HOW TE ACHERS

TEACHER
LE A R N TO USE MINECR A FT

CRAFT
IN THEIR CL ASSROOMS

B Y S E A N N D I K K E R S
Teachercraft: How Teachers Learn to Use Minecraft in their Classrooms

Copyright © by Seann Dikkers

and ETC Press 2015
http://press.etc.cmu.edu/

Design Direction by Shirley Yee

ISBN: 978-1-312-83256-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930808

TEXT: The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons

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IMAGES: All images appearing in this work are property

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 HOW TE ACHERS

TEACHER
LE A R N TO USE MINECR A FT

CRAFT
IN THEIR CL ASSROOMS

B Y S E A N N D I K K E R S
 TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments 1
Teachercraft: An Introduction 3

1 Why Games? 7
Games can be effectively and intelligently leveraged for teaching and learning.
This chapter reviews rationale for using games in the classroom.

2 Why Minecraft? 23
Minecraft and its coming imitators are unique as fully open design spaces.
This chapter provides an overview of this particular games potential for teaching and
learning and why the use of Minecraft is a lens into using games for learning in general.

3 Starting up the Game: An Introduction to Minecraft 35

By Mike Cisneros and Seann Dikkers
Use this guide to get you started playing Minecraft.

4 Why Study Teachers? 47

Teachers serve as the primary agent of change in education. This chapter provides
a research study overview and context for studying teachers in particular.

5 How Do Teachers Validate the Use of Minecraft? 59

Take a deeper look at teacher professional learning around digital resources.
6 How Do Teachers Use Minecraft Outside of Classrooms? 75
By Zack Gilbert and Seann Dikkers
Many teachers find paths for experimenting with new technology prior to classroom use.

7 How Do Teachers Use Minecraft Inside the Classroom? 93

This chapter contains a variety of classroom uses and examples of teachers using Minecraft
across subject areas. Subject specific examples start on page 99.

8 How Do Teachers Evaluate Minecraft Learning in the Classroom? 109

Using a digital game is one thing, evaluating student learning after or during is another.
Find out how teachers converted a digital experience into grades.

9 How can Third Party Tools be Used? 123

By Jeff Kuhn and Seann Dikkers
Vanilla Minecraft is usually just the start for Teachercrafting. As teachers gain experience,
they often move into the world of mods, servers, and apps to compliment Minecraft use.

10 Using Game-Based Approaches to

Increase Level of Engagement in Research and Education 139
By Joseph C. Toscano, Andrés Buxó-Lugo, and Duane G. Watson
Minecraft is also being used for research. This guest chapter provides a glimpse
into the academic use of Minecraft.

Closing 153
 ACK NOWLEDGEMENTS
The entirety of this book has had the contribution of an active and entirely helpful community
of Minecraft using teachers. This is so much so, that credit should be shared. Not only does
this book have some phenomenal guest authors writing, but I have had core community
members that have been willing to vet chapters, provide feedback, and generally keep me
in balance when presenting this world to you.

Thanks also to you, for picking up the book/PDF. Thanks for your encouragement, interest, for
using it in your classes, giving it as a gift to a teacher you know, and caring about what expert
teachers are doing with their skills and talents. Your interest in this topic, and Minecraft,
is a credit to our profession and the passion that we have to make better experiences for
learners. Thank you.

My wife and two children have been active product testers, experts, and editors of this
book. Every chapter had to be approved by my Minecraft family. They are my inspiration
and teachers at home, and most of what I know about Minecraft started with and is checked
against their expertise.

In addition, there are the Minecraft people that were both subjects for the study, but some
also became pointed critics/supporters/readers of this work. They have entrusted me with
their outstanding stories and I am seeking to present their ideas as they would have them
read. I’ve come to a deep respect for the genius that is collectively being refined by this
community. Special thanks are reserved for Zack Gilbert, Steven Isaacs, Joel Levin, Mark
Suter, Peggy Sheehy, Donelle Batty, and Andrew Peterson for conversations, readings, and
guiding the tone, content, and claims of this book. Finally, the Chapter 10 team of Joseph C.
Toscano, Andrés Buxó-Lugo, and Duane G. Watson and their contribution of a chapter that
shows off research use of Minecraft.

I want to thank the supportive and engaging community of scholars in the Patton College
of Education at Ohio University. I thank Drs. Moore, Byrne, Machtmes, Robinson, Henning,
Paulins, and Kessler for their brilliant thinking, leadership, friendship and conversations
around games for learning. Finally, Drs. Lucas and Saunders who were partners in co-
building the Athens Makers club where we were able to play test Minecraft with a group of
incredible students for ourselves. Thanks for getting your hands dirty with me. This book
relied on your help.

1
Nothing happens, in my world, without a team of generous and alive graduate students that
free up the time to write. On this particular project credit needs to be given to a few that
helped specifically to edit manuscript, contribute ideas, or even just help me get blocks of
time free by handling other projects with expertise. Thank you especially to Donelle Batty for
traveling across the world to help with this project, Jeff Kuhn and Mike Cisneros for writing,
and Mark Mace for his digital contributions and help.

This study was first conceived in the GLS community at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
and under the constructivist advising of Drs. Kurt Squire and Richard Halverson. I appreciate
their encouragement, permission, and especially their vision. My passion for identifying
expert teaching practices was born out of their gifted work and research along with others
at UW. I also appreciate the ongoing guidance of Drs. Kelley, Camburn, Steinkuehler, and
Erica Halverson while spending the last five years learning from their scholarship skills,
superpowers, and their Teachercraft.

2
 INTRODUCTION

TE ACHERCR AF T ?
“We are currently at 4.85 million registered users and then out of those
users, 8.1 million have purchased the game on PC and Mac platforms.
We also have 5 million purchases on mobile devices, ios, android and
amazon. We have 3.5 million copies sold on the xBox.”
- Carl Manneh1, Mojang | Co-founder and Managing Director

Minecraft for Learning

Minecraft 2 was released as a beta with little fanfare initially. With a dedicated and active
fanbase it has grown into one of the most successful games on the market. Uniquely,
Minecraft offers a space that can be infinitely recreated using a simple ‘block’ model
interface in servers that users set up to play with friends. Minecraft is both a game and
a tool for creation with your friends. Surrounding the game are a number of user-created
modifications, forums, and communities that share, critique, and build new challenges for
themselves. Minecraft is more than a game, it is a hobby and a community.

It is also getting used increasingly in classroom settings.

Like a blank sheet of paper and a box of crayons can be used for learning, Minecraft is
begging creators to make any 3D object, building, or idea they can think of. It is a creation-
media that is, and has been, quickly adopted and used in learning settings all over the world.
Minecraft can serve teachers in the same way that a sheet of paper, a canvas, or a pile of
building blocks can facilitate learner representations of understanding across topics, age
levels, and learner ability. Interestingly, some early adopting teachers have been doing
exactly that. They are using Minecraft for learning.

This book is built around a set of teacher interviews that describe the practices and
perceptions of educators as they are adopting, modifying, and building learning
environments that integrate Minecraft. They see Minecraft as an essential learning tool in

1
Interview with Carl Manneh on December 4, 2012.
2
Copyrighted by Mojang. For readability, I will not insert © throughout the book.

3
both formal and informal learning environments. So this book is an effort to provide context,
description, evaluation, and common threads across the interviews of teachers using
Minecraft. More than a list of ideas, I am attempting to provide a rich description of how
these teachers think about practice, the kinds of things they see when they look at an active
classroom, and what matters to their crafting of lessons, their ‘Teachercraft’.

Teachercraft is unique to the use of Minecraft in this book, but is not isolated. It has
implications for the use of any digitally mediated learning space, the adoption of
technology for learning, and more broadly a picture of how teachers learn. Using a tool
like Minecraft for learning is clearly innovative teaching. I wonder how these teachers go
about learning new ideas? Where did they find out about Minecraft? How do they gain
knowledge of new software and validate its use for learning? How did teachers test new
ideas? Appropriate Minecraft? What did they actually do with Minecraft in class? And how did
they evaluate the effectiveness of Minecraft, as a digital experience within actual classroom
expectations? These questions are at the core of this book and assume that teachers have
relevant insights to share about how teachers go about innovative thinking, learning, and
practical application.

Chapter Overview

Each following chapter answers a question related to Teachercraft. First, for context, I start
Chapter 1 with a brief overview of ‘Why Games?’ are being used in classrooms for teaching
and learning. What kind of learning game proponents are advocating for and what kinds of
proposals are compelling when discussing the use of games for learning.

In Chapter 2, I’ll provide an overview of ‘Why Minecraft?’ and present possible reasons why
so many have chosen to place special attention on this game. Minecraft has four unique
play goals that make it a benchmark learning product as the media matures: production,
creative thinking, safe/limited social play, and modding. These four traits, in combination,
provide teachers a unique classroom product that can be adopted to any subject or age
level for a variety of applications, assignments, and amplifications of subject area learning.

But, Minecraft is first a game! Millions of players have booted up for fun, not school. So in
Chapter 3, we will welcome Mike Cisneros, as my guide answering, “How do I Start Playing?”
and hope that this will encourage any non-players to play before reading on. He provides
a unique and charming insider’s perspective to booting up, playing, and having fun with
Minecraft; and even as a college student, he has a masterful and helpful touch in helping
future builders.

Chapter 4 provides a short overview of the qualitative study this book is associated with. The
chapter starts with a theoretical approach to understanding teachers that leads to this kind
of study. That said, I have taken care to make this justification as readable as possible for

4
the non-academic audience, because it has very real implications for teacher professional
development and training programs. The second half of the chapter explains the methods
used for the interviews. These foundations of research for interviewing Minecraft teachers
establishes the reliability and relevance of the rest of the stories in the book. Chapter 4
provides a glimpse of the cooperating teachers, how they were selected, who they are, and
what context they are teaching within.

Chapters 5 through 9 will answer questions about Teachercraft. Chapter 5 asks how these
teachers validate the use of Minecraft, or more broadly, any new digital technology, for their
classrooms. This process of validation looks diverse, complex, and far more robust than
simple approval of a new idea.

Chapter 6 explains a common validation approach for teachers that tried out their new ideas
after school or in a ‘club’ before bringing Minecraft into classroom settings. This ‘petri dish’
examination is fleshed out with stories from the teachers about how they used the time for
their own learning, tried out new designs, and finally, guest author Zack Gilbert gives a very
practical guide for building your own gaming club.

Chapter 7 focuses on classroom lesson ideas used by teachers. More than just the ideas,
however, teachers share their philosophy of learning, pedagogical strategies, and types of
lessons that are applicable across subject and age levels. In the second half of the chapter,
I attempt to sort additional lessons into subject specific ideas.

After seeing how teachers used Minecraft, Chapter 8 attempts to provide an insider’s
approach to evaluating whether or not those lessons were effective. I’m interested here in
how using new mediums for learning has an affect on what measures are relevant to these
teachers. What tools and approaches do they use to evaluate the tool, the lesson idea, and
how can Minecraft be used as an evaluation tool?

Chapter 9 shows how Minecraft teachers used outside resources for classroom use. Minecraft
alone, or ‘vanilla Minecraft’, is just the beginning for experienced Teachercrafting. Once they
become familiar with the basic tool, students and teachers start to create new ‘skins’, ‘seeds’,
‘maps’, and ‘servers’ to meet particular classroom needs and further lesson ideas.

In Chapter 10, I welcome guest authors who have been using Minecraft as a research tool.
While I understand that ‘research tools’ are not necessarily for classrooms, I think this chapter
has much greater reach and shows how teaching and learning extends beyond the K-12
classroom too. The tone and pace of the book will be a bit more formal here, but I hope you
find this as truly impressive and innovative as our research team did when we invited them
to participate in the book.

5
All of these discussions together flesh out what the use of Minecraft for learning looks like
in practice. This is interesting, with many, many more digital tools coming our way, to see
what effective teaching with digital tools looks like; and it can inform how we practice, train
new teachers, and support innovative teaching today. With so much to cover, we start with
building a strong argument for using games like Minecraft in the classroom.

6
 CHAPTER 1

WH Y GAMES?
“We took a little time to think what could we do with
this and how could we use it...”
- Minecraft Teacher

Kids These Days!

Kids these days are playing a lot of video games. Popular videogames are not just for fun,
many academics are growing enthusiastic about the potential and early results of using
games for learning. In this book we look at a particular game that entertains millions of
players. Minecraft has a growing fan base and teachers are quickly imagining ways it can be
used for learning.

Yet other writers are not as impressed with these games. They ask why we should embrace
a hobby for the ‘serious’ work of education. You may have already heard some form of these
published sentiments:

Games are just a waste of time?1

Games are violent and anti-social?2
Students should instead be quiet, sit down, and study the [heck] out of things?3

In fact, after ten years of more than promising research and evidence that games can be
good for learning, these questions are still clearly espoused by prominent thinkers.

Why is this the case? Why do some still challenge the idea that millions of video game players
claim they are getting value out of their game time? ‘Worth’ is a relative idea. Why do some
still critique gaming? I will suggest that it is because gaming media is still growing and we
have not yet seen their place in education.

Kids ‘these days’ are a lot like those of past generations. Without years of training toward
a particular channel of media, youth are drawn to forms of media that allow them to learn
from others. Youth have historically led the way in legitimizing new media as they grow into
adults. Today, they are playing digital video games en masse. Today, many are saying that
games provide exceptional experiences, stories, challenges, and social engagement. So,
why do we doubt the entertainment media of an entire generation?

7
Are Books Bad?

Consider how Plato disdained the “new” media of books:

“If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease
to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling
things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of
external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but
for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples… for the
most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with
the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.”

Plato believed that memory was central to all teaching and learning. Notice he equates
memorizing words to wisdom itself! For one of the world’s most accomplished memorizers
Plato could see the growing popularity of written texts - and even added his memoized
teachings of Socrates to the ancient works! Yet he valued Socrates wisdom as higher than
that contained in the book.

Plato felt books were shortcuts to the “hard labors” of real learning. Real learning was to put in
the time with your teacher to memorize their every word. Oral traditions have interculturally
shown to be stunningly accurate and generationally consistent because of the societal value
placed on scribes and scholars that recorded and committed to memory many of the great
works of history. This took considerable effort that reading could potentially delay and make
lazy learners that wouldn’t sustain high levels of learning - or worse, be “a burden” to society.

Plato saw a great loss in reading because it is a one way, second-hand, interaction. Reading
is impersonal. If the reader does not understand, the written word continues on. The writer
cannot elaborate if needed, nor can they read facial expressions, crowd response, learn
from choice of words. The reader cannot ask questions, understand tonal qualities of the
speaker, pick up on facial expressions, or see others in the audience reacting to the speaker.
Reading is essentially anti-social.

Reading allows the writer to share violent acts, lurid drama, and emotive content without the
accountability of a crowd (and nearby stones to throw). Reading can, therefore, be violent
and lead to violent thoughts! Meaning and ethical considerations could be part of these
narratives, but without a teacher on hand, reading had the potential to be misunderstood.
Reading pretends to be meaningful without the attention or moral considerations that
memorization requires.

Yet, despite these valid concerns, the overwhelming historical result of reading media has
been a more educated citizenry. Plato wrote his teacher Socrates’ words; a generation later,
Aristotle wrote his own words, and we were never the same. Books did not eliminate the

8
value or potency of an outstanding lecture, nor have they replaced public speaking as a
media. Instead teachers began to perceive and use books to great benefit - adding multiple
tools for learning.

Media Channels

Negative expectations arise from fear of losing something personally valued. Plato was
not wrong to doubt the future of memorized words, but he was mistaken in thinking that
memorizing words heard in-person are the only way to learn. In fact humans have learned
that we have multiple senses, multiple learning preferences, and there are multiple channels
that media forms can use to educate. Plato couldn’t conceive of a high quality of education
occurring with books as the central media in the lesson plan, but in retrospect this is not hard
to see for us.

Today we get ‘lost’ in books, we lose track of time reading, we even ‘forget’ ourselves in the
written thoughts of another. The best writers have found a way to effectively convey tone,
clarity, and voice in their writing. We fill bookstores, and Kindles, full of books because they
are fun, engaging, and we learn from them.

Many teachers use written texts as the center of their lesson planning and design because
they aren’t entirely bad for kids. Teachers also have found ways to make use of books as
learning media. They have written their own genre of ‘text’ books, and adopted assignments
focused on writing so that learners can build their capacity to produce valuable contributions
of their own. New media, like text, has historically added to our options in education, rather
than competing with or eliminating other media.

Media channels are value neutral. The ‘channels’ through which we receive media encourage
personal preference (like Plato’s oral learning), and we hone our literacies for learning based
on the media channels we prefer. Readers get better at reading, viewers get better at viewing,
and speakers get better at speaking. Expert readers may not have a tendency to value movie
watching, but this preference should never be interpreted as actual value. Media value is in
the effectiveness with which it communicates, entertains, informs, and engages the reader.

Books are not essentially bad - they are a form of media. They are a particular channel for
information and ideas to travel through. Those ideas however carry with them a worldview
and perspectives that are laden with value. Value is embedded in the message that is
communicated through media. Our question for books, and all media channels, should be
the extent to which they can reach people with a message or experience. In that sense,
games are clearly a powerful media channel.

9
Despite any loss of memorized content, anti-social tendencies, and moral ambiguity, books
are generally considered an educational asset. Books have the benefits of mass production,
permanence, and have developed common formats. For all the books that have been
burned, others have elevated the human condition. The mass production of the written
word has arguably transformed institutions, nations, contractual relationships, and power
holders - toward a more democratized and equitable world.

Games will do the same.

What if we could have looked inside the classrooms of those Greek teachers that Plato
was complaining about? What were they doing differently? How were they forming daily
decisions to make use of these books? What we could learn from those book reading Greeks
and Romans?

As a former history teacher, I would love to go back in time to see early innovators using
books! One look at those early adopters would show both the early mistakes and the early
seeds of change toward a new way to think about teaching and learning - that would lead
to ‘readers’, ‘textbooks’, and ‘syllabi’ as teacher adoptions of books for learning. ‘Today, we
are at that point of inception for digital tools and resources for the classroom. How they will
eventually be used will be born out of how teachers use them and dream of using them now.

Digital gaming is capturing the attention of kids today. Elders are scoffing at it, but as a
media channel, it can tell powerful stories, challenge the mind, and convey the thinking of
designers. Gaming media is proliferating as the media of choice and I want to know much,
much more about what teachers are doing to adopt and use gaming in their classrooms.

Games for Learning

Teacher adoption of new media has determined the degree to which it gets used in the
learning process. Many schools have libraries built into them today. In addition, libraries
have added books, music, video, and audio collections. Yet, however stocked the libraries
are, the teacher gets to decide how media gets used for close to thirty-seven million public
school students for six hours or more each day.

Games for learning is a logical development. If games are a powerful media channel, it stands
to reason that some of those games can be effective and powerful learning experiences. The
question is, how do we better see the future of games for learning in the classroom? How
do we explain and move forward with better educational designs, better game designs, and
actual use of games for learning?

Teacher-experts matter. We need to keep an eye on the teacher-innovators that are emerging
around games for learning. This book is dedicated to only a small number of these stories.

10
We need more. Expert teachers are the first, best, and by sheer force of numbers, the most
likely place that we will find seeds of transformative educational practices. This starts with
valuing their role as an expert audience for games for learning - and as expert learning
designers.

Rhetoric matters. We cannot further confuse the discussion of games for learning with poor
rhetorical constructs (bad arguments). Moving past, or addressing, the negative arguments
above is a collective task for advocates of games for learning. In addition, I’ll share dogmatic
arguments coming from games for learning advocates. We need balanced and logically
consistent arguments that have the potential to move game and classroom design forward.

Gaming matters. Finally, we need to continue to build a positive understanding of what

effective gaming media looks like from an educational perspective. When educators begin
to design, they start with learning goals, and gaming media choices will be made based
on the games potential to meet those goals. Below I’ll suggest a framework to define and
discern effective gaming media from ineffective designs. Educators should demand better
games and know what to ask for.

These three lenses provide context for conversation that you may have when you talk to an
administrator, parents, or even explain to students why you are going to boot up Minecraft.
At the very least, these provide context for why myself and the other writers in this book have
chosen Minecraft adoption as a focus for this study. Teachers, rhetoric, and gaming itself are
of value to the entire field and we see their learning potential as nothing short of what Plato’s
books offered humanity years ago.

Teacher-Experts Matter

First, teachers are experts. Least lets start with the assumption that teachers are excellent
at their jobs. They are also very, very busy experts. They have to design, teach, and iterate
lessons for kids on a scale and pace that is hard for non-educators to understand. But, it’s
important that we do understand and respect their expertise in the politicized atmosphere
that we hear on the news.

For instance, for every singular lesson design that a researcher tests; a teacher prepares a
lesson that gets tested in practice with up to 180 kids in 3-6 iterations (classes) per day (180/
year). For the average high school teacher, with five classes (n=@30), that amounts to around
27,000 student reactions to lessons - per year. After one year of teaching, most teachers will
have an experienced feel for whether or not a lesson plan will work well and with which types
of learners it will work.

11
By the time that teacher is up for tenure (usually three years), they may have tested lesson
ideas, in actual practice, over 4500 times. If that teacher has generally reported to work each
day they will have easily garnered over 10,000 hours, (Gladwell’s suggested condition for
expertise) 4 , of time designing and delivering learning experiences to youth. Regardless of
their availability to write this experience in a peer reviewed journal, most teachers have an
expertise that is deeply rooted in their work with learners.

If teachers can become experienced in their practice simply because of time on task - even
mediocre ones - they should have a respectable baloney detector for non-educators telling
them how to change their lesson planning. This doesn’t necessarily make them skeptics, (as
outsiders often mistake this as), but it does make them a seasoned and salty population.

I’ve found that what can feel like a fight from teachers is actually a form of testing to see if
an idea can hold it’s own in the world of practice. If it does, I’ve yet to meet a teacher that
isn’t willing to try something that they see as a better way of teaching than their current
methods. We need not waste time ‘convincing’ teachers, but invest more effort in showing
them learning methods that surpass current practices.

This speaks to educational change. Teachers are commonly being blamed for ‘out-dated’
practices. This is easy, but not productive. Nor will perceived teacher resistance (like Plato)
matter much as we move forward. If we have media options that effectively educate youth
with new ideas and abilities, demand and time will have it’s way as early adopters figure out
what learning will look like in practice. Speeding up reform efforts will happen as we show
this expert audience what might be done better and allow them their professional expertise
to play with, refine, and develop learning plans that integrate new media.

Here we offer up Minecraft as a potential teaching resource. Instead of mandating that all
teachers use Minecraft, lets start by looking at those experts that have already used it and
plan to continue using it as a classroom tool. Some of these teachers have utilized this game
to become the central learning activity in the classroom supplemented by a host of existing
pedagogical practices. We should listen first.

Then we should help to communicate examples of practice with sound rationale and
understanding. Any argument that suggests change, to those working in arguably the
world’s most effective educational system ever, should be convincing. We need to present
these examples with reasonable and well balanced logic. If not, these master practitioners
will kick back with some salty questions and calmly go about preparing their next lesson
using their well established methods.

