatness?
When having a unique experience in a space like Minecraft, writing is a natural form of telling about that experience. Each tale will be unique even if the students worked in the same server world. Written explanations build writing literacy along with digital literacy and communication is part of building lifetime practices. Teachers leverage writing non-fiction instructional guides, Minecraft ‘histories’, or direct explanations of classroom content. Reflection writing assessment focuses on the social domain (How did your group/class work together?), elements of problem solving (Did you see any other solutions that would have saved you time? Why?), and personal reflection work (What have you learned?).
Trying Minecraft for the First Time
Minecraft has found its way into thousands of classrooms, at various ages, across all subject areas. The potential of a digital stage and building space is as obvious as using cheap blank paper was to our ancestors. Yet, using any digital tool requires that the teacher has built up some degree of digital literacy and capacity themselves. The narratives above come from a small sample of early adopting teachers – all of whom have a teacher-as-designer disposition.
As central and interesting as Minecraft can be, the simple spark of interest is really far more inspiring. Teachers who humbly show interest in tools they do not yet understand bring innovation to our schools and practice. All of the teachers above first had to see potential in Minecraft; they had to experiment with small groups of students and learn from them; and most had to find a clear connection to their content responsibilities before they were willing to try Minecraft in their own classrooms. This is careful and deliberate practice. Take note that even the early adopters took time to test things out at home and run it by their after-school students. They also leveraged expert students and colleagues to help set up for the first time. They found a friend and asked questions, much like how they encourage their students to do. For every Minecraft-type tool they adopt, there are scores of other applications that they do not validate.
Finally, innovative teaching is not necessarily a character trait for the teachers I spoke with. Thank goodness! Innovative teaching is a learnable practice of thinking like a designer. Playful pedagogy includes a joyful approach to learning and design. Designing teachers are always looking for their next idea, building networks of other innovators, validating, experimenting, adopting and refining ideas until they get the right results from assessments that match the work.
Seann Dikkers is a storyteller and gamer serving as an Associate Professor of Education at Bethel University. He researches narratives of innovative teaching and learning; sharing internationally in presentations, articles, and recent books including Real-Time Research, Mobile Media Learning I & II, and TeacherCraft.
References
Dikkers, S. M. (2012) The Professional development trajectories of teachers successfully integrating and practicing with new information and communication technologies (Doctoral dissertation, The University of Wisconsin-Madison).
Dikkers, S. (2015). TeacherCraft: How teachers learn to use Minecraft in their classrooms. Pittsburgh, PN: ETC Press.
Gee, J. P. (2007). Good video games + good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning, and literacy (Vol. 27). Peter Lang.
Kuhn, J. (2015). Meaningful play–Making professional development fun. The Electronic Journal for English as a Second Language, 18(4).
Prensky, M. (2006). Don’t bother me, Mom, I’m learning!: How computer and video games are preparing your kids for 21st century success and how you can help!. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House.
Sandford, R. & Williamson, B. (2005). Games and learning. A handbook. Bristol, UK: FutureLab, 23.
Squire, K. (2011). Video games and learning: Teaching and participatory culture in the digital age. Technology, Education–Connections (the TEC Series). New York: Teachers College Press.
Trilling, B. & Fadel, C. (2012). 21st century skills: Learning for life in our times. John Wiley & Sons.
Notes
- http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-buys-minecraft-2014-9
- http://www.businessinsider.com/minecraft-has-74-million-monthly-players-2018-1
- https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/01/19/microsoft-buys-minecraft-mod-schools/79018942/
- https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2016/11/08/minecraft-education-edition-comes-to-european-schools/
- Walker, E. https://wiki.education.minecraft.net/wiki/Wonderful_World_of_Humanities
Knowledge Trails:
1. A teacher’s guide to Minecraft in the classroom http://teachingtimes.com/articles/teachers_guide_to_minecraft
What is Minecraft, and how can the astounding creativity of this deceptively simple game be harnessed in in the classroom? Ray Chambers explains. (Available with subscription to Creative Teaching and Learning)
2. How worldbuilding in Minecraft makes students better creative writers http://teachingtimes.com/articles/elu-60-worldbuildingminecraft
What if, instead of simply imagining the settings for their stories, your pupils were able to build them? Teacher Chris Waterworth describes a project where students use Minecraft to design, build and explore Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, followed by writing their own story about the mischief made inside.
3. Implementing Minecraft in the Classroom http://teachingtimes.com/articles/implementing-minecraft-in-the-classroom
How can games like Minecraft be used to enrich the everyday learning experience? Tracy Broadbent looks at the power of Minecraft for maths, literacy and more.