Could Minecraft be used to teach any subject?
Free from constraints and easily modifiable, the Minecraft video game has the potential to be used as a game-based teaching method.
According to researchers from Concordia University, in a period when classrooms have had to pivot online with little warning or prep time, the realm of Minecraft has provided educators with a massive sandbox in which to play, experiment and teach.
Professor Darren Wershler used Minecraft to teach a class on the history and culture of modernity. The course was based entirely within the game server, with instructions, in-class communication and course work almost exclusively carried out within the Minecraft world and over the messaging app Discord.
Wershler said he was happily surprised with how well his students adapted to the parameters of the course he co-designed along with a dozen other interdisciplinary researchers at Concordia. Wershler has been using Minecraft in his course since 2014, but he realised this approach created a scaffold for a new style of teaching.
“Educators at the high school, college and university levels can use these principles and tools to teach a whole variety of subjects within the game,” he said.
“There is no reason why we could not do this with architecture, design, engineering, computer science as well as history, cultural studies or sociology. There are countless ways to structure this to make it work.
“The course is not a video game studies course, and it is not a gamified version of a course on modernity,” said Wershler, a Tier 2 Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature.
“It’s this other thing that sits in an uncomfortable middle and brushes up against both. The learning comes out of trying to think about those two things simultaneously.”
The research paper was published in the journal Gamevironments by Darren Wershler, professor of English, and Bart Simon, associate professor of sociology and director of Concordia's Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology.
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