12
Rhetoric Matters

If you have never enjoyed the pleasure of martial arts films, you have missed out on the
popcorn version of “Kung Fu”. In the movies, Kung Fu isn’t bad or good, it’s just a measure
of having ‘form’. Out of balance combatants have ‘weak Kung Fu’ and those in balance have
‘strong kung fu’. The difference is not the moral stance of the character, it’s the balance that
they have and their ability to retain that balance under stress. Argumentation, or rhetorical
design, is similar.

Rhetoric, in the classical sense is the “art that aims to improve the capability of speakers that
attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences...”5 Rhetoric requires a form
that is both designed by the speaker and in response to an audience - it requires balance.
The central goal is not to argue, but to, in the end, agree. I even like the ordering of informing
first, then persuading, then motivating action. Sadly, this process takes time and patience
(like strong Kung Fu!), and mandating action is often easier than rhetorically constructing
consensus across a population.

Strong Kung Fu is usually found in those with physical, mental, and spiritual balance - at least
in the movies. Balance requires a certain calm, awareness of the context, and understanding
of your challenge. Weak Kung Fu is found in the young, the rash, and usually the over-reaching
pride found in the villian. (This is usually shown in a 5-minute training montage showing the
hero growing stronger both physically, mentally, and spiritually.) The hero grows from weak
Kung Fu to stronger Kung Fu and this usually has something to do with hard work, humility,
and appreciation for expertise.

The cumulative lesson (from a childhood of watching bad captions) is that balanced rhetoric
is more important than force of will or excitement around a topic. The alternatives are
exaggerated and fanatical statements like “All games are good!” or “Games cause violence!”;
neither is strong Kung Fu. As educational leaders, it is not our job to cheerlead, or worse, to
mandate; its our job to inform, persuade, and motivate.

Weak Kung Fu

In this book, we suggest that games are good for learning, but some arguments for this
are more balanced than others. You should avoid weak arguments not because they are
necessarily wrong, but because they present an off-balance logic that is easy to redirect into
unnecessary debates.

Strong Kung Fu avoids conflict when possible and manages it when necessary. Lets first
look at weak Kung Fu examples, then start training for better rhetoric. I propose that some
of the outlying resistance to games for learning actually comes from those that are seeking
to promote games.

13
Consider these very popular arguments:

1) Games are popular with kids...

2) No, games are really popular with all ages...
3) Games require learning a game to play and master...
4) Games are really complex systems...
5) Games make complex learning fun!

Depending on your audience, you may actually use and believe all of these premises to be
accurate. I’ll admit to using them myself. Yet they didn’t always lead to the responses that I
was hoping for. In fact, more often than not, these lead to skepticism and counter-kicks from
teachers. Why?

For a moment review the above list and replace “games” with “books” and ask if the
arguments would be compelling - even for an established media.

Learning in general is of course a fascinating topic, but formal schooling currently happens
within an established state centric system that demands learning outcomes. Those outcomes
are predominantly defined, and effectively tested, as the ability to 1) read non-fiction texts,
and 2) solve decontextualized math problems quickly. Other standards exist, and more tests
are being designed. That system may be in contest with other options, but the public school
model still houses most of our students. We have a content driven system.

Teachers are asked to teach specific content that has been agreed to be ‘relevant’ by the
state, school boards, and indirectly by parents that choose your school for their kids. Today
they have actual, written, standards that they are accountable to teach. For this reason,
teachers are on the lookout not just for any learning experiences, but those that meet the
classroom objectives of teachers.

With that in mind, review each of the questions above and ask (as many teachers do), how
does this help me teach my content? Fill in the blank and try it a few times with each question:
Chemistry? Adverbs? The American Revolution? Long division? Do you see the disconnect?
Like Plato, it’s hard to see a future where learning facts is not central to the learning model.

Any media might be popular, require learning, be complex, or provide amazing fun, but
they may not be what teachers consider ‘classroom’ learning. On the flip side, not all game
designs are actually well described as popular, complex, learning rich, or fun.

Some games just aren’t up to a level of quality where they represent the findings in the
research community. So ‘games’ and ‘learning’ can be unique and non-associated variables;
games are a media channel, and learning is a value that can be gained, or not. Not all games,

14
(or any media type), are good for classroom experiences and it follows that not all games will
motivate teachers to try them out in class.

Strong Kung Fu

While all games may or may not be popular, learning rich, complex, or fun, consider that some
games have been exactly that. On the flip side, while all games are not necessarily good for
classroom learning, some games have been shown to be exactly that. Consider rhetoric that
allows for deviants. When we cease making sweeping claims about ‘games’, we can start to
speak to our common concern for learning and kids. Using the same arguments with more
balanced rhetoric, and connecting the media to learning as a measure, our presentation
dramatically improves:

1) Some games are ‘popular’ with the kids and learning can be more engaging by
tying into student interest areas.
2) Some games require intense learning, and some games provide learning
experiences pertinent to classroom use.
3) Games have varying degrees of complexity and some are uniquely able to
present experiences that are in line with classroom learning objectives.
4) Schools aren’t necessarily fun, (nor do educators have an obligation to make
them fun), but they are more tolerable, engaging, social, and functional when fun
can be integrated into learning.

Consider how these claims both 1) represent accurate logic, and 2) direct the conversants to
consider the individual game, not the entire media type. Why make sweeping claims when
specific, balanced, Kung Fu will do? Some games are great experiences, and this book is full
of examples that Minecraft is one of those.

Gaming, as a whole, does not have to be defended in order to justify use in the classroom.
We do not have to claim a universal attribute for all games in order to claim that the attribute
exists for a particular game that we intend to use for a purpose. For instance, we don’t have
to claim that all books are valuable to teachers, only that this book is relevant for a classroom.

Strong rhetoric helps to avoid massive and irrelevant discussions about whether or not
games are a waste of time, causes violence, or if you are dumbing down the curriculum.
For instance if asked, “Don’t games make kids think about poking people?”, consider the
balance in saying, “Perhaps, I’m not aware of any studies on Minecraft that show increased
poking. I have read about teachers that use Minecraft to teach science.” Games, therefore,
are not necessarily even pertinent for classroom teachers… but in chapter two I’ll lay out
exactly why Minecraft is.

15
My own musings on balanced Kung Fu, shouldn’t be read as an excuse to gloss over well
done research either - even when it makes larger claims. Schools that are interested in the
best possible delivery of relevant curriculum should strongly consider that some games
have proven track records of being engaging, intelligent, complex, and rigorous learning
media with iterations that are useful across age and subject areas.

Gaming is an emerging media format with great promise for teaching and learning. Models
of games for learning are beginning to proliferate and great teachers make it their work to
know what and how to engage kids with learning experiences that work in their classrooms.
They know that gaming is relevant, useful, and powerful when designed well.

Gaming Matters

Scholar Larry Cuban reminds us, repeatedly, that radio and television did little to transform
the American classroom.6 More recently Larry Cuban argues compellingly that the ‘digital
revolution’ isn’t all that revolutionary.7 Personally, I imagine Dr. Cuban reading a claim that,
‘Games can be powerful learning tools!’, and shrugging. Exciting technology that appears
very revolutionary can, and often does, end up having much less impact on classrooms than
we thought. What if games are a fad?

I’m motivated to introduce Minecraft in the next chapter, but first convince my ‘Imaginary
Larry’ that it’s worth taking a look at games as a learning space as a distinct media channel.

At the very least, the teachers represented in this study present a series of revolutionized
Minecraft classrooms, even if on a small scale. For them, gaming matters because of their
experience with learners. This same population of teachers, that are not as impressed with
television, report that games are different from other media.

There are some considerations about games that support their relevance for learning above
and beyond more established media. Before moving on to Minecraft, we will consider that
games can be viewed developmentally, both inside and outside of formal learning spaces,
where consumption and production are closely partnered, and as a ‘lean forward’ media.

Big Red Developmental Dogs

Today, there is little disagreement that when kids read books, they are developing a skill
or proficiency that will help them read other books. Less prevalent is that kids music also
matures into pop music and adult preference. Kids movies graduate to adult themes and
topics. So even, if for now, kids are reading Clifford books, we naturally expect them to later
read novels, news, and professional texts.

16
Elementary school libraries are filled with books that are fun, silly, playful, and appeal to
young readers. We know that it is the capacity to read, and read with understanding, that is
our accepted goal for children learning a media. As books lead to familiarity with the printed
word, I am interested as games providing the same kind of familiarity with digital content.

Not every game should be evaluated for it’s specific learning outcomes, but for their ability to
attract and engage youth toward digital content. For established media, we excuse ‘childish
content’ because we value the adult ability to be proficient with the media. If we value the
ability to communicate, ‘read’, and quickly navigate digital spaces, we need to do the same
for gaming media.

Do we allow the same understanding of the value of games like Windosill, Williamspurrg, or
Clash of Clans? This is perhaps what Plato was unable to see from his perspective. He only
saw the popularity of Greek drama, (which, let’s be honest, wasn’t Shakespeare...), and Plato
made judgements about popular forms of the media without full understanding of mature
or educationally designed forms of that media.

Consider the mature narrative power of Mass Effect, the calming effect of Flower, or the
historical accuracy of Assassin’s Creed cities, or the graphic wonder (art) of Elder Scrolls
Online. Are these being similarly overlooked by critics? These are exactly the things that
adult gamers discuss and are amazed by.

In the same way that we allow “Reading Time” to elementary readers, (or at least we should!),
I advocate for similar “Gaming Time” that includes playful and compelling games, libraries
full of fun and delightful games. We would see children’s media evolve and benefit from
feedback from educators that track what media is consumed, improved proficiency with the
basic tools of our society, and hopefully could expect gaming interests to mature too.

The media of gaming represents a spectrum of complexity that leads not to topical content
necessarily, but to a proficiency with digital media, digital communications, and digital
communities. Games, like books, have a range of ‘reading levels’; and Clifford games should
progressively lead to much more compelling forms of media, and eventually to digital
‘reading’ skills that will help youth in the workplace.

Gaming Outside the Classroom

We have long accepted that the habit of learning8 toward a subject is as relevant as the
information that we expect to later be consumed through that media channel. The media of
a book is a ‘must learn’ even when simpler forms include a big red dog, young sleuths, aliens,
or parties of adventurers. For this reason educators have long encouraged learning outside
of the school day through reading programs, summer clubs, after school programming, and
strong communication with the home.

17
This isn’t complex: If kids read for fun, they will be better readers. If we value proficiency with
computers, we can safely assume that if kids play with computers for fun, they will likewise
be better at learning and ‘reading’ software. The variables are guidance, availability, and
encouragement to all children.

In our past book, Mobile Media Learning9 I guided chapter authors to consider questions
from Dewey’s Democracy in Education10 when reviewing their experiments designing mobile
games for learning. Dewey considered an education that allowed each student to construct
their understanding of the world through experiences. So when games are employed outside
of classroom settings, we should consider this as a natural fit for an experiential media.

This study finds that teachers are using Minecraft to build experiences (as true classroom
grandmasters) in a way that fulfills the theoretical expectations of Dewey. Not all of them rely
on minutes allocated during the school day. Educators consider the whole child and respect
that if they engage with content for fun, they will be better learners.

Yes, games do take time. Some games take large amounts of time, but we shouldn’t be
skeptical based on time because we see teachers creatively encouraging play outside of
traditional class times. If media can transform learning, like it did for Plato, we should expect
that context, time, and teacher-student relationships may also transform.

Producing Ideas

One filter to understand new technology, and the veracity of a ‘digital revolution’, is to
ask if the technology helps humans to be receivers of ideas, or to be producers of ideas.
While some get excited about the potential and power of new tools alone (the Industrial
Revolution!), some wait for the tools of production to be put into the hands of the masses
(Communism!... err... 3D Printing!).

Technology has the power to transform - it’s just a matter of seeing how things will pan
out and to what degree the ability of production will be left to people. Gaming is uniquely
enabled by the exact same instruments that allow for its production. Though some delivery
tools block off a range creation tools (console gaming), others allow games and game
production tools to exist on the same toolbar.

It is because games allow learners to use digital tools, provide experiences, are increasingly
cooperative, and because they can often address very specific classroom learning needs
that they should be part of a suite of learning tools at a teacher’s disposal.

Games, like any other media, are subject to the skill of the teacher that uses them. Quality
teaching is still at the center of classroom learning environments. Games can be used
badly in a classroom, adopted for poor learning goals, or applied without clear mentoring,

18
frameworks, or purpose. This is not unique to gaming media. The goal is to seek a balance
that avoids poor pedagogical approaches and leverages powerful learning opportunities.

Specifically, teaching and learning, is best when teachers create clear objectives, guidance
for mastering them, and ask students to be responsible for the production and representation
of them. Ultimately teachers in this study each appropriate Minecraft as a learning tool to be
bended to their own philosophy of teaching and learning.

This is why teachers don’t want products that teach for them (packaged content), they
want component tools they can use in new ways to communicate, share, and interact with
learners (editable content). The more we push standards, develop prescription curriculums,
and worry about ‘fidelity of practice’ between teachers and content specialists, the more
teachers should push back.

In a healthy learning setting teachers are reacting to students with a clear set of objectives
for the learning and using a variety of tools to engage and challenge learners. Teachers
don’t want a better production, they want to broadcast. It’s not about finding the right game,
it’s about allowing teachers to find the right game. We will see that Minecraft teachers like
Minecraft because it allows them to teach, it doesn’t tell them how.

Leaning backward and forward

When it comes to games, educators often recoil at the thought of students playing computer
games all day, but to ask students to design and make a computer game has much more
allure. Teaching and learning, at their best, are ‘lean forward’, not lean backward’ activities.
This explains some resistance to gaming for learning, but also provides insights on the
implementation of games as an educational media.

19
Lean Backward Media and Lean Forward Production have manifestations in every
technology for learning, across media types:

Lean Backward and Lean Forward Technologies

L E A N B AC K WA R D M E D I A L E A N F O R WA R D P R O D U C T I O N

Listen to a story Tell a story

Financial receipts Running a trading coster

Reading the Iliad Writing the Odyssey

Visiting the Louvre Finger painting

Listening to Green Hornet radio Recording War of the ‘Worldlies’

Watching the Muppet Show Putting on a puppet show

Watching Star Wars Making an indy film

Cheering Scoring

Buying stuff Making stuff

Cutscenes in a computer game Playing a computer game

Both applications can be educational, but clearly leaning forward creates greater potential
for student engagement with the content. There are already some outstanding books that
dedicate all of their pages to why games are powerful options for teaching and learning and
I encourage reading those to prepare for discussions about games.

20
For our purposes, presenting games for learning can be as simple as,

1) Games don’t replace expert teachers and those teachers have much to
contribute to the conversation about how to train and use others to employ
games as learning tools;
2) Games can be relevant for the content you are responsible for teaching and work
well as supplemental or integrated media that you share with learners; and
3) Games represent the entertainment arm of a proliferated set of digital tools
used across institutions for information and communication - tools that students
should be familiar with from an early age - even if playing ‘Clifford’ games.
4) Games also represent a media that requires learner activation for any progress.
They are essentially lean forward media even as entertainment - that have the
potential to engage and motivate learners in and around classroom learning
topics.

In summary, some games are specifically relevant to a topic and can be used by the teacher
for demonstration, some can allow for student adoption of topic matter, some can also be
the platform for student creation, and games can also be created to represent ideas and
understanding.

Gaining experience with games for learning may mean simply starting with a game and
building competency using all approaches with that single game. All four teaching
applications can transform games into a powerful addition to classroom learning, but like
any skill, they require time, practice, and enduring vision for how they can be used in a
practical way. Some games are better for some approaches, naturally, but some provide
broader applicability worth investigation.

Interestingly, Minecraft can be used in all four ways.

21
References
1
Goldsmith, Marshall. (2013). “Building Happiness, Meaning and Engagement”. Games in Education
Conference. Malta, NY. Presented Aug. 7, 2013.

2
Jeanne B Funk, Heidi Bechtoldt Baldacci, Tracie Pasold, Jennifer Baumgardner. “Violence exposure
in real-life, video games, television, movies, and the internet: is there desensitization?” Journal
of Adolescence, Volume 27, Issue 1, February 2004, Pages 23–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.
adolescence.2003.10.005.

3
Bennett, Tom. (2013). Teacher Proof: Why Research in Education Doesn’t Always Mean What it
Claims, and What you can Do About it. Routledge: New York, NY. Pg. 167.

4
Gladwell, Malcolm. (2008) Outliers: The Story of Success. Hachette Digital, Inc., 2008.
0316040347, 9780316040341. Online access: http://books.google.com/books/about/Outliers.
html?id=3NSImqqnxnkC

5
Corbett, E. P. J. (1990). Classical rhetoric for the modern student. New York: Oxford University Press.,
p. 1.; Young, R. E., Becker, A. L., & Pike, K. L. (1970). Rhetoric: discovery and change. New York,: Harcourt
Brace & World. p. 1; from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric#cite_note-1.

6
Cuban, L. (1986). Teachers and machines: The classroom use of technology since 1920. Teachers
College Press.

7
Cuban, L. (2009). The blackboard and the bottom line: Why schools can’t be businesses. Harvard
University Press.

8
A special thanks for this distinction goes to: Steinkuehler, C., & Duncan, S. (2008). Scientific habits
of mind in virtual worlds. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 17(6), 530-543.

9
Dikkers, S., Martin, J., & Coulter, B. (2012). Mobile Media Learning: Amazing uses of mobile devices
for learning. Springer-Verlag.

10
Dewey, J. (2004). Democracy and education. Courier Dover Publications.

22
 CHAPTER 2

WH Y MINECR AF T ?
“The only way kids learn… digital citizenship is by experiencing
social media spaces and being part of those.”
- Minecraft Teacher

Looking Closer at Minecraft

In the last chapter we talked about how games can be much more than just titillation. Games
can also be vibrant, ‘lean forward’, media that allows the player far more interactivity than
passive media. Games can be tools of creativity and production. In fact, there are scores of
games that would warrant a specific guide for using in classrooms, or a study of implementing
teachers. So, why Minecraft?

This chapter is an overview of Minecraft. Specifically, before booting up the game or digging
into the teacher examples, let’s look at what Minecraft is and why Minecraft is worthy of our
attention. This chapter attempts to give you a glimpse of the game and explain why this
particular game is so compelling for educators.

The game itself is simple. You set up a ‘world’ filled with randomly generated blocks, and
your character is dropped in the middle of the world - empty handed. You can move by
using basic keyboard commands (W,A,S,D) and your primary skill is the ability to pick up
dirt, wood, or rock (left click) and put it down where you please (right click). While you hold
blocks, you can ‘craft’ them (E) into tools, houses, and armor that allows you to pick up more
kinds of blocks. The essential experience is to survive, explore, plan, and build anything you
choose - and possibly show your work to a friend.

Minecraft has broken the rules about what we think a video game is, how it should be
advertised, and how long a player will invest in their own imagination. It is not enough to
say that Minecraft is unique or different and it is insufficient to call it just another computer
game. Teachers in this study remember their ‘first’ time playing Minecraft with fondness.
They and millions of others remember the moment they realized they could do anything they
wanted in a world that was designed for just that.

23
Minecraft is a special game at the very least. Within the world of gaming, Minecraft is special
in four ways:

• The Minecraft experience is about gathering and building whatever you can think
of; it is a tool of production at it’s core;
• It’s also built without a structure or scaffolding that forces certain kinds of
experiences. It trusts the player to think;
• Minecraft is social and is appealing because you can play with your friends; and
• The inner guts of Minecraft are wide open to learning more about programming.

Expert players make modifications to the game itself, or ‘mods’, and the desire to change the
game itself is almost as strong as the desire to build, show, and experience the game itself.
Any one of these four elements would make Minecraft a great game for educators - probably
a top selling game on the market too. But all four of them create something special that is
changing an entire generation of play.

It may be overreaching to call it historical, but within reason. “Historical” brings us closer to
the context or tone in which players and early adopting teachers have framed it. For those in
this study for instance, Minecraft is a not just a game - but a game changer.

So, what exactly is so special about this little game? Why would anyone be interested in a
game where you move blocks around?

A Blank Slate

Well, for many, ‘moving blocks around’ needs no explanation. They ‘get’ it. For others, the
idea of the ‘blank slate’ helps to explain the powerful pull of creation and it’s endogenous
connection to learning.

Early in American education, students used a small hand held ‘slate’ and chalk to show their
thinking or to work out a problem. A ‘blank slate’ offered the potential to learn anything,
and we still use this phrase to express the idea that anything can be expressed on ‘a blank
slate’ or as a metaphor for students awaiting instruction. Blank slates represent completely
open ended potential - as does Minecraft. But Minecraft is better than a blank slate in a few
ways too.

Slates, however, were restrictive. They were more expensive than some families could afford
at home, they had to be erased each time they were used, and they were small - unless you
went to school where they sometimes had giant ‘slate boards’ on the wall! In this regard,
Minecraft is entirely different. The potential of Minecraft is available to everyone relatively
cheap, never needs erasing, and can be expansively large.

24
Today the blank slate has been replaced by paper. Paper allows every student the chance to
draw a picture, write a story, take on giant projects, cooperate with others, and share their
work. But, paper alone doesn’t do anything, it allows many things. In teaching and learning,
media serves us as a tool to share ideas and for learners to represent ideas back to their
educators. While paper can be used for a memo, a picture, a table-top adventure game, a
quiz, political commentary, or a sketch of a innovative idea; paper also awaits the users input
in all things. This comparison gives us a lens to look at Minecraft too.

Likewise, Minecraft is not a game that you play through. It won’t entertain you. Essentially, it
won’t do anything. Minecraft is a randomly generated digital space that you can modify by
moving and transforming cube shaped pieces of the world. Playing with other people allows
your constructions to be a note to others, a picture or space, a digital adventure game, a
test or puzzle, a political agreement, or a chance to build an innovative 3D idea. But before
you play, and get a form of writer’s block, you should know the nature of this game is that of
paper. The user interface is like a pencil, and for non-gamers, you may need to find a player
to help if you don’t know how to ‘hold the pencil’ yet. Once you learn, there is no limit to your
imagination. Minecraft, like paper, is a blank slate. Minecraft assumes that a blank slate is
compelling for many young minds.

Minecraft trusts in a second principle of human nature too. For Minecraft to work, as
designed, it assumes that a person’s mind is limitless or ‘forever, voyaging’.

Forever Voyaging

It seems there was a market for this kind of game too. We know that Minecraft has serious
sales. The Wikipedia on Minecraft paints it as one of the top selling games of all time - and it
is gaining steam. Before it officially ‘released’ in 2011, Minecraft beta included 4 million units
sold,1 by 2012 it had grown to 5.3 million copies,2 and as of this writing in 2013, Minecraft has
over 11 million in sales.3

<2011 + 1.0 million copies sold

2011 + 3.0 million
2012 + 1.2 million
July 2013 + 5.8 million
Jan 2013 + 9.0 million
Total 20 million copies sold 4

Typically computer games, have their top sales the first month they are released and then
fade away. Minecraft is selling more copies this year than two years ago and has sold more
copies each year than the year previous. Heck, in the last 24 hours alone, they have sold over
fifteen thousand copies,5 - enough to launch a small indie company.

25
Minecraft, without a publisher, and without one paid advertisement spread via word of
mouth6 to be a central hobby for millions. This is much less like a typical entertainment
product, that is consumed and forgotten, and much more like what we would expect to see
when a new innovative technology releases. The first exposure to the game is the same.

