By:
Jacob Haney
Have you played, heard
of, or like the game Minecraft? Many teachers use Minecraft in school. While some students have not heard about the
game, others have spent countless hours building, crafting, and creating.
What is Minecraft?
Minecraft is a sandbox
video game published by the company Mojang and created by Swedish game creator,
Markus Persson. Many know him by his Minecraft username, “Notch.” The goal of
this game is to gather materials, survive, and get to the end to defeat the
ender dragon.
In this game, there are
multiple game modes available to play on and enjoy. The game modes include “Survival
Mode,” a mode that requires players to gather resources to build and maintain
health. Another is "Creative Mode,” where the player has an unlimited amount
of resources to build with and the power to fly around the world. The last two
game modes are “Adventure Mode” and “Spectator Mode.” Adventure Mode is where
players can experience crafted custom maps and adventures. This game mode is
like Survival Mode. Instead, it introduces many player restrictions that can be
affected by the world maker or the world itself.
Minecraft won numerous awards
and accolades. Since June 2016, there were over 106 million copies sold across
all platforms, making Minecraft the second-best-selling video game around the
world. In September 2014, the company
Microsoft began a deal to buy Mojang and the Minecraft intellectual property
for 2.5 billion dollars, with the acquisition completed two months later.
What is Minecraft Education & What is it
used for?
At the beginning of
2016, Microsoft announced a new tool for education called “Minecraft: Education
Edition,” or “MinecraftEDU.” Minecraft has already been used in numerous classrooms
and districts to teach subjects from core STEM topics and with art and poetry.
Minecraft Education Edition was designed specifically for classroom use. The
Education Edition has given teachers the tools they need to use Minecraft on a
regular daily basis.
Teachers can use
Minecraft to assign students huge projects to work on at school or home.
Teachers can also use Minecraft to teach students math concepts like ratios and
proportions. Teachers can also have students create experiences on historical
places and times they learned in the classroom. Students can use Minecraft for
writing to tell stories about characters, locations, choices, motivations, and
plots.
An easy way teachers can
use Minecraft is as a choice of assessment. For example, teachers will give end
of the chapter/unit projects for their students to work on and use what they
learned in the classroom to put that into the game.
Conclusion
If students have
experience with Minecraft in the classroom, please describe your thoughts in
the comments section below.
Part two of this article
will be released within two weeks to one month.
It will focus more on student and teacher opinions of Minecraft.