Minecraft is not outwardly impressive. The typical first impression of Minecraft is to be a bit
disappointed, ‘So this is what all the hype is about?!?’ Minecraft does not strike awe into the
first time player. Though it requires a good graphics card to render, you’ll notice first that it’s
graphics appear to be a throwback to the mid-90’s. It looks like a ‘retro’ game.

We’ve already pointed out that there isn’t much more than a blank slate to look at. The game
is full of cubes, no motion capture has been done for your characters movement, and you
don’t need a retina display to see the chunky graphics. The soundtrack does its best to lull
you to sleep and the standard ‘getting started’ tutorial is conspicuously missing. Minecraft
seemingly breaks all the rules of awesome game design’ because it fails to provide clear
direction, narrative, or context; it doesn’t scale (much) through more and more challenging
‘levels’; and there is no central or essential challenge for you to overcome.

Not only is Minecraft not visually impressive, there is a steep imagination curve that pushes
away casual players. If you don’t have an avid fan, (bearing the fruits of creative thoughts),
showing you the game, you too may start it up and think, ‘Really? This is all there is?’ Or
worse, you’ll fall in a dark square hole, get stuck, and decide to move on to other games in
complete frustration.

Current players have tried to make it easy for you though. If you go online, you’ll find an
assortment of Minecraft Startup guides to help new players navigate the first day and night
of the game. Chapter 3 will help with this also, but my goal is not to get you playing, but to
have you forever voyaging to new classroom ideas.

It isn’t the production that makes Minecraft draw millions, it’s that millions can produce
within Minecraft - and do. Like paper, Minecraft requires the player’s action for anything to
happen. It’s a lean forward media. Minecraft simply opens up a world in which you choose
the adventure, you choose the goals, you choose who to play with, and you build whatever
you want. It assumes and trusts that the player has a mind that wants to create, that can make
it’s own plans, and will connect and help others learn to play. Like a blank slate, the power
isn’t in the slate, it’s in the potential of the media. In Minecraft, the designers trust that the
player has a mind, and, in the words of William Wordsworth (via Steve Meretsky), that the
mind is forever voyaging.

Of Newton with his prism and silent face,

The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.7

26
It takes a unique restraint for a designer to hand over the reins of design to the consumer - or
a trust and respect even. One has to believe in humanity a bit. In this regard, educators can
resonate a bit with blank slates, paper, Lego’s... and Minecraft.

Minecraft humbly presents a randomly generated world when you set it up. Players are faced
with a silent ‘index’ of options that they can alight with a sharp mind. Thinking is an internally
rewarding experience and creator, Markus “Notch” Persson, is to be credited with making a
game that trusts and relies on player thought to fill the space with intention.

This explains why Minecraft was, and probably had to be, a non-corporate decision to make.
Notch started his own company, Mojang, to make this game where the ‘Sea of Thought’
can also be lonely, filled with ‘creeping’ terrors, frustrating, yet ultimately rewarding. This
requires a trust in the intelligence of the player to fill their own worlds.

Or perhaps this trust wasn’t such a leap of faith? Mojang also built a new kind of multi-player
mode that encouraged real life friendships to make private worlds together. Where one
person may come up short, playing with others is a far more generative activity. Humans
are, after all, social beings. If one person couldn’t muster the voyaging mind, perhaps two or
more people together could cultivate the needed creativity and play to populate this game?

Embracing a Limited Multiplayer Online Game

For years, I thought I knew what online play was all about, but when my kids dug into
Minecraft, their experience had some key differences - namely Minecraft was a limited
multiplayer online (LMO) game.

The Story of a Gamer…

I’d been actively involved in a ‘guild’ of online gamers. We had large group events, ‘raids’,
on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons, but fellow guildies were generally online every
night - so if you were looking for a small pick-up group, you could usually find one. We played
online in Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, or MMORPGs, or for short, MMOs.
We were a ‘family friendly’ guild and considered ourselves less intense than ‘hardcore’
gamers. We played for fun.

My role was that of ‘tank’ and I loved drawing the attention of big, nasty creatures and
taunting them to hit me. While I was tossed about, my friends would pummel the ‘boss’ of
baddies and heal me until we conquered the latest challenge game makers threw at us.
These weekly efforts usually resulted in conquest, but at times it took us a month to topple
one of these boss fights.

27
Our core group had played for nine years - jumping from Everquest to World of Warcraft
together the week that WoW was released. This was my gathering place each weekend or
what Constance Steinkuehler calls my digital ‘third space’ between work and family life.8
Using annual vacations, my digital friends had gradually become face to face friends too.
We enjoyed each others time. We shared a common interest, were willing to share the same
amount of time, and generally enjoyed sharing life with each other each week. Over these
years, we also got pretty good at tackling the challenges of MMOs together. We were coming
to be known as one of the best guilds on one of the most competitive servers in the game.

However, as our guild was successfully beating baddies, this came with challenges. As
people came, they needed leadership, communication, and management to organize 50-
60 active players (150-200 players were occasional members). Also, when people gather, so
does drama. We had to handle drama and would inevitably had to meet and agree on guild
rules, policy, and direction.

In fact, while real life had me working as a high school principal, I was always learning tips
for my real job from how we led our guild online. People management skills crossed the
digital line just fine for me. After all people are people. (I should point to what I believe to be
seminal work by Moses Wolfenstein9 who tracked this phenomena of transferred leadership
skills across school leaders playing MMOs.)

This alone was interesting for a time. But eventually, I would hesitate before logging in and
consider if I wanted to take on whatever was waiting. After all, work is work. Some nights,
after working with people all day, I just didn’t have the will to log in.

Even when the game became tedious, I still jumped online once a week to maintain very real
relationships with people. But they could tell I was less committed to the guild, raiding, and
managing people. For a full year, I dutifully took damage for them as a tank, worked on the
latest armor upgrades, and trained my kids to run ‘dailies’ for me to offset time on redundant
collection quests - but I also stepped back from the social engagements. Yet I still logged in
to announce to my friends that I was going to ‘log out’ for good.

Still, a few close friends and I are regularly in touch and game together occasionally. So that
was a long story that led to this reality for me. My core group of digital friends and I are still
in touch. It was that small group of players that made the time social for me, not the scores of
people crowding the server, but the few relationally relevant people that could laugh, play,
and share time that was rewarding.

The truth was, I enjoyed their company, but just couldn’t justify playing a MMO that was
starting to feel like a job. This is where Minecraft is a welcomed change of pace in the gaming
world. It hit the market at a perfect time after a wave of MMOs hit the market and before
people had abandoned them entirely.

28
For both veteran guildies, like myself, and for millions of new players, like my kids, Minecraft
came with many of the design benefits of an MMO, but the low-key playful nature of what I’ll
call an Limited Multiplayer Online experience - or LMO. You can play with friends. You can
set up times to meet online or see what the other has done while you logged out. You can
plan together, show off ‘awesome’ projects, or set up challenges for others to enjoy. Playing
together is fun and a key aspect of gaming expectations today.

Teacher concerns

Yet, during my time working with teachers across the country, I see a pattern of hesitation
toward MMOs in the classroom. Teachers are justifiably shy of MMOs because they have no
control over who is going to talk to their students once online. A typical MMO server could
have between two and ten thousand players online at any time - which presents the potential
of the wrong people chatting with students.

As exciting, social, and investing as these games are, teachers have to sell new curricular
ideas to parents and administrators. So if there are thousands online, how can you prevent
bullies? How do you stop a stranger from asking for my child’s address? What if they see
a swear word? For gamers, these are minimal problems (if not imaginary), however, for
administration seeking to avoid a lawsuit, these are central possibilities. It’s the potential
problem that can freeze educational innovations sometimes, not the actual issues.

MMOs provide no guarantee of privacy because they are designed to be social experiences.
(In their defense, you can report inappropriate play and the MMO companies are pretty
diligent in following up on these complaints). Developers want you to be able to meet new
people, and do everything they can to facilitate social play and positive online norms of
behavior. Players can and do get banned, but game companies wait for abuses to happen
first, then react.

Educators attempt to prevent abuses before they happen. Socially, MMOs are more like going
to a concert, and less like having a ‘sleepover’ with a few friends and parent supervision. Why
not invite over kids you can trust, whose parents you can report to, and keep them in your
own home which you can guarantee is safe? There may be bouncers, hired for safety, at a
concert that respond to bad behavior, but as a parent or teacher, why bother until the kids
are older?

For my part, I completely agree with this bias. Schools should and are well served in
protecting kids from as many dangers and hazards as they can. It is the teacher’s job to make
the case that they can combine great learning experiences within a safe context for the kids.
LMOs offer this kind of guaranteed protection and are a much easier game to present to
kids for this reason alone. So far, Minecraft is the first to really nail this controlled multiplayer
option in it’s native game.

29
So, while my work in the past10 has been to study teachers that have overcome these resistant
points for great classroom learning, it hasn’t gone viral in schools. These challenges have
made the use of MMOs in classroom settings fairly limited. The LMO however, addresses
many of these concerns.

LMOs for Learning

Most people have had private (controlled participation) social gatherings and have attended
(open uncontrolled participation) large community events. Both social experiences are
integrated into our lives and are far from exclusive of each other. So it’s not hard to imagine
that games would eventually be designed to address both styles of social connections.

In fact, there have been other ‘invite only’ multiplayer games. Some of the very first local area
network games were by invite only, strategy games have long allowed you to invite a friend
to play chess, scrabble, or Civilization. These games require a degree of coordination or act
as ‘play by mail’ asynchronous communication. Players exchange ‘moves’ but little informal
communication or ‘hanging out’ together.

However, the excitement of having an environment that is ‘live’ is a different sort of social
connection. Setting up a server creates an ‘always on’ setting. This means that anyone can
login and play as they please and that when you login, you are likely to find friends there
to chat with or take on a new adventure together. So what MMOs offer is community and
conversation in a way that other multiplayers do not. An LMO, may have less players, however,
the players it does have are all people that you have chosen to have in your community.

This is a significant advance for teachers. Minecraft offers all the stimulation, cognition, and
social interactivity of an MMO, but without the worries that playing with strangers will lead
to. A teacher can set up a class, make a whitelist of players, and say with complete certainty
that the space is safe for school use. In fact, for the paranoid, they can set up internal servers
at the school or a local network in the computer lab that has no connection to the internet
itself at all.

This kind of LMO retains the benefits, and eliminates the worries of community style
online games.

Modding

Minecraft is a blank slate; it allows for a voyaging mind; it is an LMO; and Minecraft represents
a fourth trend in digital gaming that has engaged a new generation of media producers
- modding. A ‘Mod’ is short for a modification to a piece of software, especially a game.
Modding is the verbing of the word and is the act of making mods - an activity apart from the
game itself, but is seen as an act of expert fandom around the game.

30
Most mods are not kept secret, they are published online for anyone to download and attach
to their own game. Mods can change the graphics, rules, or any other aspect of the game
itself. Increasingly, game companies encourage and welcome these modifications because
they actually can serve to improve or fix issues in the game released. Modding communities
also build momentum for a game and a self-organized community around the game. Under
the radar, game companies can also scan the modders for experts that may be worth hiring.

For instance top shelf games are embracing modding for their games. The popular Skyrim
uses the Steam Workshop space for players to make their own stories, objects in the game,
or add spells, and change rules. Players usually find a thing or two in the games user interface
(UI) that bugs them, so they go into the code, change it, and share their fix with the world.
Mods thus allow players to customize their play experience in every regard. Expert World of
Warcraft player screens are often filled with such UI mods and in some ways raiding depends
on the modding community to build tools for leaders. Even my lifetime favorite Civilization
has opened up to modders that convert the game, add world leaders, change units, and
allow for core rule changes to play. Mods customize, add play-time, and field prototypes for
future game designs based on player desires.

Expert modders become famous for their work - within that gaming community at least.
But when a game has 7-15 million players and 1-2 hundred thousand have downloaded
your mod, that is more famous than most politicians, scholars, or even many entertainers.
Of course it’s a different kind of fame, for a different type of media, but it’s still fame. Top
modders will have followers that know they do good work, bug test, and generally have
similar taste. And for many novice gamers, the aspiration to make a mod and be known for
it is a powerful draw.

So in one sense Minecraft simply follows this trend. It too opens up the files for players to
change and modify. In another sense, Minecraft takes modding a step further. Minecraft
hosts one of the largest, and growing, community of players so the stability of interest
means your mod will be relevant to a larger number of players and for a longer time than
most games. But that isn’t all, Minecraft opens up the doors to modding like no other game.

Because Minecraft is on simple to set up servers, with fairly basic graphics, and contains
little to no storyline, it allows players access to nearly every aspect of game play. Setting up a
server allows you to change the game world to your taste and gives the player a chance to see
that changing code can make the game more fun for you. When players start to add friends,
they inevitably have to negotiate the ‘rules’ of the world server so they can compromise on
a mutually fun space.

Sooner or later, one of the players finds out that they can upload new ‘skins’ for their
characters, which are seen by all. Instead of endless farming to get the cool gear though, in

31
Minecraft you can simply modify your graphics files. Using editors you can design your own
skins and make your characters look like a superhero, a robot, a princess, or anything you
can imagine.

Once a player has tinkered with server setup and graphics mods, the idea that you can go
into the game and add unique operations and objects is suddenly much more approachable.
So the progression and natural scaffolding for programming feels easier. Though there is no
clear data, I’d presume that far fewer Tomb Raider players mod the game than do Minecraft
players, simply because Tomb Raider can be a completely rewarding experience without
mods and even without other players. Minecraft is already a tool for creation, attracts
creative people, and makes modding an integrated and rewarding part of the experience.

On a side note, some are arguing that everyone should learn to code.11 That every subject,
every institution, and every profession will be led by those that can master and produce
in the media that transmits communication and information. Today, they argue computers
are the media of choice for doing work across professions. This leads to a question of how
and where to introduce coding to youth? So as these folks are building online guides and
tutorials, Minecraft quietly has millions of youth learning to set up servers, build graphics,
and modify code to suit their play styles.

In Chapter 9, we’ll introduce you to all of these forms of modding in the game and show you
a few tricks. For now, understand that modding is part of the context of this game and part
of why this game is uniquely worth taking a look at for classroom use.

Not only is Minecraft full of potential, designed for thinking, and social, it’s an entry level
drug for programming and creating digital realities. These four aspects of Minecraft make
it interesting within gaming culture as a truly unique and innovative piece of software, but
these elements also have easy to see educational benefits before you even boot up the
game.

This is true outside of any curriculum you design, or any topic you want to cover. Like slates,
paper and legos, the tools of creation are open to any activity you choose to attach them
too. This particular tool has the additional benefit of being wired for social engagement and
programming skills. This follows an age old educational principle of modeling learning. If
you want learners to write, hook them on reading and show them they can write too. If you
want engineers, hook them on legos and show them mini motors. If you want students to
learn today’s digital tools, you can use digital tools for learning; one way is hooking them on
Minecraft and showing them what they can do with mods.

That is why this book is focused on one game.

So, Why Minecraft?

32
Because it’s a digital tool that provides learners a blank slate, moddable, LMO to forever
voyage the imagination. Just ask students that play and you will get some convincing
material, as one of the teachers I interviewed found:

“So there have been 70 middle school girls running their own world and it
blows my mind what must go on in this server so he had each of them type
up a paragraph for his own reasons about what Minecraft has taught me.
I took that stack of letters and I gave them to my principal and I think that
was the final push she needed to give this a try.”

Together, these assets have made it much easier to find teachers integrating Minecraft
into their classrooms. In fact, unlike most research efforts, the Minecraft teachers largely
came to me when they heard I was doing this book. Minecraft has an emergent, active,
and passionate community of educators already using it for learning - and they care about
sharing this tool with you! Teachers are like that. When they see a good thing, they are ready
to share it because they see the larger mission of serving the kids.

Actually, I’m humbled a bit by the task of doing justice to what they are so excited about.
This book isn’t so much my thinking about Minecraft (or MC), but my effort to adequately
represent what the teachers in the study want to tell you. They wanted to make sure you
knew the ease of use, that you weren’t scared off by the learning curve, and that you had
examples of use that you could relate to. That is what this book is hoping to accomplish.

So it’s time to boot up. Minecraft is easy to use and the next chapter should have you move
from reading this book to playing the game to see what it’s all about for yourself. After you’ve
played for a bit, you are ready to return to Chapter 4 and find out what teachers have done
to make this part of their classrooms.

33
References
1
“Minecraft beta cracks 4 million”. GameSpot. CBS Interactive. Retrieved November 9, 2011.

2
Shields, Duncan (March 22, 2012). “Top 15 best selling PC games of all time”. SK Gaming. Retrieved
January 16, 2013.

3
“Minecraft stats”. https://minecraft.net/stats. Retrieved July 30, 2013.

4
Nunneley, Stephany (January 22, 2013). “Minecraft sales hit 20 million mark for all platforms”.
VG247. Retrieved January 30, 2013.

5
“Minecraft stats” https://minecraft.net/stats. Retreived Aug 21, 2013.

6
Silverman, Matt (October 1, 2010). “Minecraft: How Social Media Spawned a Gaming Sensation”.
Mashable. Mashable Inc. Retrieved December 28, 2012.

7
Wordsworth, W. The Prelude: Book First. use by Stephen Meretsky’s Text Adventure Game A Mind
Forever Voyaging. http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww287.html. Retrieved August 27, 2013.

8
Steinkuehler, C. and D. Williams (2006). “Where everybody knows your (screen) name: Online
games as “third places”.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11(4).

9
As a side note, I was part of a unique study by Moses Wolfenstein on the links between online guild
gaming and real life leadership practices. Look up his dissertation for more.

10
Dikkers, S. (2012). The Professional Development Trajectories of Teachers Successfully Integrating
and Practicing with New Information and Communication Technologies. Curriculum and Instruction.
Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin - Madison. PhD.

11
See intro video at http://www.code.org/.

Further Reading:

Review http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23572742

34
 CHAPTER 3

HOW DO I
S TAR T PL AY ING?
Mike Cisneros and Seann Dikkers

“I played it for 12 months before I was even thinking

of bringing it into the classroom.”
“So, I think the best advice I can give is to just jump into it.”
- Minecraft Teacher

A First Time for Everything

Last week, I was at a conference and was asked to do a ‘workshop’ session with teachers
and show them Minecraft. When we arrived… the assigned room had no computers in it.
With great flexibility the teachers were willing to review ‘Plan B’ slides of the game and talk
about the teachers that we highlight in this book. We spent the next hour in a delightful
conversation about how important it was to test out software for yourself. Normally a video
game workshop without computers would be a problem, but it wasn’t. The teachers went
home, played, and wrote back to share that their play time experiences were outstanding!

Many of these teachers knew a young player that could coach them through it. They stayed
after school for a day and had one or more walk them along and encourage them each
time they got stuck. In fact, as we interviewed MC teachers, they often recommended this
pathway to learning MC. If you know a younger player, have them show you. If you do not,
I thought it would be a treat to present this chapter as close to this form as possible. Mike
Cisneros is an avid MC player and was willing to let me use our conversations below and
is thus a co-author on this chapter. As you read, notice how teaching and learning in this
context is a natural, encouraging, process. Mike is a clear and natural teacher - driven by his
love of the game.

The following, then, is a simple step by step prompting on how to play Minecraft. For new
gamers, we’ll walk you through it. For veteran gamers, this may still be interesting as a case
of informal digital instruction. For new players, I would still encourage you to read only if you
run into troubles - it’s good to go run into some troubles first. The game comes with minimal
instruction and encourages you to look around, set your own goals, and grab a friend or
student when you get stuck. For some, this vagueness is part of the fun.
35
Two quick reminders: First, don’t confuse your ability to navigate a game with its capacity to
be a powerful tool in the classroom. Think of when you first picked up a pencil, or when you
first used a camera - it may have felt awkward. Expect a learning curve. Second, remember
you don’t really have to get good at navigating digital worlds before you manage a classroom
of players. Students can demo, help with navigation, and joyfully watch you learn.

Playing Minecraft is part of your lesson preparation in using it. Later in the book, when we
look at teachers who use Minecraft, there will be many references to the game itself that will
make much more sense if you’ve played it yourself. Also, most of the teachers in this study
(15 of 17) played the game before deciding to use it in classes; the other two had a fellow
teacher that they were working with who had played it. So go play. Put down this book,
navigate to https://minecraft.net/download and follow the instructions. Plan on giving it an
evening or at least an hour or two before coming back.

Learning to Play Minecraft

Seann Dikkers: Hey Mike, thanks for this conversation. Before we dig in, tell me what you
like about playing MC.

Mike Cisneros: The thing I enjoy the most about Minecraft is that it’s versatile. Literally any
person, in any mindset, can play it. If you just want to build with your friends, you are able to
create a server and play with them! Another thing, Minecraft is that it is very straightforward;
to get wood you cut down a tree, to get sand you find a beach, if you want some steak or
leather you hunt down some cows.

1) Setting up your account

SD: Moo! Alright, so treat me like I’m a brand new player - a newbie. What do I do first?

MC: First you have to make an account on Minecraft.net. Once there, go to the top right
corner and click [Register].

— Fill in the personal information,

— Click the green [Register] button at the bottom, and
— Confirm your email address.

Later, you can choose to try the demo or buy the game. Just use those prompts.

SD: Do I need to worry about getting spam from Minecraft/Mojang? Can my students use a
fake email instead of their school email accounts?

36
MC: Yes, there are options such as “I would like to receive e-letters from Minecraft/Mojang.”
If you don’t want these updates, make sure you don’t select this option while signing up for
an account. Sign up using an email account you can access regularly, whether that be an
email address you already have, one you set up just for Minecraft, or even your school email
address.

2) Downloading Minecraft

SD: Ok, so I’m registered. Now what?

MC: Now you need to download it on your computer. This may be different depending on
what operating system you are using. First:

— Go to Minecraft.net
— Sign in (if you aren’t already)
— Click the [Download Now!] button...

For Apple operating systems:

— Right below [Minecraft for Mac OS X] there will be a file named “Minecraft.dmg”,
— Click “Minecraft.dmg” to download it to your computer,
— After the file is downloaded, double click on it to open it,
— Confirm that you understand you downloaded this [may appear based on
your settings],
— Drag the Minecraft Application into your ‘Applications’ folder as instructed.
(This will make place an icon in the folder and on your ‘launchpad’. You can drag
it to your ‘dock’ if you want easy access later),
— Open the Minecraft Application by double clicking on it,
— Log into Minecraft when prompted (Use the registration we just set up), and
— Click the “Play!” button at the bottom of the page.

For Windows operating systems:

— Right below “Minecraft for Windows” there will be a file named “Minecraft.exe”,
— Click “Minecraft.exe” to download it to your computer,
— After the file is downloaded, open it,
— Once it is open, click “Run”,

37
 — Log into Minecraft when prompted to, and
— Click the “Play!” button at the bottom of the page

3) Generating a World

SD: So far so good. I’m going to press on [Singleplayer] for now…

Image 1: Minecraft Startup Screen

MC: Right, later on, you may want to look at the options you have for the game on the startup
screen, but for now lets get you playing by pressing [Create New World] next.

SD: Done. I’m naming my world now…

MC: While you do that there is a single middle button that toggles what kind of world you
want. When you click on it it will rotate between three settings: [Game Mode Survival], [Game
Mode Hardcore], and [Game Mode Creative]. For now, lets play what the community calls
‘Vanilla Minecraft’ and stay on Survival.

[More World Options…] allows you to customize your world a bit. This is where you can pick
a ‘seed’, or pre-made world, but we won’t do that to start. [Structures] are signs of life in your
world. [World Type] are options that tell the generator what kind of geography you want. It
will still be random, but you can go with lots of hills, or flat as a board.

38
SD: Why would that matter?

MC: Because when you start playing a bit, it changes the challenge and setting for what you
build and how you adventure in the game. Some players just like to explore the world, for
instance, so they do [World Type: Amplified] to get impossible mountains and otherworldly
landscapes. [World Type: Flat] is more for builders that don’t want to do as much terraforming
for their designs.

Leave [Allow Cheats: ON], we’ll use those to get you started. Also leave [Bonus Chest: OFF]
it’s cheating.

SD: [laughs!] So it’s cheating to have a chest, and not cheating to have cheats?

MC: Yes, that’s about it. [laughs]. You have a point there. Cheats are different in a game like
this. It’s not cheating to get shortcuts to managing the game itself, it is cheating to skip over
newbie content that really helps you learn. Cheating to save time is good, cheating to skip
learning is bad.

SD: That’s fascinating Mike, really it is. We need to spend more time on that idea later.

MC: For now, click [Done], and you return to ‘Create New World’. Click on [Create New
World] and it will start generating one for you.

4) Moving around and Monsters!!

SD: It is running! I used “W.A.S.D” keys to move around, looks like the space bar lets me
jump… and now there is a green thing chasing me!

MC: That green thing is a Creeper, eventually they blow up if you get too close, so just keep
running, or stop and let it blow up.Arrow keys work for moving too. You can use your mouse
to ‘look around’ too, most experienced players get good at using the [W] and the mouse
together to move around. New players have trouble with that.

SD: AAAAAAH! He exploded on me! I don’t like those!

MC: [Laughs at my misfortune!] Lets turn them off. Return to the game menu by pressing
[ESC] on your keyboard. Choose [Options…] and in the top right click on [Difficulty] until you
see [Difficulty:Peaceful], then [Done] and [Back to Game].

39
For new players the monsters create a need in the game. You need to build shelter! The
first thing you should do is to gather supplies and build some type of protection against
monsters. Monsters, or “mobs,” spawn in the dark, so consider building a house before the
sun goes down! In the morning the light burns them up so you get some time to explore and
collect.

5) Collecting Supplies

MC: Typically, when starting off in Minecraft, you will use anything from your surroundings
to make a shelter. When you first spawn, you will be in something called a “biome.” There are
12 main biomes, most have wood. Wood is probably the most useful resource in the game,
you can make tools, weapons, and even build a house out of it!

SD: Sure, there are trees over there… birch! I’m running to them now.

MC: To collect a block of wood, approach the tree and use your mouse to move the plus sign
(+) in the middle of your screen on top of the block you want to harvest. You hold down the
left mouse button to break it, (keep holding down the mouse button, it takes a few seconds),
and then walk over the block to collect it. You can collect all the wood you want!

Image 2 & 3: (L) Harvesting Wood, (R) Harvested Wood

6) Crafting

MC: Crafting is a huge part of the game (hence the name MineCRAFT). To access your
crafting table and inventory simply press [E].

SD: Okay, I see lots of blocks.

40
MC: Yes, here you can craft the ‘block’ of wood into wood planks. Drag (left click and hold)
the wood blocks into the crafting table and it will show that you can craft wood planks.

Image 4: Crafting Wood into Planks

To collect the wood planks, either drag the planks into your inventory (or press [Shift]+[Right
Click] to turn all of your wood blocks into planks at once. Now you are crafting blocks that
have greater uses within the game, than just the raw material you first mined.

7) Building a House

MC: Once you have materials, you can start making a house. Begin trying to find a flat part
on the ground. I found this area in a nearby tundra biome and it will work perfectly for my
new house. Harvest enough wood to build a modest shelter for yourself. Mine was 7x7 blocks
with a space for a door.

So now you’re ready to start building. With your inventory [E] open, drag and drop your
building materials into the ‘toolbar’ at the bottom of your inventory. Click [E] again to return
to the game interface. See how the toolbar is still ‘in game’ too?

41
Image 5: A Starter House

SD: Yes, so I can use anything on that bar while playing?

MC: Yes, if your planks are ready, to place a block, first use the mouse scroll wheel (or number
keys) to select the planks, then target [+] any existing block surface and [Right Click] to place
the planks. You can place a block from any direction on any side of an existing block. Keep
stacking blocks and you should be able to build a shelter. Use the [space bar] to jump on top
of a block and stack higher. Use [left click] to remove one you don’t want. A few more crafting
tips to finish your house.

8) Finishing off a house

MC: You probably need a door now.

SD: Yes, and a roof… but it looks like I can add blocks from below too. Up to three blocks
away from my character. So, how do I make a door?

MC: So for that you need to craft a larger crafting table. The one [E] we’ve been using only
has four spaces to put materials, we need more. So to make a crafting table, fill all for spaces
with a wood plank, you can split ‘piles’ of wood by [right clicking] on them in the crafting
window. Now you’ll see a ‘Crafting Table’ ready to drag to your toolbar?

SD: Sure.

42
MC: Drag it onto your toolbar and leave the crafting window. Highlight the new crafting
table on your toolbar [scroll wheel/number keys] and place [right click] the crafting table
inside your house on the ground. [Right click] on the crafting table and it will open a crafting
screen, like yours [E] but with more space now. Now you can make a door with those wooden
planks.

Image 6 & 7: (L) Making a Crafting Table, (R) Making a Wooden Door

While you’re in your crafting table, you want to fill the left and middle columns with wood
planks. Move the door to your hotbar, leave the crafting window, highlight the door, then
place [right click] the door in the doorway of your house.

SD: Home, sweet home. I feel like a pioneer or an island castaway making my way in the
wilderness.

MC: [laughs] Yes, so do a few million other people!

9) Forever Mornings

MC: Did you shut off monsters?

SD: I think I left them on.

MC: If you die in the game, you will be teleported back to where you first spawned when
you first started the game. So no worries. If you built your house near the original point, you
should be able to just run back to it. Making a bed and sleeping in it will make the night go,
but that is later in the game. For now, lets save you time and keep having fun building.

43
SD: How do I do that?

MC: We ‘cheat’ the natural day and night cycle. Because you left the ‘cheats’ on when you
set up the world, the designers gave you a lot of control over the world. Some gamers want
the game to be hard and the ‘learning curve’ is better when it’s more challenging. So the
monsters are your foil to building, hunting, farming, and generally doing what you want. But
I find that most adults just don’t get that this challenge (part of the fun for me) is exactly why
it’s fun to succeed. Without challenge, your victories are minimal.

SD: I think for an adult the challenge is just getting around and figuring out the buttons.

MC: Well, the next first person game you play, you’ll see the buttons are all the same. These
are pretty common conventions for gamers. So for kids, it’s the monsters that frustrate and
validate achievements.

SD: That makes sense and makes it easier for me to want to ‘cheat’ for now. How do I make
it morning.

MC: The designers give you all the tools, so it’s ‘gamer-cheating’. Press [T], for [T]alk,
on your keyboard. This brings up a bar you can type in at the bottom left of the screen.
Type, [/time set 0]. That makes it dawn and you have a full day ahead of you again.

SD: Nice, forever morning!

10) Monsters

SD: So what if I wanted to leave the monsters on?

MC: I was hoping you’d ask. If you leave monsters on (ESC>Options…>Difficulty), you’ll
need to defend yourself or hide. Just run from the green ‘Creepers’, they explode and aren’t
worth doodling with at this point in the game. If you get up close, you’ll hear a “SSSST” sound
that sets the explosion. They stop moving when this starts, so you can run away in time.

To defend yourself use that crafting table to make a sword and keep it handy on your toolbar.
You can make one out of wood pretty easily.

MC: Use two sticks for a handle and you can start making all sorts of tools like a Shovel (for
digging), a Pick Axe (for mining), a hoe (for farming), and an axe (for speeding up how long it
takes you to harvest wood. Play around with this and make a few tools. Using stone instead
of wood will upgrade the tools to make them faster and last longer. You’ll need a pick axe to
harvest stone. To find it, just dig a few layers of dirt and you’ll find it - or explore for a hillside
with exposed rock.
44
Image 8 & 9: (L) Making a Stick, (R) Making a Sword

SD: Can I use tools to fight monsters.

MC: Sure, but the sword hits harder. You have other options besides fighting too.

SD: Like?

MC: That house you built is your first and finest defence, to play survival MC, just hide out
and play with your craft table a bit during the evenings. You can also build more elaborate
defences to ward them off - moats, walls, traps.

Light also repels them from ‘spawning’ (automatic monster generation) nearby too. You’ll
want to learn how to make a torch and place them all around your house.

SD: How do I make a torch?

MC: A stick and coal - or charcoal. But I think this is the point to show you a resource that
nearly all MC players find out about…

11) Building Everything

SD: What’s that?

MC: Here is the link: http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Crafting#Complete_recipe_list

Anything in the game can be searched and they show you a neat little picture of how to
arrange materials in your crafting table. Torches are in there.

45
Early on, you’ll want to make a Chest, Furnace, better tools (with stone and iron), and
eventually learn to make food. To eat food you put it on your toolbar and hold down the
mouse button. You’ll see your hand come up and ‘munch’ the food until it’s gone. That’s
later though. You have all you need at this point to keep going and learn as you need using
Minecraft wiki’s like the one above.

SD: Thanks Mike, you are amazing! So what do I do now? What’s the point of the game?

MC: [laughs] The point is to play. Use your imagination, explore, build, adventure, dig, or
anything. You can do anything. It’s like legos. If you have to ask what to do, you’ve forgotten
what being a kid is all about. You’ve also forgotten how to invent your own purpose, and
maybe it’s high time you start working on that.

Mike Cisneros is a student at Ohio University from Cincinnati, Ohio. He is currently studying at
the School of Media Arts & Studies with his focus in video production and video game design.

46
 CHAPTER 4

WH Y S TUDY
TE ACHERS?
“Its worlds that are opened up that are different than
the ones students live in today.”
- Minecraft teacher

Metaphors for Teacher Learners

In most fields of practice, there is a robust and interested audience for understanding how
the top practitioners perceive and conduct their work. For instance, in business, we see
shelves filled with biographies and memoirs from top CEO’s; in medicine, leading doctors
publish new methods and potential cures to the rest of the community; in politics, new
campaigning tactics are debriefed by insiders and arm chair commentators for months
following an election. But what of educators? How do we approach teacher learning?

Teachers as Employees

If teachers are employees, shouldn’t we be able to tell them to use digital technology in
the classroom and they obey? Reform should be easy to initiate, but it is not. Many ask why
this is the case, and logically pursue ‘primers’ on more effective professional development
(Desimone, 2011) strategies. These are based on researched ‘best practices’ found
in successful districts. Others document and define successful learning phenomena,
like communities of practice (Cox, 2005), and seek to expand them through mandated
participation. These approaches are ‘top down’ in essence. They propose that teachers
serve districts, and districts have historically guided teacher practice. So, when we present
new ideas, teachers should embrace them because it is their job.

This assumes that with the right inputs, teachers will react consistently to the ‘best’ ideas.
When they do not, this research logically starts to identify ‘barriers’1 to teacher adoption

1
Rogers, P. L. (2000). Barriers to adopting emerging technologies in education.
Journal of Educational Computing Research, 22(4), 455-472.

47
like fidelity, ‘resistance’, toxic cultures, lack of resources, laziness, or other wrenches in the
machine - all are well documented2 by those that research employees. This approach places
a premium on convincing or compelling new practices and has often led to concerted efforts
to unify teacher evaluation, curriculum, and standardized tests to place pressure on teachers
to ‘change’ for the better. However, when it comes to teaching digital literacies, integrating
reading or math across the curriculum, or data-driven decision making, low adoption rates
seem to confound centralized planning. Teacher ‘employees’ can list a variety of reasons why
technology is not getting used (barriers) and they prove very resilient to new ideas.

Say you want to change classroom practices. If the teacher is an employee, you should not
have to study what they do at home, informal learning, or influences. Why would you? As an
employee, they should comply with what you tell them to do! The problem, then, is in clearly
telling them what to do - via in-service training. It makes more sense that you study and
perfect PD deliveries that provide the best results or gets the most teachers ‘on board’ with
your program. This has been the path of many reform efforts that have come and gone the
last few decades - but these efforts have ultimately not shown large scale adoption. Despite
the overwhelming focus on employees, teachers remain an elusive bunch.

Teachers as Conservants

What if teachers were better understood as independent actors that have agency in order
to protect the teaching and learning process? What if schools are supposed to be tough to
change? Other scholars point out the inherent conservative nature of educational practice
(Postman, 1979). They point out that the entire education system, in the United States, was
intentionally designed as a ‘loosely coupled system’ (Elmore, 2000) that serves to insulate
classrooms from the whims and fads of changing workplaces and politics. Education is too
important to allow teachers to be overly pressured by powerful outside lobbies, so teachers
are the conservators of a great institution - and rightly so. Despite pop culture excitement for
innovation or proponents of new technology, when a teacher closes their classroom door,
they can essentially do what they feel is effective and have a moral obligation to innovate or
conserve as appropriate. This allows top practitioners to practice for decades and quietly
deliver innovative and outstanding lessons despite tidal reform efforts washing by.

This understanding of teacher practice does allow for much more patience over time, and
can adequately explain slower or stalled adoption of new ideas in education. For a new
idea to take root, it has to be shown worthy of adoption, over a generation of teachers, and
leaders need to consider how to convince, not dictate. If not, districts can buy costly new
technology, that largely goes unused in practice (Cuban, 2009), and not be able to force

2
Wachira, P., & Keengwe, J. (2011). Technology integration barriers: Urban school mathematics teachers
perspectives. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 20(1), 17-25.

48
teachers to use it. The conserving view of teachers provides for understanding why teachers
may choose not to adopt new practice, but provides less direction for understanding why
some do. It is worth noting, still, that teachers have authority over their day-to-day practice,
and that this provides a precious protection for education to not be dominated by industry,
politics, or fads.

If teachers are primarily conservators, then it makes sense for change agents to investigate
essentially different system designs that allow teachers far less control over classrooms. So,
automated online settings, removal of tenure protections, common core curriculums, and/
or a more centralized systems of accountability and pressure for teachers should result in
transformed learning systems that produce better change - but they do not. In fact, it is
increasingly obvious that increasing pressure on schools is not having measurable impact
on student learning.

Image 1: Trend in NAEP reading average scores for 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students

This is a hot button issue, I know, and you may resonate with one of these two approaches to
influencing schools. My point is that to direct teachers or to undermine their independence
may not have a measurable impact on either teachers adoption of new practices or on
student learning overall.

49
Image 2: Trend in NAEP mathematics average scores for 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students

These approaches both come with bodies of valid research, but look at existing realities,
with a particular focus and set of assumptions. One continues to improve on top-down
professional development (PD), and the other documents the reality of its ineffectiveness
and acts accordingly. Frankly, I can see the benefit and appeal of both approaches. Yet,
these two approaches ultimately lead to frustration over actual teacher adoption rates,
flat lined test scores, and wonder why disarming teacher independence has not led to the
reform they envision. They provide a narrative that teachers are not changing, yet, from my
experience, teachers do change.

Neither approach to understanding teacher learning accounts for how quickly digital
slideshows were adopted by teachers - as a core tool in classrooms. Why were these taken
up so quickly without directives by the conserving teachers? There are many such examples
of technology adoption. Few teachers, for instance, needed workshops on how to use a
word processor, or the internet itself, yet thousands of teachers use these tools every day.
Video clips effectively and appropriately support teacher lectures and add layers of media
to previously audio-dominated practice. This change was an internally driven, widespread,
bottom-up, change in practice. Transformation of classroom pedagogical practice may not
be as radical as anticipated, but it is also not a benign change when students use, say, digital
editors over slate boards. So, if top-down ‘training’ was not a documented historical impetus
for these changes, and teachers still managed to change over time, what did account for
mainstream adoption of these tools? What approaches to teacher learning do account for

50
equally interesting realities that teachers sometimes innovate, create, discover, and adopt
new classroom practices?

Teachers as Designers

What if we consider the teacher as an artist, or a designer? Some accept that generally
teachers do adopt new tools and can do so within a short period of time. Consider recent
research that documents the teacher as a whole person. They show that teacher beliefs are
central to the conversation of technology use and changed practice, (i.e. Ertmer, Ottenbreit-
Leftwich, Sadik, Sendurur, & Sendurur, 2012), and that their networks, in and out of the
workplace, are essential to their practices (Byrk, A. S., Gomez, L. M. , & Grunow, 2010). These
researchers more accurately frame teachers as professional actors within a community
of local expertise. For a professional designer, rather than an employee, the decision to
change practice is not a lightly made one; it is a locally considered, bottom-up, validation
process, using multiple resources to inform practice (Dikkers, 2012). Teachers are essentially
independent designers that are unavoidably scanning and searching for improved practices
all of the time, but are rooted in designs that have worked in the past. Notably, this approach
understands why general core curriculum guides may be welcomed, but specific daily lesson
guides are consistently changed or ignored.

This lens treats the teacher as designer - a designer with years of developing a thin patience
for those that don’t understand effective classroom design. Consider that most teachers
make micro-changes each time they teach a lesson because they inherently experience
student reactions, performances, motivations, disciplines, enthusiasms, and informally
collect feedback on lessons each and every hour. They are informed by each iteration to: 1)
sustain, 2) tweak, or 3) start over on their designs for each class. Why don’t we see sweeping
adoption of reforms? Primarily because they are not in conversation with this process. Why
do we see teachers embrace some technologies widely? Because some technologies make
the design of teaching and learning easier, across subjects, and serve teachers as a blank
slate to design as they are inspired.

If teachers are designers, (or Teacher-crafters), we can assume that new ideas may not be
adopted wholly, but are tested incrementally outside of class, at home, or in small ‘free
day’ activities, before being used as a supplement or single lesson. If this is the case, it is
easy to see that formal ‘in-service’ training really is not all that relevant. Designers want to
bounce ideas off of their trusted friends and colleagues before they put work into them.
This does not mean that they are ‘resistant’ to change, it means they are always changing.
They are both empowered to ignore top-down training, but not necessarily oriented toward
‘conserving’ past practice. Quite the opposite actually, a designer is naturally seeking the
next great idea, new angles, and, as tactics grow expected, the designer seeks to capture
student attention with new material. Sometimes teachers like to create something that is their
own and see how students react to it. This process is what I call “Teachercraft”; an ongoing

51
process of identifying, validating, experimenting, and appropriating new experiences into
the classroom. Using Minecraft then is only a particular kind of Teachercraft.

Why Look at Teachercraft?

If teachers are designers, this opens up a new line of questions about how teachers learn and
adopt new ideas into their classroom. Why look at teachers? Because in any design field, we
should study the innovative designers. For example, if we want to study Impressionism, we
do not waste time defining and teaching only the single ‘best’ Impressionist (via in-service
training); nor do we document how they didn’t conform to the conventions of the larger
French art culture, (and suggest they should have been controlled better); instead we look
at each of them as a community of practice and draw actual practice across different styles
- understanding what Impressionism is broadly. In the end, we become better educated on
the movement of artist-designers.

This is why studying a group of teachers can inform other designers, but it may not provide
single answers that can be mainstreamed. This book does not provide a bullet point list of
how to teach, it does not define a single answer on what innovation is, but it does show a
movement of design.

The moment we try to tell an artist the ‘right’ way to practice, the good artists will keep
the profession fresh, new, and give us original material. This can be mistakenly interpreted
as ‘conserving’ or ‘resistance’. More accurately, I propose this is the teacher’s search for
ongoing engagement of an audience that needs original material. In fact, a number of
teachers we interviewed for this book have already started looking for the ‘next thing’ after
Minecraft. They are artists, constantly in motion, seeking to get reaction from their students
that matches their own enthusiasm for their subject material.

This is why we show common learning tactics, common wisdom and technique, and the
common adoption of Minecraft across teachers, but we cannot present a ‘best practice’ for
use of Minecraft in the classroom. A student of the teaching craft, should examine many
teachers and see each different style as a color contributing to a larger picture of teaching
- a movement. Constructivism, for instance, is not ‘right’, nor is didactic instruction ‘wrong’,
they have both inspired, engaged, and taught children effectively in the hands of designing
teachers that learn and try new practices. Mastery involves using many tactics, styles,
influences, and in time developing your own practice.

If teachers are designers, we should be able to see common tools of the trade, but not
common usage of them. We should expect teachers to develop over time, have phases of
practice, band together to inform their current interests, and try new things just because the
old ones are stale. If teachers are designers, we should be able to ask why they use or do not

52
use classroom technologies and expect robust stories, or narratives, around their decision
making process - in truth, there should be a process of design in place.

I assume that teachers are designers. This research carefully examines this process and
documents it across cases. If we have the correct theoretical framework, we would expect to
see a complex process for evaluating new ideas, a staged experimental process prior to full
blown use of Minecraft, and we should expect to see teachers sharing their breakthroughs
with refined and complex methods for watching their ‘audience’ (students), as designers are
ultimately interested in how others respond to their design to instruct further iterations on
that design.

The next few chapters allow a deeper look at teachers that have already been down the
road of trying Minecraft. I will argue that they fit the model of ‘designer’ as anticipated
and the entirety of their communication, across cases, is that of designers, not employees
or conservants. Together they paint a picture of what technology adoption looks like in
practice for designers. These teachers are, of course, exemplary cases and unique in the
profession, but they present evidence that exemplary teachers think of themselves primarily
as designers.

Finding Minecraft Teachers

Very quickly3, with the help of existing Minecraft networks and mailing lists 4 , I was able to
begin to find and identify teachers that use Minecraft for teaching and learning. As teachers
contacted me, I began to filter cases by asking them to share how they used Minecraft in the
classroom via e-mail.

Most of the teachers had tried using Minecraft or were just preparing to use it, but I was
particularly interested in talking to teachers that were already using Minecraft for: 1) a second
(or more) class rotation, 2) across a variety of ages, contexts, and subject areas, and 3) were
original in their usage of Minecraft. Thus, of the many educators that responded, seventeen
of them stood out as a purposeful sample for learning experience, diversity, and innovation.

3
A formal overview of the study, participant selection, methodology, and analysis will be published separately.
4
Thank you Joel Levin, GLS, and Mojang!

53
Participant Educators Using Minecraft for Learning

USE OF
COUNTRY SCHOOL YEARS XP LEVEL SUBJECT GENDER
MINECR AFT?

Denmark Alternative 9 HS English M Island

NC, USA Rural 14 K12 IT M State Sites/Open

Australia Rural 8 HS Science/Math M Community

NY, USA Urban 10 E/MS Computer M Various

MD, USA Urban 8 MS Computer M Hunger Games

SocialStudies/
VT, USA Rural 19 MS M Various
Language Arts

World of
Kuwait Private/Suburb 4 MS Social Studies M
Humanities

NC, USA Rural 6 MS Art F Force/Velocity

Australia Urban 30 K12 Extra-Curr. F Sandbox/Free Play

WA, USA Suburb - ES Extra-Curr. M Civics/Free Play

NY, USA Private/Urban 17 MS IT M Building Ziggurats

Canada Urban 21 MS SS/Math/Lang. M Math

NJ, USA Suburb 10 ES Extra-Curr. M Sandbox/Free Play

NJ, USA Private/Urban - ES Extra-Curr. F Sandbox/Free Play

Canada Urban 5 ES Language Arts M Writing

Canada Suburb 16 ES Library F Writing

Canada Urban 10 ES Library F Writing

Thankfully teachers are, in my experience, a sharing, helpful, and generous lot. All seventeen
were willing to participate 5 in the full interview process and be identified along with their
comments. Most can be found online if you want to compare notes with them too.

5
A small data point that suggests they are neither resistant or stagnant.

54
Gathering Teacher Stories

With a review board approval and volunteers identified, it was time to talk. I chose to use a
narrative analysis approach - used in a previous study of award winning teachers (Dikkers,
2012). This study is an effort to reflect the work of identity psychologist, Dan McAdams,
who uses narrative analysis methods to unpack a participants sense of identity, self, and
their perception of relevant events. As people develop a sense of self, they remember key
narratives, or a ‘life story’, marked by selected milestones. McAdams shows this expertly in
his interview capturing G.W. Bush’s (2011) perception of his redemptive self, as data. When
people tell stories, they are already selecting stories, from endless non-relevant experiences
to expertly filtered relevant ones.

“The story spells out how you believe you have developed over time
and where you think your life is going… Furthermore, much of what we
remember relates to our current situation and future goals. If I plan to
become a physician, I may have very clear memories of learning science
and helping people when I was a child.”
(McAdams, 2006, pgs 86-88).

… or, if I am being interviewed about how I can use Minecraft in the classroom, I remember
vivid memories of learning Minecraft and share pertinent stories that convey a professional
self to the interviewer that is interested in Minecraft.

After preliminary questions and demographic information, I asked participants about their
MC use:

• Why you were attracted to MC and how did you begin to use it?
• Talk about your first use of it with kids.
• What results you have seen, and what do you see as the potential
of MC for learning?
• What advice do you have for using Minecraft effectively with learners?

These questions were followed up with probing questions to gain clarity on story points.
Interviews lasted about forty-five minutes to an hour. I transcribed audio to text and
participants were able to read over the interviews and correct, change, or edit any of the
content to make sure it read like they meant it. On two occasions, participants used this post-
confirmation process to add details.

Though I am not as interested in the self-generating identity of these teachers, I am

interested in what they see as key to their development. Their expertise makes their opinions
relevant and their stories of learning useful - especially if we see any indication that there are

55
patterns. Across cases, these ‘Minecraft stories’ may help us to identify both professional
development and classroom designs that help you use Minecraft in the classroom. Using
narrative analysis provides a method, slightly adopted, to study teacher growth and self-
perception of professional development.

Organizing Teacher Stories

After the interviews were concluded, myself and interested graduate students began to
read and review the transcriptions and sought out common stories. We proceeded with
three reviews, or phases, of analysis:

Phase 1 - Review and theme building

Phase 2 - Coding data and sorting
Phase 3 - Cross-case analysis

Phase one analysis was to start asking questions of the data to see if there were direct
themes. The data pointed to key story elements across teachers. Teachers explained: 1) How
they learned about new media technologies; 2) How they validated the use of Minecraft;
3) Design trials and testing efforts they made when they first tried Minecraft; 4) How they
refined ideas; and 5) Perceptions of ‘best’ practices that may work for other teachers.

Phase two used phase one themes to re-read all of the interviews and coded them for stories
that answered the questions. We gathered all stories for each theme and built descriptive
lists of ‘answers’ given by teachers, compared lists, and began to make cross-case narratives
to be tested in phase three.

Phase three reviewed all data according to themes and looked for patterns and common
threads across cases. We also attempted to create common language around the prevalent
stories to share them as findings. Coding efforts were to document these stories and
accurately ‘let the teachers speak for themselves’.

This work is not conclusive, or an indicator of larger populations of teachers, nor should it
be. Similar to ethnography, the goal here is to fully understand how these particular teachers
learn, grow, and have opinions about using Minecraft. Why look at other teachers? Because
they are expert designers and each choice can inspire other designers. This work looks at
effective practicing professionals because the work itself is a form of art. The rest of this
book, then, is a kind of gallery.

References

56
Byrk, A. S., Gomez, L. M. , & Grunow, A. (2010). Getting Ideas Into Action: Building Networked
Improvement Communities in Education, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In
C. F. f. t. A. o. Teaching (Ed.), Carnegie Perspectives. Stanford, CA: Creative Commons.

Cox, Andrew. (2005). What are communities of practice? A comparative review of four seminal
works. Journal of Information Science, 31(6), 527-540. doi: 10.1177/0165551505057016.

Cuban, L., & Cuban, L. (2009). Oversold and underused: Computers in the classroom. Harvard
University Press.

Desimone, L. M. . (2011). A primer on effective professional development. Phi Delta Kappan, 92(6),
68-71.

Dikkers, S. (2012). The Professional Development Trajectories of Teachers successfully integrating and
practicing with New Information and Communication Technologies. (PhD), University of Wisconsin -
Madison, Ann Arbor Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1033501351 (3513241).

Elmore, R. F. (2000). Building a new structure for school leadership (pp. 1-46). Washington, DC:
Albert Shanker Institute.

Ertmer, Peggy A., Ottenbreit-Leftwich, Anne T., Sadik, Olgun, Sendurur, Emine, & Sendurur, Polat.
(2012). Teacher Beliefs and Technology Integration Practices: A Critical Relationship. Computers &
Education, 59(2), 423-435.

McAdams, Dan P. (2011). George W. Bush and the redemptive dream : a psychological portrait.
Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

McAdams, Dan P., Josselson, Ruthellen, & Lieblich, Amia. (2006). Identity and story : creating self in
narrative (1st ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Postman, N. (1979). Teaching as a conserving activity. Instructor, 89(4).

57
 CHAPTER 5

HOW DO TE ACHERS
VALIDATE THE USE OF
MINECR AF T ?
“Then, the final nail in the coffin that convinced me
how much benefit there was is that she learned how to spell
her first word because of Minecraft.”
- Minecraft Teacher

Validating Validation

Minecraft use may be a promising idea to you, but you may not be ready to use Minecraft
in the classroom quite yet. Or, you are hearing a lot about other teachers using Minecraft
and want to know more. It may be that your students are very excited about Minecraft and
gave you a copy of this book! If so, you are in a process of validation that is consistently part
of every Minecraft-for-learning teacher narrative. Validation is the process of moving from
hearing, about a new practice, tool, or idea for the classroom, to using it for teaching and
learning. Consistently, teachers need a time to think about and see a path for appropriating
new ideas for classroom use prior to actual use.

This chapter defines, across cases, what this validation process includes among exemplary
and innovative teachers. Interestingly, these teachers learned new practices quickly,
efficiently, and effectively using their lifetime interests, talking with students, and leveraging
online resources to inform their practice.

The current and widespread belief about professional development (PD) is that if a teacher is
told convincingly about a promising classroom idea, that they return to their classroom and try
it. Summative literature outlines “core features”, for formal PD, including a presentation that
has a “focus on content, active learning, coherence, duration, and collective participation”
(Desimone, 2011). Where this literature is well established, none of the teachers (n=17) in this
study were fully convinced to use Minecraft because of a single workshop or presentation.
Which begs the question, if they were not taught to use Minecraft, how did they learn?

59
When asked, “Where did you first hear about Minecraft?”, our teachers actually describe
multiple experiences including informal and digitally mediated experiences. They explain
transformative informal professional development elements that appear consistently across
cases. This chapter reviews past work that similarly finds these informal learning elements to
be central to exemplary teacher growth, identifies what the resources are using the teachers’
own words, and suggests how to build your own PD program toward exemplary practices.

Exemplary Teacher Professional Development

Full disclosure, I had every reason to ask about validation in this study. Two years ago I was
studying award winning, or ‘exemplary’, teachers about how they came into their current
practices. These participants included Teachers of the Year, the ING Innovators, Presidential
Award winners, and others (n=32). I wondered if the exemplary teachers learned the way the
primers said they do, or if they had innovative PD strategies that led to innovative teaching?
What was their ‘trajectory of learning’? What was their story? This study and the current
Minecraft teachers used the same narrative approach (Dikkers, 2012).

My hypothesis was that as the flow of information shifted to digital mediums, so would
the professional development; that teachers may not need to wait on the next workshop
to hop online, meet other teachers, and find ideas for lesson planning. In the same ways
that information and communication were speeding up other professions, teaching PD was
silently undergoing a revolution of its own. Among our awarded teachers, at least, it was.

First, I learned that not all award-winning teachers reacted to formal PD the same way. In fact,
some did tell stories that included formal PD as relevant to their growth (29%) - this included
a good ‘in-service’ training session, project group, learning community, or conference
session. But more often teachers gave conditional (39%) or negative (24%) answers that
formal PD was a hit-or-miss endeavor; commonly:

“We would count the light bulb in the ceiling while the person goes on
and on” (p.121)

Teachers pointed this out even when not directly asked, because it was key to their storytelling
to point out that they took a ‘new’ path to learning. At best, for the sampling, formal strategies
are inconsistently effective. And when they positively pointed out the benefits, they shifted
to extra-curricular tasks.

“They are helpful to me to make sure the kids get on the bus the right way,
but not for anything in the classroom” (p. 122)

For expert teachers, as good as the PD might have been once, there were now other sources
of training and development that were consistently more relevant to them and part of their
narrative toward award winning practice.

60
 Cumulative Relevance of Formal PD Resources Cumulative Relevance of Informal PD Resources Cumulative Relevance of Digitally Mediated PD Resources

7% 2%
8% 4% 6%

29%
13% 19%
24%

76% 73%

39%

n=32 n=32 n=32

Relevant Conditioned Relevant Conditioned Relevant Conditioned

Irrelevant Non-Applied Irrelevant Non-Applied Irrelevant Non-Applied

Though this study captured that teachers were learning elsewhere, I did not see the pattern
soon enough to dedicate interview time to specifically probe on exactly how this happened.
What did convince them that an idea was worth trying in the classroom? How did they
validate a new practice? This study built forward and teachers were able to share their recent
memories of validations. Teachers explained that they 1) learn from their lives, 2) validate
with their students, and 3) build on knowledge using digitally mediated resources.

Learning from Their Lives

Teachers told their stories and highlighted mostly informal activities (71%) that moved them
from hearing to use. Remarkably, these narratives were filled with PD examples like hobbies,
trying things at home, experimenting in class, student ideas, learning/playing informally with
students, surfing the net, and community groups.

A sampling:

“Fly fishing... it has informed my classroom...”

“I read, I do yoga and that influences...”
“My pilot training plays a big effect in me...”
“Parenting”
“Reading and travel...”

and leading into this study,

“I was attracted to Minecraft when I saw students playing it during their breaks.”

Broadly spoken, teachers were always on the lookout for new ideas,

“Every single thing I do, every single thing…”

“That’s what I do... I’m always looking...”.

61
Indeed, this data looked less like the PD primers, and more like Jenkins (2009) participatory
cultures; or Ito’s (2010) ‘hanging out’ and ‘messing around’; or Steinkuehler’s (2006) ‘third
spaces’. This cannot be understated. Every single participant in that study (100%) named
a personal interest or hobby as relevant resources for their teaching practice, growth,
and professional development. Even with only 32 teachers, that leads to a compelling
commonality among our awarded teachers, why wasn’t there more research around teacher
interests?

These teachers did not necessarily follow the PD learning patterns expected of employees;
they were much more like designers. Hobbies consistently stood out in the narratives as
inspirational elements and creative teachers were looking everywhere for new ideas. This
was worth pursuing. If this is the case, then when we focus on Minecraft, will there be more
common sources that lead to the particular tool?

Validation from Their Students

A second common finding was the central importance of the students themselves. Award-
winning teachers learned from their students,

“Not once in a while, all the time. All the time.”

Similarly universal conditions introduced these kinds of student stories in the narratives
(italics are mine),

“Students are the greatest source”

“Constantly teaching me things”;
“I get feedback from my kids all the time”;
“Students always drive what you do,.. if you watch them enough”.

To these teachers, students are completely central to innovation and practice. This cannot be
understated. Teachers tested everything against student reactions, behaviors, and learning.
Before they ran with an idea they would verbally run it past students over lunch break or after
school, test it in an after school setting, or run a single hour version of it - solely to see how
students would react.

Minecraft, likewise, was enthusiastically presented to teachers in this study. Students were
consistently part of the stories, and even were presented as the initial starting points for
teachers.

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 “My initial experience with Minecraft came through students. Students
introduced me to Minecraft. Actually, not students that I was directly involved
with in the school system but indirectly involved with or played World of Warcraft
with outside of school.”

As with the award winning teachers, the 10 out of 17 Minecraft teachers noted either playing
with children at home, showing it to students at school, or both:

“So, [I discovered Minecraft] playing with my daughter, in school I’d pull one or
two kids over to my desk and say what do you think of this game. What do you
think of the graphics? I thought a lot of kids would be turned off by the simplistic
graphics but quite the opposite. They were intrigued.”

Both studies confirmed a pattern of reacting to student feedback around new ideas in the
classroom.

Digitally Mediated Learning

Exemplary teachers also learned from

digitally mediated resources. Though the
teachers weren’t selected for their use of
technology in particular, when asked how
they learned, they consistently named
online communities, videos, information/
idea sources, tools, and video gaming. A
rough mapping of these stories across the
interviews, and coded for the context of
the story (relevant, neutral, or irrelevant to
their learning) shows a clear pattern of how
important online resources are to exemplary
teachers.

This finding led to the Minecraft study.

Instead of pursuing how to make formal PD
better, it seemed obvious that informal and
digitally mediated teacher learning would
be much more interesting and essential.
Something was enabling these teachers to
move from idea to practice. Minecraft is one
of these online resources. How exactly did
they validate using it in class?

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Elements that Validate Minecraft for Teaching and Learning

Teachers using Minecraft were selected in part because of their use of this tool. Naturally
then, all of the participants (n=17) shared narratives describing how they discovered, saw
potential, and decided to try using Minecraft. Teachers explained that they needed multiple
elements to convince them to use Minecraft. Interestingly, not one teacher had a single
experience that led to using Minecraft; instead, validation narratives contained anywhere
between two to seven elements, but most (n=10) contained four to five elements, and
averaged 4.49 elements per participant. Seven of the teachers explained that at one point
they actually said, “No” to Minecraft at one point in the validation process.

PD elements were limited to only seven named within these narratives. Participants listed
seven types of validation elements. Here is a closer look:

NUMBER OF
% OF PARTICIPANTS TOTAL # OF
# ELEMENT OF VALIDATION PARTICIPANTS
NAMING ELEMENT TIMES NAMED
NAMING ELEMENTS

1 Playing Minecraft personally 16 94% 17

2 Gaming as a hobby 15 88% 16

3 Online information and communities 10 59% 15

4 Friend’s recommendation 7 41% 7

5 Enthusiasm of students at school 7 41% 8

6 Watching a child at home 6 35% 7

7 Conference 4 24% 4

All but one teacher had to play the games themselves (1) as part of their journey (Chapter 3!).
Others had used other games in their classrooms and approached Minecraft more ready to
see it as a valid resource (2). Each element provided a contact point for the teacher to hear
about Minecraft and/or hear others praise it as an educational tool.

One participant coded all seven in their story about choosing to use Minecraft in the
classroom. Prior to a final decision to use, this teacher shares a rapid fire collection of stories
that led him to using Minecraft. No one single element made this happen. Significant and
complex validation ‘work’ is being done prior to formal classroom application and usage. This
teacher, in particular, required multiple positive elements to overcome an initial rejection of
Minecraft and develop an awareness of it as an interesting tool. As a veteran teacher he has a
growing conviction that Minecraft has potential (especially watching his daughter over time)
and that his students at school would welcome an opportunity to learn with Minecraft. His

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telling:

“I came across it very, very early on. It was before it was even an alpha. I don’t
even think it had a name. It was just sort of this experimental game that this guy
called Notch was working on…” (Gaming as a Hobby)
“...I saw it on a game discussion forum and I tried the free version and I got on a
multi-player server, my first experience was on a multi-player and it was just this
really chaotic world… I thought, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ but I sort of discounted it.
I said this is not for me…” (Online community)
“...Then it was probably a good sixth months later I was at Quakecon 2010 and…
In fact, it was sort of the underground hit of Quakecon 2010 and if you know, they
have very large LAN so there are several thousand people with their computers
all networked together and everywhere you looked there were people playing
Minecraft either by themselves or multi-player…” (Conference)
“...A friend said have you played Minecraft? It’s really great. I said, I’ve seen it and
it’s not for me. He said, no, no, look at it. It has really evolved. At this point, the
game had a survival mode. It was in a natural landscape and there was a large
adventure component and creation component and I dove right in… and my
very first thought is gee my daughter would love to play this game…”
(Friend’s Recommendation)
“… She was almost five at the time, lets just say 4 1/2 and I thought she would
like to explore and be able to build houses and I didn’t know quite what she
would want to do. I didn’t think she’d be able to play by herself. I figured very
often when we play she would sit on my lap and I’d play the game and she’d tell
me what to do, that kind of thing. So, when I came home, I think I described it as
the world game to her because every time you played, the game created a new
world to explore and she loved it and every single day it was, ‘Daddy, let’s play
the world game.’ (Playing Minecraft Personally)
“...At first, she just liked cutting down trees and building little wooden houses.
She wanted me to turn the monsters off because they were too scary but then I
was a very proud dad when one day she said, ‘Daddy, I think maybe you could
turn the monsters on but keep them on easy mode… Then, the final nail in the
coffin that convinced me how much benefit there was is that she learned how
to spell her first word because of Minecraft. She wanted to be able to teleport
herself back to her home in the game and I had set up that if you typed /home
you’d teleport home so she came up to me one day and asked me how to spell
home and that was the first word she ever learned to spell.”
(Watching a Child at Home - full cuteness)

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 “...So, as I was playing with her, I had it in the back of my mind that my second
grade students specifically, I thought, would get a lot out of this… … In school I’d
pull one or two kids over to my desk and say ‘What do you think of this game’?
What do you think of the graphics? I thought a lot of kids would be turned off by
the simplistic graphics but quite the opposite. They were intrigued. They had
never seen a game like this and were very, very curious. All of this really gave me
the confidence to dive in and create a little unit about Minecraft.”
(Enthusiasm of students at School)

Needing the least amount of validation (3 elements), another teacher had a history of gaming
and immediately saw potential in Minecraft. Later however, he added that he had tried out
the game with his kids at home and at school.

“ I played, I am a gamer, I’ve been a gamer all my life and so I was gaming at
the time playing World of Warcraft...and it [Minecraft] was so different and so
I played it...it was such a different game and I was just getting into teaching
and using other video games with kids. I immediately thought this would be
absolutely amazing to used with students because it is a captivating game that
doesn’t have all the things that normally exclude off the shelf games from being
used in schools.” (Gaming as a Hobby)
“When it comes to using it with kids... I also started using it with my own two
children as well as with my students so I have both of those lenses on when when
I think about using it with kids.” (Watching a child at home + Enthusiasm
of students at school)

Playing Minecraft and Gaming as a Hobby was most common with Minecraft users as only
two of the participants did not mention previous game play or hobby time with digital
communities as relevant to their validation of Minecraft. In these two cases a good friend was
involved that was a gamer. It should also be noted that when conferences were mentioned, it
was often in regards to meeting people at conferences, not necessarily attending a particular
session or lecture.

On occasion, the teacher would include two or more specific instances of an element
influencing their validation. Of note is Online Information and Communities where
participants reported multiple and distinct stories about different online sources. The data
does not capture the number of sites, conversations, and videos that were watched during
these times, only that the participant named this as a relevant part of their learning, so even
the number of elements recorded may not represent the detail with which they spent time
online learning and gathering ideas.

Knowing the number of occurring elements is not the full picture however. These
elements were always found in combination with each other. The following data shows the

66
chronological ordering of these elements for each teacher. When a teacher mentioned
previous experience, for instance, with game play, as a relevant part of their story, these
were located prior to when participants were ‘aware’ of Minecraft. Normally however, most
told their stories in chronological progressions.

Below, bold italic lettering identifies when participants rejected Minecraft (n=8). Also, italic
identifies the point at which teachers saw potential for Minecraft to be used in classrooms
(-->). Bold lettering (n=9) shows that the teacher had previously used digitally mediated
learning (DML) in the classroom, legitimizing games for learning.

Narrated Order of Elements of Validation

KEY: DML History | Rejects Minecraft | Sees Potential

PREVIOUS
1ST AWARE OF USE OF
PARTICIPANTS GAME
MINECR AFT MINECR AFT
HISTORY

1 2 5 7 3 1

2 2 5 3 3 5 1

3 4 3 1 3

4 2 3 1 4 7 6 5

5 2 1 1

6 2 3 1 6

7 2 3 3 1 3

8 2 4 1

9 2 5 1 3 3 4 1

10 2 1 1

11 2 1 4 1 3 6

12 6 6 1 5

13 2 4 5 1

14 2 3 6 5 1

15 2 3 1

16 2 4 7

17 2 7 4 6 1

1) Playing Minecraft personally; 2) Gaming as a hobby; 3) Online information and communities; 4) Friend’s
recommendation; 5) Enthusiasm of students at school; 6) Watching a child at home; and 7) Conference.

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Commonly teachers gamed as a hobby and brought this into the classroom, but it was not
always the case that they had to play the game themselves before deciding to use Minecraft
for learning.

Did veteran users of DML require less validation? No, the number of elements needed to
validate did not significantly change when a teacher had previous experience using digitally
mediated experiences in class. Of the seventeen participants, eight claimed to be using
a digital environment (of any type) in the classroom for the first time with Minecraft. Nine,
‘veterans’, had previous experience using digitally mediated environments for classroom
learning (including Second Life, World of Warcraft, River City, Wolfquest, Pokemon, Webkins,
and Quest Atlantis). In addition, validation was not apparently related to years teaching or
context of practice. In other words, we had a good mix of new and veteran games for learning
teachers in the study. Nor did being a veteran simplify the process of validation.

The veteran gaming teachers still required an average of 4.44 elements to validate use, and
the ‘newbies’ shared slightly fewer elements (4.25) and they both had a range of two to seven
elements. The previous use of digital experiences did not show significant difference in the
number of elements needed to validate Minecraft for classroom. Likewise years of teacher
practice had no significant effect on validation elements.

Along each of the narrative plot lines, teachers described a point at which they ‘got it’, or saw
that Minecraft could be used for the classroom (‘Potential’) - even if they didn’t quite know
how to use it. It was at this point that the teacher would start to pursue ideas, examples, and
explanations of using Minecraft for learning. On six occasions, seeing potential led directly
to trials in the classroom. Preceding elements were distributed between playing Minecraft
personally, seeing something online, a friend, student enthusiasm, and watching a child play
Minecraft at home.

NUMBER OF % NAMING # OF TIMES % NAMING

# ELEMENT OF VALIDATION TIMES PRECEDING ELEMENT AS PRECEDING ELEMENT
‘POTENTIAL’ ‘POTENTIAL’ ‘USE’ AS ‘USE’

1 Playing Minecraft personally 5 29% 10 59%

2 Gaming as a hobby 0 0% 0 0%

3 Online information and communities 3 18% 2 12%

4 Friend’s recommendation 2 12% 0 0%

5 Enthusiasm of students at school 3 18% 2 12%

6 Watching a child at home 4 24% 2 12%

7 Conference 0 0% 1 6%

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Prior to ‘Potential’, teachers were receiving elements, afterwards they would pursue elements
of validation toward the use of Minecraft in the classroom (‘Use’). Personal play time was the
compelling element that led to actual use of Minecraft for most of the participants (n=10).
For some, the choice to use was simple:

“I got an email from her saying I know this guy called Liam who is awesome and
he wants to do this thing with Minecraft. I don’t know what it is but want to try? I
said, yeah, I want to do a PLC that is formalized and I said yes I’m in.”

For others, seeing the potential was harder. Half of the eight participants that rejected
Minecraft initially were basing this decision on playing the game themselves. Personal play
of Minecraft was the most significant factor in making pedagogical choices about not using
Minecraft too.

“After taking a look at some of the videos on the website and kind of examine the
game I essentially laughed and said, ‘No way looking at the graphics... you’ve got
to be kidding me,’ and then went back to playing World of Warcraft.”

To overcome rejection of the idea, teachers needed to personally use Minecraft again in all
but two of the cases, where it took seeing a child play at home to convince the teacher of the
learning potential of Minecraft.

When presented with a compelling technology, teachers need to play the game for
themselves prior to making the decision to try it in the classroom - often more than once.
Over half of the time this was the element that directly precedes the choice to use Minecraft
in the classroom. On two occasions, teachers only needed one element (in addition to being
lifetime gamers) to validate classroom use - both times this was personal play. Within this
sample, the time to personally test-drive Minecraft was the most powerful and common
validation asset.

Finally, in the cases where hobby participation led to awareness, teachers had to play for
themselves to see if it had potential in the classroom - even in the cases where these were
the only two elements narrated. Playing Minecraft personally was the most common cause
of seeing potential, and choosing to try Minecraft in the classroom.

Using Elements of Validation as Professional Support

Validation is often overlooked, but in these cases it shows an important aspect of teacher
growth toward using digital media in classrooms. These narratives show validation as
essential starting points for teacher innovation. Prior to accepting an idea or planning for
classroom use of Minecraft, all of the teachers in this study expressed a narrative, with four
to five elements, that led to validating the idea and ultimately transforming their classrooms.

69
Most of these teachers needed to try Minecraft out, even if it meant rejecting it at first,
then continue to hear and learn more about it. All too often, anything less than compliance
with formal PD strategies marks the teacher as ‘stubborn’, ‘resistant’, or ‘coasting toward
retirement’. The result is a misperception of the modern teacher that doesn’t want to try
innovative strategies in the classroom.

Worse, single-element PD potentially assumes that teachers are willing to let ‘experts’
validate an idea without local discernment. Thinking that a single session or book on an
idea, (no matter the degree of fidelity to design), will transform teacher practice or even
validate the potential of an idea is simply not supported by this data. This doesn’t take into
account a natural and positive process of validation that is evident when we take a closer
look at innovative teaching. This process is locally relevant, involved, ongoing, and complex
- and this small study only identifies its presence, not the full range of its workings. In short,
I propose that a stronger appreciation for the validation process would paint a different
picture of the modern teacher - or at the least, we should be thankful these teachers put so
much consideration into design prior to use.

Notice that ‘seeing potential’ was separate from ‘choosing to use’ Minecraft for learning in the
teacher-design process. In fact, the two are distinct and separate in most cases. We saw this
when trying Mobile Media Learning (Dikkers, Martin, & Coulter, 2012) models with teachers
too. Initially we would provide a game intervention that teachers would praise in the post-
interviews, but then note that they would never try it out on their own. Seeing the potential
of mobile learning was a positive stage, but the challenges of using new technology without
researcher support, was still unaddressed for the teachers. ‘Believing in’ and ‘acting on’ are
clearly different parts of validation.

If these are indeed separated for the larger population of teachers, then we need to plan
accordingly when designing professional development interventions or presenting new
pedagogical practices to teachers. Consider personal exposure (play), lifetime hobbies
(learning), and online information (inquiry) as the most commonly involved stories
of validation. These three elements may actually be more affordable, convenient, and
deliverable than traditional, formal strategies. For our teachers, they are clearly more
impactful. What if these were elements that school leaders actively tried to encourage? How
would it affect teaching and learning in your school?

Time to Play

Personally trying out Minecraft was, most commonly, the final step prior to a decision to
try it in the classroom. Hands on testing can be as affordably organized as an in-service
presentation. Instead of presenting an idea, for instance, PD designers should consider
showing design potential and use to teachers; alongside letting teachers try something out
for themselves and with their children at home or at school. ‘Show, don’t tell’, applies to

70
adult learners too - and it should be assumed that one element will not result in changed
classroom practices.

Districts that expect any technology integration without allowing teachers to take home that
technology and ‘play with it’, should expect marked detachment from the creative design
process of classroom planning. Without time to explore and consider, the new tools or
applications simply are not present as teachers think of new ideas and projects for next
week. With a modest amount of planning, providing teachers with new technology a year
ahead of any formal expectations could align with the findings here and potentially have a
greater chance to result in innovative teaching than a presentation alone would. In short, buy
teachers toys to play with, let them take the new technology home, and pilot test use prior to
large scale adoption. This tip alone could save millions, nationally, in technology purchases.
If teachers cannot design for use in their classrooms, save your district a stunning amount of
money, and wait until teachers do have particular technologies they want for teaching and
learning.

Promoting and sharing interesting and compelling classroom trials (even imperfect ones)
would also promote the design-focus that teachers like thrive within. Consider starting,
ending, or filling staff meetings with faculty sharing their most recent efforts for engaging
learning design. Put a spotlight on playful design efforts, ‘plan B’s, and cheer success along
with... initiative.

Learning Everywhere

At first glance, hobbies are hard to encourage. We can even ask if we should seek too. In fact,
if teachers are just employees, it may not be appropriate to encourage any activities outside
of work. Minecraft teachers were not necessarily going to Minecraft communities until they
saw potential in the software - however many were already in video game communities.
So if teachers are designers, sharing and celebrating any activities of excellence is actually
supporting and condoning hobbies, or more appropriately, high interest, lifetime learning
habits. Initially, professional learning communities (PLCs) were promoted with similar
evidence that innovation commonly started in trusted conversation. However, when these
were mandated, and often organized by grade or subject, they lost their potency to influence
active, vibrant, teacher learning.

Promoting lifetime learning may still be within reach. PLCs could easily be arranged around
high interest areas like computer gaming, civic engagement, project-based learning, and
new topics could be driven by teacher suggestion. This data shows that these groups may not
naturally form around grade levels or subject areas, but informally gather around common
interests. Teachers can easily translate a science teachers use of Minecraft for use in their
history lessons. Also, they are only, ever, one of seven elements found in this study and not
all teachers came to innovative practice because of a community. PLC groups should be

71
highly enjoyable, fluid, and voluntary.

For education leaders, showing interest, and modeling, participation in clubs, community
groups, volunteer activities, and online communities can serve to show younger teachers how
these are relevant activities. Willfully choose to tune into new ideas and tune out empty small
talk. When a respected (valid) leader chooses to focus conversation on lifetime learning, it
sets a bar for professionals to get involved, geek out, and play - just to be more interesting to
their colleagues. Consider gently starting in the interview process and continue by bringing
it up in annual merit conversations to sustain a culture that legitimizes passionate investment
in hobbies and new skills.

Learning with and from students is a form of learning everywhere. In the cases of our
Minecraft teachers, the students were often the ‘experts’ that teachers leaned on for initial
classroom efforts. Designing teachers actively sought out feedback from students and
based key decisions on their reactions to an idea. Little attention is given to training teachers
for this kind of data, yet we see consistently that innovative teachers measure each effort by
student reactions. Techniques for gathering student feedback are easy to teach, model, and
highlight in formal training.

Recently we’ve also had great success involving student presenters at our local Playful
Learning Summit and working with student teams as personal coaches for teachers that are
taking their first steps in digital environments. Students have been consistently excited to
show teachers new tools, they are patient, and they are familiar with coaching others to play.

Supporting Online Literacy

Finally, districts can easily provide links, leads, and provide guidance for using the internet
as an information and community building asset. When a teacher is interested in using
Minecraft in the classroom, a district can dedicate attention to saving the teacher time
looking for more information, people, and examples of use.

For example, the drive to have local ‘data-based decision making’ may be well received as
having the potential to improve learning, but teachers and administrators also need tools to
process student data in a timely, effective, and even exploratory way. For data to affect daily
choices it most likely has to fit within the constraints of time, cost, ability, comfort, and safety
that are also part of teacher decision making. These are all based on a person’s competency
and knowledge base around digital tools. Supporting online resources means building
tools, communications, and support for teachers so they can efficiently and effectively do
things for themselves.

It is worth reasserting that the prevalence of informal PD around new media technologies
can easily be explained by the newness of the technologies. We simply haven’t formalized

72
training yet. So, conditionally, this study (and the limits of both the sampling and method)
should not be used as a critique of formal PD, only that informal PD is currently prevalent for
new technology adopters. Formal PD may in the future address the need to build teacher
capacity using online tools - moving from boutique to mainstream practices.

Conclusion

Understanding a process of validation provides a new lens through which we can look at
teachers and how they actually validate and adopt Minecraft in their classrooms. Teachers
are essential designers constantly looking for and validating old and new practices. As
information is digitized, it stands to reason that teacher validation elements are shifting
toward both digital resources and communities of practice that can expand and filter ideas
for new classroom practices. Second, I’m convinced that a better understanding of how
teachers design their practice can open up new conversations about structuring PD more
effectively. If teachers naturally leverage informal PD assets, then formal PD designers can
potentially also benefit from appropriately updating new PD designs that more naturally fit
with evidence of actual adult learning.

Personal play, having a hobby (related to the intervention), student reactions, and personal
relationships (friends and colleagues) were all key elements that contributed to a clear process
of validation prior to adoption of Minecraft. Validation, though varied, was consistently
communicated through narrative as a process of moving from aware of Minecraft, to seeing
potential in Minecraft, to choosing to try using Minecraft in the classroom. Next, we have the
privilege in hearing how those first efforts played out, how the ideas were refined, and how
they ended up with their current practices.

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References

Desimone, L. M. (2011). A primer on effective professional development. Phi delta kappan, 92(6),
68-71.

Dikkers, S., Martin, J., Coulter, B. (2012). Mobile media learning : Amazing uses of mobile devices for
learning. Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press.

Dikkers, S. (2012). The Professional Development Trajectories of Teachers successfully integrating and
practicing with New Information and Communication Technologies. (PhD), University of Wisconsin -
Madison, Ann Arbor Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1033501351 (3513241)

Itō, Mizuko. (2010). Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out : kids living and learning with new
media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Jenkins, Henry. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture : media education for the
21st century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Steinkuehler, C. A., & Williams, D. (2006). Where everybody knows your (screen) name: Online
games as “third places”. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 11(4), 885-909.

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 CHAPTER 6

HOW DO TE ACHERS USE

MINECR AF T OUTSIDE
OF CL A SSROOMS?
Zack Gilbert and Seann Dikkers

“Within two days, we had 120 kids sign up so we blew through the
requirements and had more sign ups for the program than any other topic
ever offered by the school in its twenty year history.”
- Minecraft Teacher

The Petri Dish Club

Validating a tool like Minecraft is closely tied to working ‘with’ and ‘for’ students. Likewise
after our teachers made the decision to use Minecraft, eleven of them chose to organize,
(or let students organize!), a club outside of their classrooms and their narratives pause
to elaborate and emphasize how instrumental these experiences were for them. For our
teachers, outside of class time with learners was essentially a kind of petri dish for cultivating
and growing new ideas.

We too will spend a chapter unpacking why teachers choose to organize ‘clubs’, what they
think about that time, and how they begin to tie emergent activities into classroom learning
experiences. Outside of class time also serves to train the teacher, provide ideas, and allow
a natural process of testing, organizing, and developing group management around a piece
of software. Broadly, understanding why and how teachers build clubs is an essential aspect
of understanding professional learning processes.

This chapter first reviews narrative insights provided by our 17 Minecraft teachers and the
end of the chapter includes a step by step guide to starting your own Minecraft club. Guest
writer Zack Gilbert brings his experience explaining how he thinks about and goes about
planning for a new club. First though we will explore why you might want to invest the time
to start a club.

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Why Start a Club?

Across the narratives in this study, teachers spend time explaining why they felt it was
important, or essential to them, to start a Minecraft club. Clubs, in general, are good
because they provide a safe space, build community, provide common ground for students,
challenge them, and they are fun. Together, Minecraft teachers added their own professional
development, lesson ideas, digital literacy, balance, and escape from curricular goals as
core reasons why they invested time into meeting with kids outside of class.

Our teachers started explaining how important it is to try things out in a club first. Notably, for
non-gaming teachers, playing in a play space helps them to learn the ‘language’ of gaming
without the burden of curricular goals. To this end, knowing gaming terms, styles of play,
student interest, basic mechanics, and rhythms of play are a form of literacy worth getting
more familiar with as a teacher.

“As games explode and become the cool thing that a lot of teachers want to try
out they all just think that they can… not all, but many, and they don’t have any
background... you need to know the language of it. I think teachers can bring so
much as long as they are approaching it from a gamer point of view or lens.”
“I think teachers have to learn to get out of the way and let the kids play the
games and see where they can fit the learning in. Once teachers start trying
to cram the learning into the game, you will kill the game and the game won’t
be fun.”

If they are not, teachers are prone to colonize the game space with goals, assignments
and forced actions that may not fit with what is fun (and compelling) about the game itself.
This particular teacher went on to explain that teachers who aren’t familiar with digital
environments tend to ‘assign’ work and tasks that are out of alignment with the tool. This
can actually have an adverse effect, rendering the tool powerless for learning. It is essential
to make time to be able to watch students and integrate, not take over, learning spaces.
Other teachers take time, without playing themselves, to see student actions and behaviors
outside of the classroom:

“We took a little time to think what could we do with this and how could we use
it and to come up with ideas… The more I saw, the more I realized what you could
do. I admit I probably have only played it 10 minutes myself.”
“The whole jumping into the game and not really knowing how to play the game
is actually part of the game and part of the fun because they start out and a lot
of them don’t even know how to walk… So, I think the best advice I can give is
to just jump into it.”

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Where teacher playtime varies between the teachers, they are essentially all seeking the
same thing outside of class. They are trying to negotiate how the digital tools can be used,
how they should be used, how their goals and the goals of the players can be balanced
between learning and play.

“I still try when I’m creating a new activity to find that balance, to give them a
sense of purpose, to give them a goal but also include segments of game play
where you are just playing Minecraft.”

Another reason for starting an informal club for students is to escape the need to justify time
spent. Classroom time essentially is set aside for learning a curriculum. Teachers, arguably,
need to be able to explain each lesson and how they expect it to lead to learning. Currently,
efforts to evaluate and quantify ‘value-added’ puts even more pressure on ensuring each
moment in class serves the curricular goal.

“I have curriculum to deliver and assessment to do and recording to get done.

I can not just let them play. I don’t know if that is short sightedness on me or
whether that is just a fact.”

Yet outside of class…

“That argument can’t hold up against when it is extracurricular, when it’s

enrichment, and supplemental, and we’re still doing exactly what we’ve done
before in the classroom.”

Moving outside the classroom, then, is a clever way to experiment with new learning tools,
without having to explain them. Often teachers will see the relevance of digital media in the
classroom and ask where to start making changes to their classes. For these teachers, the
answer is to leave the classroom alone and get to know Minecraft outside of classes.

Another small benefit to outside of class exposure was shared by one teacher that had tried
classroom adoption first, and then saw the benefit of training a small, highly interested,
cohort of players first, then bringing the game to the classroom.

“I tell you what the first two weeks where you are trying to teach 15 plus students
at a time how to play a game, that may or may not have had experience with
computer games, that is awful. However, it pays off. As soon as they learn how to
play, then they start teaching each other and then it gets much easier.”

Similarly, using Minecraft outside of the classroom allows a teacher that is not technologically
savvy to gain knowledge. For teachers that are new to games, virtual environments, or
managing a classroom with computer users, this can be a safe place to learn and understand.

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 “I mean it doesn’t have to be as big of a thing as I’ve made it for my kids. It can
just be a day a month or something like that, where maybe the teacher doesn’t
understand as much about it technologically but can run it in the classroom,
but just open to… reaching students who have a variety of learning styles.”
“I don’t know enough about how these kids will react to the game so I really
felt it made sense to start with something that was really close to the original
Minecraft experience.”

Our teachers also explain that they organize time outside of class because it fulfills them. This
is not necessarily new, teachers have coached, advised, and opened up their classrooms
after school for decades because kids can just be fun to spend time with - especially around
a high interest activity.

“It is really fun to have these big epic wins with the students. I feel like it has made me
a much happier teacher.”

These weren’t the most important reason why to start a club however. Most commonly,
playing with students served as a petri dish for understanding how to use the tool itself.
Teachers explained that they would invite the kids in, step back, and watch them. Their
advice is to relax, play, and spend more time with the people that love and embrace the
software. As a teacher, with expertise in the content areas, you should be able to see natural
fits between the tool and your curriculum.

“Having the teachers not be afraid to fail in a club is good. Failure is okay for
teachers and students. When teachers feel pressure to teach the prescribed
curriculum, failure seems to be a time waster, when in many cases it leads to
deeper understanding.”

The theme of failure carries over into classroom use also, but those teachers that started a
club explained clearly that informal spaces allowed them to try more unique and experiential
learning ideas without the pressure to cover content - until they were adequately convinced
that the informal learning space presented results that measured up to their expectations in
the classroom.

Stepping Back

Stepping back is actually a strategy for professional learning. Teachers explain how relevant
and important it is to simply watch students. To these teachers, this process is a starting
point, not an evaluation of new ideas. Instead of generating a great lesson idea and testing
it, they start by stepping back.

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 “One of the first things… is to allocate some time to just see what the kids do.”
“We were just going to see exactly the kids could do with this game and what
direction they wanted to take it in and what direction we wanted to take it in.”
“Working in these virtual spaces over the past few years, I have discovered the
best way to develop robust programs is… simply playing with the kids BEFORE
creating curriculum.”

Notice the goal for the teacher in this space is to watch, listen, and learn. Consistently teachers
sought to communicate how important it was to approach new tools by enjoying them and
letting ideas come naturally. In this sense, the teachers role is to actively and purposefully
enjoy a game first.

We also see teacher framing their role as one of supporting the player goals, or helping
students to fully enjoy the game:

“I’m mostly just watching the girls and seeing what they do and what they like
to do and then trying to help them be successful at it.”
“We took a view of stepping back to see where kids would take this sandbox
if they were in control of it and so our role in the space was to… support them
in what they would like to do with the server…”

Stepping back is not a passive activity. Observation of students playing Minecraft is a fast
track into expert design. “Notice that what these teachers often condition as “stepping back”
is actually a significant learning activity for the them. This is much more relevant than they
make it out to be. First, notice that they are choosing to tell these stories as part of a larger
narrative on how they came to use Minecraft. “Just watching”, then, is relevant enough a year
or two later to share in a formal interview setting. Second, notice that their work after “just” is
very specific; they “see exactly” what students do, what their preferences are, and matching
this to “direction”. Stepping back is actually instrumental in moving forward.

Expectations and Student Wait Lists

If you choose to start a Minecraft club, you may be in for a surprise. Another common story
thread across teachers was that they did not quite expect the enthusiastic response that they
got. Quickly, students would promote, recruit, and fill capacity in Minecraft clubs. Here are
a few of these story snippets:

“I was originally thinking it would be kind of a club kind of thing. An optional

activity that I’d get some kids who are already huge video game fans that would
join in after school… I’ve had, just this year, about 150 students from our middle
school playing. That is about 1/2 our middle school population.”

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 “I invite eighth grade students into my lab during their recess time… 15 students
a day because I only have about 15-16 computers. We switch off on a weekly
basis. I actually have to make a list that we rotate through because I couldn’t allow
everyone who wanted to come in to come in.”

These stories convey a sense of pride that students are showing up, but also serve as a kind
of quantitative validation for the tool itself. Teachers point out that half of their students are
playing because it is an expression of the relevance of the media, the broad appeal it has,
and combined with previous validation elements, they are further convinced that this can
serve to engage learners.

Individual students with special needs may also be part of these spaces and benefit from
them. One story explained how Minecraft became a sort of intervention strategy for a
student.

“The teacher approached me and said could the student please be in your Minecraft club
because he doesn’t care about anything else except for Minecraft and he got to the point
where we did some related assignments with Minecraft and he’d actually ask to stay in at
recess so he could finish it.”

If you plan on trying out Minecraft outside of the classroom, plan on a crowd. If you do not
want a crowd, think ahead about how you might filter or manage access to your club.

Settings, Constraints, and Goals

The overwhelming approach to after school clubs was to allow students to play as they saw
fit. For all the reasons in Chapter 2, Minecraft offers plenty to players all by itself. Open play
also facilitates much of the learning explained above. Stepping back, is therefore the most
common approach among our participants, however we did have teachers that explained a
more organized experience outside of class. Sometimes this was a follow up to open play,
and other times they started out with more structure to guide students toward the kinds of
things they wanted to do in the classroom later.

First, and very simply, one teacher explained that he wanted to see how Minecraft could be
used for student design and exposition of their ideas. He wanted to be able to give players
some constraints, (the ‘box’ in sandbox), and let them create within those borders.

“I put them in creative mode in the same world, the same map on creative
world. I’m going to partner them up or triple them up and they are going to
build essentially their dream house. A house they would be proud to show their
parents. That is what we did.”

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In another interview, a teacher explained that a little structure was a reaction to student
distractions. His players were a little younger and took on projects to build. In-game,
monsters were distracting his students and frustrating their efforts.

“I did change things. I mean that was the beginning of Minecraft in that early
state. You could pick and choose features of the game to add and subtract… I
also wanted to minimize 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.”

This minor change freed up his players to enjoy their projects and effectively engage with
Minecraft. This approach requires some knowledge in how to set the play mode, how to
setup the server. The teacher also put students into groups, which is fairly uncommon in this
study. When asked why, the teacher explained that they had a limited number of available
computers and trying out the groups would further help him to understand what Minecraft
might later look like in classes. So the teacher was watching their group behaviors in addition
to how they designed.

Another group of teachers built an external set of awards, badges, and community building
tasks in front of their players (over 500 of them):

“We layered over the game and the kids helped design some of those
challenges. As in a normal game structure they get progressively more complex
and require more collaboration as you go farther in that structure of badges
so you can do lots of small things individually when you first join as a spore but
then, as you level up, you are required to do more collaboration and much more
complex tasks and more use of building complexity in the space.”

Before you panic, this was designed by a team of teachers with the intent of inviting students
from all over Australia. Their uncommon structure still allowed students to play as they saw
fit, but acknowledged and communicated activities that were valued by the community,
like helping a new player, learning new things, and building impressive projects. Individual
teachers that used badges could do so with simply ‘blocks’ within the game:

Yeah, it’s something that I’ve developed more recently in the past couple of
months. Badges. So as they walk around this world they find info blocks and it’s
a blue block with a white letter “i” on it. Underneath on a post is a piece of paper
and if they click on that they get information.

Or ‘rules’ can be added outside of the game. The teacher often would challenge players to
only play with certain tools, on certain settings, or gave them a narrative framework to play
within. Teachers that liked to build at home could set up elaborate challenges.

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 “[I] decided that I needed to give them some structure so I made my very
first purpose filled Minecraft world which was, 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.”

Naturally, teachers also reported that players would do this themselves or request a certain
server setting for a session of Minecraft. Player styles often led to preferences and multiple
servers being set up as the clubs refined over time. Some players enjoyed building and
wanted monsters shut off and others wanted them on for survival and exploration.

Moving Toward Classroom Use

In all of these cases, the constraints and goals were more to enhance the experience than
to monitor or ‘manage’ youth. Later, I’ll talk more about social contracts, and how Minecraft
provides a context for student behavior coaching and guidance. For now, it is worth noting
that discipline is not present in the narrative accounts. Students are painted as enthusiastic,
anxious to be in the good graces of the club advisor, and wanting terribly to see Minecraft
be used in classroom settings.

“Then from there, the word sort of spread like wildfire throughout the whole
school and everyone was asking about it so I began to incorporate it into some of
the other classes.”

Across cases, the teachers themselves tell their stories outside of class as context for how they
saw potential in the classroom. Fulfilling the goals of learning the game, watching students,
gaining technical skill, and sorting out group organization outside of class, some teachers
began to use the clubs to experiment with curricular implementations prior to attempts in
the classrooms.

One saw the differences in student play styles (from above) as an opportunity:

“I was trying to tie it into the elections this year in terms of 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.”

Where some may see a conflict, this teacher saw a real world opportunity to engage
passionate players in a democratic resolution. This is worth unpacking a bit. Instead of
teaching ‘democracy’ from a text, and taking a test, Minecraft cultivated an actual difference
to arise between ‘citizens’ of a kind of digital ‘country’.

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When I was in the classroom, I encouraged students to visit a real city hall meeting because
I wanted them to see how a city is run. Yet, even a visit to a city hall meeting may not engage
student learners that do not necessarily have strong feelings about, say, where the new
stop sign should be located. Students often returned to class saying it was, “Okay, but they
were mostly talking about ‘stuff’”. That stuff was interesting to adults, (like new levies, water
quality, traffic issues), but we forget how abstracted these issues are to youth—they do not
yet own a home, pay bills, or drive. But In Minecraft, they do invest their own energy, time,
and efforts to building a world, with other people, and they are immediately influenced
by ‘rule’ changes the group wants to agree on. Further, students often have strong, strong
opinions about them. To the teacher above, this wasn’t a problem, it was the link he was
looking for - real feelings, around real civic decisions, in a virtual world. We will cover a whole
list of these kinds of ideas in the following chapter.

A second key story that supported moving toward the classroom included the student
representation of knowledge. As students in the school become familiar with Minecraft and
what things can be done within the ‘blank slate’ space, they often offer up alternative ways
to present their work to teachers around the school. This is truly a bottom up process of
technology adoption in schools.

“The 5th grade is planning to use Minecraft because every year they build
ziggurats out of cardboard and glue and stuff. Now they have the option to build
the ziggurats in Minecraft.”

This afterschool club is able to influence a formal classroom because the students themselves
approach the teacher and ask them if they could have permission to build the ziggurats
digitally instead of physically. Student choice in learning, within subject parameters, creates
a powerful intrinsic tie to the work and outcomes of the class. Because the media is not
essential to the experience the teacher is assigning, the swap out seems to be natural,
exciting, and supporting of student interests. The same teacher points out the school wide
effect of this one class adoption:

“We are slowly working it into the school and finding ways to do things in
different classes.”

You may not start a club because you are trying to send out student advocates, yet when
they get excited about their work this will likely happen.

Finally, for a few of our teachers, outside of classroom time with Minecraft is actually the
goal. They advocate that this open time complements the highly structured classroom time
during the school day. Informal learning provides an essential opportunity for youth to
develop ideas, design, socialize, and connect with digital skills.

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In the following chapter, we will take a look at narratives that integrate Minecraft into the
classroom itself.

Starting Your First Minecraft Club

The remainder of this chapter is largely the gift of one amazing Illinois teacher and co-host
of EdGamer, Zack Gilbert. I asked and he obliged to share his experience and suggestions
for building a club of your own. His club ran after school, however, his guidance serves any
informal youth time before school, on lunch breaks, or for a summer program. This chapter
winds down then with practical guidance on starting your own club.

Zack validated the club effort, first, via his personal hobbies and conversations with a
colleague.

I always wanted to bring games to my students… Students knowing my love

of games have asked me for years to start a club. What really pushed me to bring
a gaming club to my school was my [friend]. He had started his game club early
in the 2012-13 school year and he was putting a lot of pressure on me to get
started. Gerry’s success within his high school finally convinced me to get
my club started.

Getting started means organizing who, what, where, when, establishing a ‘why’, and agreeing
with students on how your club will be run.

Who to Involve?

Planning your club is essential. With this in mind, being aware that you are never operating
alone is important. Those outside and within school should be involved in the discussion.
Make a list of those that need to be considered stakeholders in your club and start having
those conversations. In order, talk to the following people to get a feel for how your club
might shape up:

• Your Family. Start involving those loved ones close to you. Will the club be taking
time away from them? Are they supportive of your club idea? Can they help or be
involved? If you are already a workaholic, the investment in a Minecraft club may
be an idea better shared with another teacher.
• Administration and IT Support. Talk to Administration before talking to students.
Exciting students before getting approval can lead to awkwardness and
disappointment. Talking with administration early on allows them to help shape
the club as part of the overall development of goals, suggest ideas to you,
and address any concerns they may have. Their support is essential and will
help with each following step. Depending on your administrators, you may get

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 wholehearted support or you may need to slow down and do some persuading
over time. Your IT support will have much to say if you are using digital
applications or school computers in the club - make sure they are excited or at
least willing to support you as needed.
• Students. Start with those students that you know already play Minecraft and run
the idea past them. Do you have a core group of students? Are they willing to
take on leadership roles? Promote? Clean? Organize events? Student enthusiasm
will help to get things started, but it also will help you sustain the program over
time. If they can serve to manage and lead, then it is much easier to bring in
substitute supervisors if you need a day away. Zack noted he was selective in
starting with a small group of students first, and building from there.
• Fellow Teachers. Your colleagues will be those subs. Before starting the club, take
some time and check in with other teachers in your building to see if they have
any interest, would be willing to help out on occasion, or if they have ideas for
the club. Other teachers can help to promote the club and/or provide challenges
that could tie into classroom lessons.
• Parents. Finally, it’s time to visit your local Parent Teacher Association, send a
note home to parents, or chat with them during parent-teacher conferences. You
can possibly check with parents to see if you have any other adult volunteers, if
they might be willing to donate or bring gaming devices (especially if your school
is in short supply), or if they may be willing to financially support the club.

What should Your Club be About?

Minecraft can easily support a club, however you may want to broaden your focus to be a
gaming club, game making club, or include board games or developer tools. A club can
serve to challenge youth to move from high interest applications like Minecraft, or World
of Warcraft, to tools that add to their gaming experience. Later we have a chapter about
modifying Minecraft, but mods are common to digital gaming now. You can also show
students free developer tools like Blender (3D objects), Unity (3D world building), or Scratch
(entry level game logic) that can also support learner interest in a club setting.

When you choose what you are going to be doing these will lead to key planning questions.

• Board and Tabletop Gaming. Do you have enough space and tables? Do you
have extra chairs to enable students to sidle up to game spaces? What games do
you currently have? Which are your students wanting to play? Are your games
appropriate for the challenge and complexity levels of your students? Do you
have key players that can teach others?

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 • Digital Games. Do you have access to school computers? Do you have storage
space for students to bring laptops and safely keep them until club time? Can
students log into the school network? Do you need parent waivers for student
play and access? Will IT need to pre-load the games or set up accounts? In the
case of Minecraft, many of our teachers had IT do most of the set up (either Local
Area Network or an open server) in a school lab setting.
• Digital Production. Moving from games to production often means upping the
requirements for your processors and memory space. Will students save work
on thumb drives, in the cloud, on computers, or on a server? Always check the
software requirements with your school computers, or ask your IT support to
check if the computers are current enough to run the software.
• Physical Production. Closely tied to the game design and coding communities
are the maker communities. If you feel you might want to move in that direction,
consider your proximity to appropriate shops, the outdoors, kitchens, janitorial
support, and tools. How flexible is the space, furniture, and storage space? Do
you have open floor space? Finally, you may want to double check each activity
with maintenance and administration prior to starting.

Where Should You Meet?

Many teachers meet in their classrooms so they can move between desk work and being
with students smoothly. However, not all teachers have computers in their classrooms to
support a gaming club. Check what you are planning, and who is bringing devices, and make
sure you have the right space for it. Zack also recommends a few ‘comfy’ chairs, couches,
and open floor space to allow for diverse activities. If the right space means moving to a
computer lab, cafeteria, the school library, or off site, you will need to include more people
in the loop and start those conversations too. Also check the space for practical needs:

• Table spaces - with room to grow.

• Chairs - a variety for different kinds of activities.
• Outlets, extension cords, and/or surge protectors.
• Display projector/s - for group conversations and display of accomplishments.
• Online connection - WiFi saves you a lot of connectivity setup, but is a bit slower
than cable/corded connections. Both will work for Minecraft.

Also think about variable conditions for the space:

• Lighting - Check that the room lighting is appropriate for computer use, reading,
and design work.

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 • Snacks - Will you have snacks? Are vending machines in the building? Can
students eat or drink in this room? What rules will you put in place?
• Garbage - Regardless of snack rules, your design work will fill a garbage can
quickly. How accessible is the garbage to students? How far do they need to walk
to throw something away?
• Supplies - Does the room have blank paper, graph paper, pens, markers, white
boards, and other supplies for doing prototype design work? If a learner has an
idea, can they get it on paper quickly and share it? Do they have access to tape or
staples to hang flyers? Do you need a budget? If so, seek out parents, community
organizations, businesses, or internal funding for supplies.
• Work space - If you are in another space, do you still have a place you can settle
in and work when needed? Space to meet with kids away from the group? Space
for small groups to plot, plan, or design together?

When Should You Meet?

Zack took considerable time sharing how important this question is.

Your time as a teacher is important and you need to evaluate what you can
handle. This will be time away from other responsibilities you have with school
and your family. I believe the time I give is very important and it also helps that I
thoroughly enjoy the time I spend at game club.

Carefully consider morning, lunch, after-school, summer, or even weekend times in

conversation with colleagues and family. Zack used occasional Saturday ‘events’ for larger
competitions or presentation times that parents could be more easily involved in and
regularly settled into every other Friday after-school from 3:00-4:45.

Attempt to avoid conflicts. For Zack, Fridays were not a school night, so this allowed for
occasionally hosting longer game nights. Consider regular community organization times,
like girl scout nights, church confirmation meetings, and others. Do you need to work around
these? Ask your students to check for these kinds of conflicts too. Also, check the school
calendar and make every effort to avoid conflicts with other groups and events.

Set a cap on the time and communicate it up front with students. If they are unable to respect
that time and get you out the door (after logging out, cleaning up, and helping to pack up)
then make it clear that the club will be short lived. Sustainability is tied to your time. Part of
getting you home on time is making sure that parents know the pickup time or that your
group ends in time for the activity bus - especially in the middle school where students can
get stranded and you are responsible to stay with them.

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Make sure you communicate when the club meets effectively. Use school announcements,
flyers, posters, and classroom reminders. Many of the clubs have a game club website with
a calendar of events and other community assets. One group used this web site to share
badges and leaderboards in the club. Also, plan to gather and use phone numbers, digital
email groups, listservs, or instant messaging to communicate with parents and players when
needed.

Communicating a ‘Why’ and Establishing a ‘How’?

The front end of this chapter is primarily about why eleven of our Minecraft teachers used
time outside of class to explore Minecraft. When you start a club, Zack suggests that these
reasons should be clearly and consistently communicated to everyone involved. Common
understanding of why you are meeting together helps to establish common goals, choose
activities, and head off potential problems.

Zack started with an outline for the first students meeting to establish why they were there
and how it would be run.

“Meeting with the group for the first time was very exciting. These kids want to
be here and they are coming after school to work. I don’t think they realized how
hard it would be to create a club, but that did not stop them. I tried to stay out of
the discussion as much as possible. I wanted the students to work through the
process. I did give them the outline below and told them that they can’t work on
any other steps until they figured out their goals for the game club.”

Here is his ‘first meeting’ agenda for the students:

• Mission statement (Focus and goals)

• Student expectations
• What games and platforms
• Time
• Advertise and announcements
• Sponsorship and assistance

Students worked through the agenda and together agreed on their mission statement to,
“Enhance learning, have fun, create, and socialize.” As the core group agreed, they were
establishing a culture that could be clearly communicated with other future members. They
also contracted a code of behavior:

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Zack’s Club’s Behavior Code

• Respect, Responsible, Safe

• Attendance
— Communicate to inform the teacher you are attending
— Parents pick up on time
• Clean up
— Put away games appropriately with all pieces
— Account for all pieces and inform the teacher if there is a problem

In essence, this process allowed Zack to build and communicate why they were meeting and
work out how they would move forward - establishing a positive culture for the club. When
there they were questions or when students had new ideas, they knew to frame them within
the club goals.

Zack also assumed that his students would lead. We had a variety of teachers in the study
in this regard with different attitudes about student leadership capacity. Part of why Zack
is a good example of organizing a club is that by leveraging student work and input, he
effectively makes the club sustainable for himself. His students figured out advertising,
communications, permission slip gathering, sought out sponsors, and recruited volunteers
for larger events. Students not only get the benefits of gaming in this approach, but they learn
to create, organize, and work for a community group - otherwise known as civic engagement
and leadership.

Meeting Times

Zack had a basic outline for how the time would be organized at the club. A few of the
Minecraft teachers resisted this approach and argued for open play time. They would say
that the more time the teacher structures, there is a direct loss to valuable generative time
for players. Both kinds of teachers would vouch for the success of their programs.

In Zack’s case we get a closer look at how time can be organized:

Basic Outline for a Game Club

• Start up (5 min):
— Attendance.
— All book bags and coats are left in their locker. All they need to bring is
themselves. There will be time to go to lockers after club.

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 — They can bring any or all of the following: Laptop, tabletop game, pre-
approved digital games, hand-held devices.
• Large group discussion (10 min):
— Share new games brought and who will teach them (pick locations for
each).
— Encourage students to try something new each time they attend. If you
normally play tabletop games then try a digital game. If you mainly play
digital games then try a tabletop. Most students choose digital games,
but are surprised at how much fun they have playing a tabletop game.
• Choose which game we will play and move to a gaming spot (2 min):
— All students have a laptop and that makes it easier and does not force
us to a lab, but we expect them to settle into a location for the time.
• Gaming time (90 min):
— Once things get going the club is very simple to manage. The students
are always engaged. You will have to monitor and make sure students
are able to smoothly move from one game to another. Most will play
one or two games.
— If I get a chance, I play along with the students. I show them a new
game or they can teach me a new game. We all learn best when we
teach each other and this happens to many students at each game
club. The students become the teachers.
— Look for chances to lead players to higher end challenges, more
complex games, and looking up ideas found in the games. Have them
write and share strategies, make machinima (video re-creations), and/or
research game ideas online.
— Look for chances to lead players to design tools. Fascination with
gaming often provides ideas for making their own games. When you
hear, “It would be cool if…”, be ready to move on that! They can make
‘cool’, right now. Gradually become familiar with Scratch, Game Makers,
Unity, Blender, Photoshop, Illustrator, and other design tools.
• Wrap up (20 min):
— Give a clear 20 minute warning before you expect players to log out
or pack up. Games generally are designed for 15-30 minutes of action
between reposes. If you ‘unplug’ suddenly, you can lose significant
progress, planning, and even let down fellow players online (which
hurts their very real reputations by being rude). Let them know that you
know this rhythm of game play and that you expect that they can find a
‘checkpoint’ roughly every 20 minutes in a game.

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 — After 20 minutes, students should have started cleaning up, logging
out, and generally ‘leaving the space better than they found it’. If you
are in your classroom, they can say ‘thank you’, by cleaning whiteboard,
running errands, and generally helping manage the space with you.
— Those still on the computer , after 20 minutes get a 1 minute warning.
After 1 minute, you can fairly power them down. Do not let fellow
students do this because this is essentially a discipline situation. Talk
with the student privately about the group norms and ask them to make
an effort to abide by them.
— If everyone has successfully logged out without the 1 minute
reminder, consider praising or rewarding this to reinforce the logout
expectations. Take time to discuss the games. What did they figure
out? Any good puzzles or achievements happen? Do they play or plan
to play it at home? What are they going to work on next time?
— Make sure students have rides and get home on time!

Again, Zack’s plan is not the only one, but it should serve to get you started, help you avoid
some common pitfalls, and guide your planning a bit. If the club is organized and run well,
you should get some time to play too. Try out new gaming media, challenge the students
to bring you games that might work in your classroom, and shamelessly recruit students to
give you lessons.

Finally, note that these clubs were often a form of validation, but they were also
serving as appropriation for classes. Outside the class, you can watch students for new
ideas, for natural ways to enjoy the software, and seek out student ideas as they play. After
watching, listening, and building with students, teachers eventually saw an opening for
their classroom ideas.

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 CHAPTER 7

HOW DO TE ACHERS USE

MINECR AF T INSIDE
THE CL A SSROOM?
“It’s my personal opinion that an hour and ten minutes of straight
typing practice is just cruel and unusual so I was trying to kind of think
of something interesting that we could do other than just typing.”
- Minecraft Teacher

Steal this Chapter

This chapter is primarily a summary of what these teachers did with Minecraft in their
classrooms. Early in my teaching, I heard the adage, “Good teachers plan lessons, great
teachers steal them,” and took it to heart. Looking for ‘great’ ideas, I committed one prep
hour per week to visit other teachers classrooms of all subject areas to see how they start
class, how they organize their planning, how they led their classes. At times, I came across
ideas I could copy or adopt, mostly I just enjoyed the brilliance and diversity of my colleagues.
Hopefully, this chapter provides a similar experience for you and expands your list of ideas
you can steal.

Everything in this book so far has led up to classroom applications. How do teachers actually
use Minecraft in the classroom? How do they refine their ideas? Finally, what can we learn
and what ideas can you generate when reading about what other teachers have done?
Here we can start to see both common uses and a range of uses across the teacher stories.
The first half of the chapter, I will present three different pedagogical approaches found
across our narratives - open creative building, playing out a story, and using Minecraft to
build examples and demonstrations of ideas. In the second half of the chapter, you will find
classroom examples gathered around core subject areas. All of the teachers involved in this
study would be flattered and excited to hear that you stole any of them for your learners - so
steal, or more gently liberate, these ideas!

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Creating Amazing

Like teachers using Minecraft outside of class, it is clear that first attempts to use Minecraft
in the classroom were often perceived as trials under careful observation by teachers. As
innovators, they are looking to see how and what learners would design with the tool before
intrusively conquering it for their objectives. To do this they either use extra class time and
have kids play freely, or, more commonly, start with “a basic idea” and see what they do. First
the ‘sandbox’ examples:

“The kids created projects on their own and worked together so at that point it
didn’t need to have any set curricular goals. We were just exploring.”
“It ended up being a class completely on its own with a free range of what
direction we wanted to take. We ended up sort of like a sandbox class.”

At this point the teachers would say they are just trying it out, seeing how the students would
use it, or trying to discover new ideas. This may sound fairly chaotic in the classroom, but
when pressed, these teachers also shared how they introduced students first:

“With all four of those classes, I created a separate ‘natural’ Minecraft world for
each one and I spent maybe 10-15 minutes at the front of the class with the kids
on the floor and I was projecting on an [interactive whiteboard] and I just showed
them the basics of how to move around, how to collect blocks and how to place
blocks and that is really it.”

So even in free play settings, teachers commonly provided introductory instruction or used
game-like badges or challenges to direct early learning curves.

“[We] developed challenges and rewards and we have upwards of 80 of those where
a kid could choose a reward and then do it earning badges and leveling up.”

Two important side notes: First, notice that these sample passages are very similar to
teachers that had open play time in the after-school programs. This testing approach serves
the teacher’s learning across times. I suggest teachers that feel license to experiment in
class do, and those that feel they have to convince administration more use outside of class
experiences to show validity to others.

Second, for these teachers, the importance of open creative time had to be relevant to their
overall classroom goals. We do not find any math or science teachers, for instance, that
allowed open Minecraft time; on the other hand ‘writing’ teachers commonly saw the open
time as generative for later writing projects. With only seventeen teachers, this is far from
conclusive, but we do see hints that curricular obligations may affect pedagogical ‘fit’ for the
teacher.

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Part of ‘watching’ was for teachers to join in with students. They used class time for their own
learning, often combining physical classroom management with online management.

“I’ve always got my character on and my character is online and is in the server
and sometimes I can do special things like we have restricted their water bucket
usage for flooding purposes... But, yeah, I’ll play with them.”

Playing with students also led to collaborative design of ongoing learning for a few teachers.
More teachers found that open play did not naturally lead to their learning goals.

“Some built the Eiffel tower and others started messing around with lava. It
wasn’t a very constructive, cohesive production… I had imagined that some of
them would get together and pioneered a little village or made something that
made sense but I think the narrative that I presented them with wasn’t immersive
enough and didn’t actually capture their imagination…”

These teachers started to experiment with more structure in the form of narratives around
which the class would play a role.

Playing out a Story

A second pedagogical strategy was to have students play out a story. In these cases, teachers
will share the context of game time and ask students to role play accordingly. This following
example continues from where the last left off; the teacher changes what they do to add in-
game and out of game elements:

“…this time we had a project where we wanted to create an infrastructure on

the island and I did some preparation where I, in cooperation with the students,
mapped out different zones on the island where I said ok, we’re going to have a
little town here, we’re going to have your private houses here and we’re going
to have your hotel here like your Holiday Inn kind of feel and there was a railroad
going throughout the island so it was like a collaborative project where the
students could help each other and also build something of their own.”

While this teacher still defined their approach as “open play”, they have effectively told
students where to build, what kinds of things to build, and began to shape how they would
interact with each other. This is not the kind of free and open Minecraft experience fostered
above. This is the roughest example of the teacher shaping a story for the students to play
out. In this case, it was to build a town. Students were essentially in the role of villagers and
they had a job to do.

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Fitting with the game itself, another common starting point is to have the students survive
together. This too is a basic story, ‘You are stranded on an island… what do you do?’ Students
are in the role of survivalist and can compete or work together to get by.

“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.”

Interestingly, some teachers chose stories with clear conflict. Lord of the Flies is a story
that has youth eventually doing barbaric things to each other. These kinds of stories fit the
gameplay itself and require little to no prior set up for class. Boot up the game and let them
play out the story.

“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.”

Outside of this study, I also talked to one teacher that had students build their world freely,
get to know the game, and come to value harder to get resources in game. Yet the students
were limited to their continent. To teach European exploration, the teacher then ‘unlocked’
the oceans and allowed players to build boats. When they reached new land they found
automated non-player characters in villages. The result was that students pillaged the
villages… ruthlessly… for hard to find materials. The student story played out in a way that
made European-Native American interactions much more of a personal conversation for
students. When the teacher connected real history to their Minecraft story, they shared one
of the most powerful classroom conversations they had that year. Here the purpose of a story
framework for Minecraft is to fuel experiences that the teacher can leverage for learning.

Another form of playing a story, with a bit of set up time, is to challenge students with the
teacher as the antagonist! The teacher, with control of the server, has powers the players
need to overcome or solve.

“Instead of a community, they worked as a team to escape my confines. [laughter]”

“I made a puzzle for them to get into the pyramid and I made sort of a treasure
room inside. I structured it… [for the] next group of classes, the tutorial world
ended up being the entirety of their Minecraft experience so they stayed on my
path and with my guidance the whole time.”

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Most teachers played with this idea of creating an obstacle course, a first person tutorial,
or setting up student play time with a constructed story as one of their early efforts. Again,
this requires the teacher to make time to build and design outside of class so that the time in
class is spent exploring the teacher’s work. This can be done as a story outside of the game,
or for some teachers, it can depart from a story and start to take the form of show and tell.

Show and Tell

Another approach to using Minecraft is to stack blocks to show an idea to others. Above,
teachers gave a narrative prompt, but other teachers started experimenting with Minecraft
in the classroom by challenging students to build something that was relevant to their
curriculum, or curriculums:

“It happens that we were working on our Greece unit as part of our world studies
and in math we were working on rates and ratios so I thought why don’t we do a
little research on these and recreate some buildings.”

And recreate they did. This early effort required less investment of prep time, but this
initial classroom project grew, and grew and grew into what is known today as World of
Humanities. World of Humanities, designed by Eric Walker, has grown into one of the most
popular worlds for teachers to download. It includes most ancient civilizations and allows
students to ‘walk around’ notable landmarks from each society. Downloading a world allows
you to take advantage of impressive amounts of work, without having to build the pyramid
yourself.

“They can’t build or destroy anywhere except in designated places. They start
out in a tutorial area tree house and then there are info blocks that they click and
then texts come up. That is the basics of it. They go around and they find the
ancient China area and they explore and they learn about all the things we’ve
talked about in class, about ancient China or ancient Greece or the islands of
mythology or the pyramids. There are tons of areas now. I’ve been adding to it
constantly and students have too. There are specific areas where students can
build and those are, there are some housing areas which are more popular at
first… there is an area where they can build different schools in different styles of
either Athens or Sparta, and they have to match their educational philosophies
which is something we learn about in class. There is an area where they can
learn how to build defense systems for an ancient city, Babylon in this case. They
create an irrigation system to show how irrigation, how the Mesopotamians
brought water from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and then created farming and
agriculture. There is an area where they are just a landscape architect and are
building gardens around the Lighthouse of Alexandria and a ton more than that.”

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Image 1: Eric Walker’s World of Humanities. Source: http://dig.temple.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/World-
of-Humanities-Map-Feb-20131.jpg

Walker designates areas for seeing, areas for particular tasks, and areas for student building.
This mix allows for different play styles, but also allows the teacher to nudge players in different
directions within a complex learning environment. He sees these worlds as a giant classroom
space for students to explore and learn from. This approach allows for Minecraft to operate
as a presentation tool also. Another teacher used Minecraft for short demo’s in the classroom:

“I was teaching a group of… 15 year olds about neurotransmitters and redstone
is perfect for how neurotransmitters work so I set up a little room and a little
demonstration of what neurotransmitters do and how they have to cross the
synapses… so it was just a small trial, [15-20 minutes], with a class of say
17 students, just one short activity, minimum amount of set up time
and it was just amazing.”

This, of course, could be seen as a unique form of teasing; putting one of the most popular
video games up on the big screen. Later this teacher allowed students to role play cells and
he set them on fire (inside the game). As they attempted to run, he explained that when
heated up, cells do the same thing - combining a show and tell setting with a kind of science
‘story’ experience. Naturally, the follow up assignment is to invite students to represent what
they know by building their own Minecraft ‘labs’, showing or using short video demos, and/
or actually printing physical versions of their creations.

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 “Now I’m moving into the 3d printing world so using it as a 3d modeling tool so
students can create models using Minecraft.”

Minecraft classrooms use strategies that seem to include either creative building, playing
out a story, or using Minecraft to model concepts. In fact, many of our teachers played with
more than one pedagogical approach without any clear progression from one to another.
Teachers that started with open creative building time, would often add story their next
try. Conversely, teachers that had highly guided demonstrations, continued by allowing
students open build time. That said, if you are looking for a ‘best practice’ for Minecraft, this
data suggests that all three are part of understanding the tool and its uses. You’ll see below
that subject area ideas for Minecraft employ these strategies in creative ways.

Using Minecraft within Subject Areas

When you choose to try Minecraft in the classroom, you may have a particular subject you
are responsible for in mind. This chapter contains a variety of classroom uses and examples
of teachers using Minecraft across subject areas. One goal is to have a quick reference,
however I would encourage you to read examples from outside your subject area too. Many
of these teachers saw ideas from other teachers and modified them to fit. If you want a
particular idea, this is far from an exhaustive list of ideas and teachers suggested visiting
online sites, like Minecraft EDU, for connecting with and sharing ideas with other teachers.
Here, however, you can get a good sense and feel for how the above approaches are applied
in classroom settings.

First, once you have played Minecraft a bit, you may see that some of the natural activity in
the game already serves your curriculum. You can explore this deliberately, as one of our
teachers did:

“I took out all the essential standards, all the ones that lended themselves very
well to the whole Minecraft interface… So, we have been talking about forces
of motion with the roller coaster aspect of Minecraft and talking about digging
speeds and velocities and things like that…”

I would add that this can be done with students too. Sharing your entire course ‘calendar on
the wall’ (or COW) 1 introduces the goals of the class and involves students in the common
challenge of classroom work. Having students share ideas is not only effective professional
learning for teachers, it is also engaging and fosters ownership of the learning process.

1
I’m really not sure on the actual source for ‘COW’. This is an idea my principal, Tom Harrold, shared with
my middle school team of teachers a decade or so ago. We mapped the curriculum in order to find existing
interdisciplinary opportunities.

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COW can be used in any subject that has clear curricular goals, and many ideas for
classroom use arose because teachers knew their goals and were able to see connections.
Art, technology, architecture, and exploratory teachers more often approached Minecraft
as an open sandbox. Across our teachers, we saw subject specific applications arise in the
core subject areas: science, math, writing, and social studies. I’ll attempt to show breath of
application in the following examples.

Science Stories

Use of Minecraft as a lab is suggested above. More ideas supported this approach in teacher
narratives. For example:

“So what we did is rocks and minerals and I asked one of my Minecraft players
to make a video which he did an amazing job of an overview of all the different
types of rocks and minerals in Minecraft.”

or

“I built a massive cell model they can walk through with students creating plant cells.”

Really, anything physical can be ‘built’ in Minecraft. Students could build a cell, human heart,
or a digestive system, in biology; or landforms, water bodies, and minerals for geology. In
each of these examples, Minecraft is used as a ‘lab’ lesson, where the teacher introduces the
activity and then supports it during the classtime:

“I was more of the person on the side, you know, the lead scientist, so I didn’t
have to do anything, I just had to supervise them. I’ve walked them through it
and given them specific activities like the neurotransmitters maps or an open
exploration with the cell map.”

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Image 2: A Minecraft Digestive System Science Project. Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraftcomments/
1gdxmt/my_extra_credit_project_for_biology/ and too_many_toasters

Minecraft, like typing paper, can be used to represent ideas effectively and in a 3D space
that is exciting.

Minecraft can be used as a context for scientific thinking too. One teacher looked beyond
the ‘building’ nature of Minecraft, and saw that Minecraft essentially encouraged a kind of
planning and purposeful thinking. He used this planning as a pathway into scientific thinking.

“So he would sit down and write ‘the next time I play Minecraft I want to find
out’ and so from that he did science and then I said lets do predictions so from
around that we did the science of inquiry. What are your theories? What are your
predictions? That is how we scaffolded learning so that is what I mean when I say
we take that interest and then I build on it and we go and we did.”

Elements within the game can also be a focus of investigation. When students conduct more
advanced crafting, or you turn on creative mode, they will find TNT in game. TNT explodes
according to formulas already programmed into the game. Likewise, when you drop from a
height, your character takes different amounts of damage based on the height of the fall. Day
and night seem regular and the sun seems to ‘move’, so how is time linked to real time? How
might a scientist explore these ‘natural’ phenomena? How long do different materials take
to burn? How have scientists historically taken hypothesis toward law with data collection,
replication, and measuring predictive algorithms?

As with science in the natural world, Minecraft provides a virtual world that can be explored,
studied, and serve as a giant lab for the scientific process.

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Writing & Language Arts

An obvious starting point is to have students re-create things they read:

“I’ve seen students create book reviews so they are creating a scene from a book
and then walk through it and talk about a book they’ve read.”

Some of the more interesting story ideas create a context for players to experience a story,
and then write. I remember my own writing teacher saying, ‘Most great writing is reflecting,
in part, on the writers own journeys.” Yet if students are still inexperienced and overly
curated, they may not have much to write about 2 . For instance, Hemingway went to war and
did some Caribbean fishing before he sat down to write - yet neither are available for most
of our students. In digital games, however, students can experience great adventures, save
the world, or play out very real dramas with fellow players. For these lessons, the teacher can
easily have students play the story.

“We went at it from stranded on a desert island perspective. They get in the
world. They are doing survival mode so its up to them to gather their resources,
to pool their talents, to find shelter, to avoid danger and they are blogging about
that experience.”

2
Leading, arguably, toward the thin fabrications and ponderous poetry assignments many of us remember in
our own writing classes; ‘If only you could ‘dig’ deeper!!’ ;)

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In the absence of real danger, students can safely have play danger. Using blogs also
introduces a newer format and genre to students. The point here is that the story happens
to the students first, then they write from memory, not purely imagination. Immediately,
this opens the curriculum up to travel journals, memoirs, blogging, archiving history, or
ethnographic work in multiplayer worlds.

This kind of immediacy is engaging and consistently hooks students - even when they are
trying to ‘kill’ each other:

“I teach an elective class about the Hunger Games. We use the Hunger Games
and we incorporate technology projects. We basically went through and
recreated the setting of the story district 12 in Minecraft. It was just a great way
to tie in what they were learning and what they were reading in a really fun and
interactive way.”

This example models existing effective teaching around a novel. Other projects have rebuilt
Hogwarts, Azeroth, Middle Earth, and King’s Landing. Using print media to inspire drawing,
writing, conversation, or film making is established practice in language arts. In these cases,
Minecraft simply adds another media format to play out what they are reading or playing.

Conversely, Minecraft design can be inspired by external resources. One teacher treated
another computer game as source material and had students use Minecraft to build similar
story arcs with ‘quests’.

“We had a project where we did level design with the guys and had them write a
story. We were inspired from the quests from Skyrim where there was very clear
progression in the quests.”

For this class, students would build contexts for their story and invite friends to come and
play their stories. This uses Minecraft as the composition media. Instead of pure prose,
the ‘writers’ had to build puzzles, clues, prompts, and post signs that carried a player from
beginning to the end of their adventures. Finally, I would think these had to be a pleasure to
grade/play when they were turned in.

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Social Studies

When I first started playing Minecraft with my own two kids, we quickly built our dream houses
and looked for the next thing to build. Like Eric Walker, we started to think about existing
buildings that would be fun to build and the kids helped to bake bricks for a recreation of
Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

“Through textbooks and though movies and through in-class activities, they can
kind of get a glimpse of being enveloped in this other world, but it isn’t really
deep... I always wanted to somehow communicate to my kids that there was this
whole other world that you could explore, and it’s fun to do so.”

This is probably the simplest entry point for social studies teachers. Have students start
exploring new worlds or have them start to build things to demonstrate of what they know.

Image 3: Beginning to build a colonial village with Independence Hall. Source: Author.

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 “I’m going to have them create a pioneer town and if I can do it to scale I might
have them do that. I’ll have to find plans and stuff like that. That is the next big
project after this one.”

To build a pioneer town, they have to do some research. “Finding plans” is no simple task,
but made much easier with the internet. These kinds of ideas can continue to be refined by
using particular historic texts, for instance, to build sets for events - like building colonial
Boston for Johnny Tremain, or having the class set up camp by states at Valley Forge.

Another approach is to consider Minecraft less as a modeling tool and more of a multiplayer
world. One teacher set classroom rules (no ‘in game’ settings needed) to only use certain
tools each day to represent technological development.

“The latest project right now is the CivCraft project which is Civilization and the
goal is to play through stone age, iron age and bronze age and we are working
from a Danish context so we’ll progress through Viking time and into the Middle
Ages and this has been a great experience for seeing what a teacher can do
because I’m able to develop my own content.”

This kind of approach allows conversation around constraints each day and helps students
connect with events from personal experience. So, in terms of history classes, students can
see history, build history, or play out history. None of our teachers had students act out
scenes from history, but I would see this as another easy application of Minecraft.

Minecraft actually has ‘biomes’ that define computer generation areas in new worlds. These
biomes map fairly well onto Geography classes. Using Minecraft to identify landforms, water
bodies, and to introduce irrigation or cartography are all fairly easy class lessons to develop.
Human-Environment interaction is the core game mechanic for Minecraft and any of those
themes would be low hanging fruit. Further, students can engage together in massive
terraforming projects that may work for different kinds of geographical studies.

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The World of Humanities example above could, and are, being expanded to current cultural
studies. Teachers and students build modern cities and communities as a way to root
discussions and lessons about modern places.

Image 4: Guild construction of a Minecraft City. Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/tsiKf and highrossferry

These larger projects require teamwork too. Many of our teachers explain that Minecraft
leads to conversations about working together, teamwork, civics, and respect (next chapter).
These aspects of citizenship can be expected as you progress in the classroom and are on
the radar especially for social studies teachers that are looking for ways to teach citizenship.

“The next thing is this big project on digital citizenship where the sixth
grade is going to create a world where everyone practices exemplary digital
citizenship…”

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Knowing the software and the issues of ownership and property that are tied to creating
things in a common space, teachers can expect these issues to be learning opportunities.
Or one teacher approached the idea far more directly and had students designing abstract
representations of values:

“I had this idea of how about if they represent our school standards,
responsibility, respect, honesty, safety, cooperation, if they represent one of
those ideas abstractly it would be like a sculpture… I had them make a model of
it in tinfoil first so they have a common leaving off point.”

Of course the tinfoil models were tabletop sized, and the Minecraft versions were more
building sized.

Overall, no teacher stayed strictly within their subject area confines. Combining sculpture
with social studies, science labs with scaled perfection, and mixing story inspiration with
story representation are all common across the teachers we talked to. They explained
consistently that Minecraft is a blank slate, a piece of paper, ready to be drawn on. So one
activity generally leads to another. Building Mount Rushmore leads to a study of sculpture,
laying out a road for Bilbo Baggins means pacing out a “day’s walk”, terraforming leads to
predictive hypothesis of TNT explosions. Your role, regardless of your approach to using
Minecraft in the classroom, is to frame the lens through which players will look at, design in,
and compose stories within a powerfully flexible space.

Far from a complete listing of Minecraft ideas, this chapter attempted to show a range of
them from within the teachers narratives to support your planning for your classrooms. For
most teachers, however, planning an activity goes hand in hand with evaluating learning.
Most teachers in this study were as interested in some kind of evidence of benefit to their
students, as they were in the activity itself. The following chapter helps us to see what they
see and what they are looking for when they use Minecraft in the classroom.

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 CHAPTER 8

HOW DO TE ACHERS
E VALUATE MINECR AF T
LE ARNING IN THE
CL A SSROOM?
“It wasn’t a matter of them measuring up to our expectations,
they totally exceeded them…”
- Minecraft Teacher

More than a Test

For classroom teachers, the end of the chapter has some ideas for using Minecraft as an
evaluation tool. Minecraft teachers also evaluated Minecraft activities and the bulk of this
chapter puts a spotlight on how they choose to do this. Subject area content is important to
these teachers, but is not consistently or predominantly on the minds of Minecraft teachers
when they evaluate classroom use of Minecraft. Instead, they gauge a lesson quite differently
than we might expect. Across our interviews, Minecraft teachers assessed the value of their
new lessons based on: their own learning, student engagement/motivation, social skill
building, and problem solving.

At first glance, building a block house seems like it may not be related to core subject areas
at all - and might possibly be a complete waste of time. Even when the ideas in the last
chapter played out well, some teachers spent large amounts of prep time and class time
delivering the content. Is it worth the time? Is it relevant to the curriculum? Some teachers in
the study were keenly aware of this balance:

“I have curriculum to deliver and assessment to do and recording to get done.

I can not just let them play. I don’t know if that is short sightedness on me or
whether that is just a fact.”

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Teachers have a mandate to teach particular skills, subjects, and tools to their learners -
they are not babysitters. As a society, we demand that teachers keep this focus and have an
expectation that they actually plan for and evaluate innovative ideas, at least in part, based
on their ability to teach curricular content. So, the time/learning ratio question is legitimately
posed, not just to Minecraft teachers, but to any new idea for the classroom. Teachers should
always be evaluating a new idea by asking, ‘Is this activity adding appropriate value for the
time spent?’. This chapter starts by asking exactly how Minecraft teachers evaluate new
classroom practices.

Where I expected that at least a few of the teachers would brag about increased test scores,
few did. Their focus was not necessarily on test prep, rote memorization, or trivia facts. Some
teachers even rejected these as distractions to the larger goal of raising children. Most
looked at these elements as only a part of what they were designing for in the classroom.
Subject area learning came after other relevant signs that they were on the lookout for.

In narrative analysis this is significant.

Narratives reveal what the storyteller values and what they think the listener needs to hear.
For instance, if you were to tell about a new piece of software you are using, you may show it,
then talk about its speed and cost. This kind of ‘story’ details the artifact, but also allows us to
see what you value. Namely, you justify your choice with what you perceive is most important
about it or what you think will persuade the listener. In the example, you are revealing that
you value software that saves you time and money. Time and money are relevant measures,
or evaluators, of the software.

Likewise, when teachers share classroom ideas, they commonly provide introductions
and epilogues that they perceive are relevant evaluation points of the idea itself. So, when
they share that the lesson resulted in increased test scores, we can reasonably conclude
they think test scores are important measures of success. With the national conversation
on accountability, scores, remediation, value-added activities, and standards, we expect
innovative teachers to qualify their stories with test results. Yet, test results are clearly not
what these teachers valued most.

“In many ways [these] are even more important than the active standards in which
we test students on all the time.”

Great lessons are about more than a test. Minecraft teachers occasionally explain
how students learn content, but more often include what they were learning, student
engagement, motivation, learned behavioral social skills, and problem solving behavior.
These goals appear as they tell about Minecraft, and remain as constant measures of success
in their classrooms. “Across cases, Teachercrafters share that a ‘good lesson’ involves these
key outcomes:

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 • Teacher learning,
• Student motivation and engagement,
• Community building,
• Student problem solving, and
• Curricular learning.

Minecraft provided a context to measure all five of their valued outcomes. None of these
should come as a surprise to an experienced educator and they are common evaluation
elements across narratives in this study. Yet, we may often train teachers to look only for what
students have memorized (curricular learning) without necessarily training them to look for
and value whether or not they learn when they try a new idea, or if their students are learning
to work together.

For Minecraft teachers, these values are not secondary to curricular learning, they are equal
to, or if anything, supercede curricular learning as outcomes that matter. They focus on the
software within a larger classroom experience and how it played into that experience. They
go out of their way to clarify the primary importance of non-curricular evaluation of lessons:

“Our primary goal isn’t to fill them with knowledge but to create experiences
from whence we can draw knowledge”

Commonly, in research, we measure an input with pre and post testing to see what content
is learned, yet not one of our teachers narrated this as a validation of their use of Minecraft.
It is not clear that these knowledge based measures of learning are irrelevant, but they are
at least competing with other goals the teachers had, for instance:

“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 organizing a team and assigning jobs.”

These Minecraft teachers want students to do more than memorize. Life and work skills are
of greater importance and at the edge of the kind of thinking valued by these teachers. They
suggest that students need to exercise imagination, creativity, or ingenuity around sticky
problems. So, they are generally looking for evidence of student thinking, engagement
and motivation, positive social behaviors, problem solving, and also curricular learning. In
short, Minecraft teachers are looking for engagement more than scores, problem solving
more than ‘correct’ answers, and evaluate the use of Minecraft based more on their own
professional learning than on any external recommendation.

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Learning from Students

Teachers, seeking higher level thinking habits, have to find a balance between work that
is too easy and too hard for the largest number of their students. This requires years of
observing students when trying new lessons and a refined expertise in reading student
reactions. As we saw in Chapter 5, these Minecraft teachers are experts at watching. They
sample ideas with students, test them after school, and informally seek feedback from their
charges; so classroom implementation is a logical extension of these validation techniques.

When trying out an idea in the classroom, watching student reactions is the final test of a
lesson idea - this is central to their ability to pursue promising lesson ideas and reject ones
that come up short. Watching students in the classroom is not separate from validating an
idea, it is part of the same process. Learning from students is a skill that Minecraft teachers
take for granted, and therefore shows up in their stories.

Curiously, it was not always considered a bad thing when students were confused or
challenged by instructional designs. Convinced Minecraft was good for her students, one
teacher explained:

“I would say most of the rest of them 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.”

Typically, an overwhelmed student is bad. For this teacher it was an observable sign that
the students were asking the right questions and that the activity was pushing them to think
for themselves. So the ‘overwhelmed’ students had to start thinking differently, creating,
planning, and exercising the part of their brain that had been starved in highly structured
learning spaces. In this case, ‘overwhelmed’ was a sign that the design was effectively
frustrating students that needed to increase their ability to think for themselves.

Teachers are trained to design lessons that carefully scale difficulty toward every student
successfully learning. For instance, I remember having to turn in daily lessons, as a young
teacher, that started with SWBAT (Students will be able to). But in practice, that outcome
often is less clear and very diverse student populations can start into new content with
confusion and difficulty - or mastery.

‘Overwhelmed’ is not bad, it is inevitable; how a teacher deals with it, however, marks that
teacher quality can be learned. Notice, above, that the teacher says, “You know, stuff like
that”, as though this is common knowledge. To a practicing teacher, or at least to Minecraft
teachers, ‘overwhelmed’ is simply part and parcel to testing new ideas. Their initial confusion,
then, is not as relevant as what students do after starting confused. Does the lesson eventually
lead to clarity? Do students help each other out? Are they motivated enough by the goal to

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overcome ‘overwhelmed’? These are what Minecraft teachers are looking for when they try
a lesson.

So, consistently, our teachers explain how they first want to watch students wrestle with
Minecraft and figure it out. They were checking their own expectations against student
performance. Instead of making things simpler, they first wanted to see what happened in
the face of a real challenge:

“We would have never seen what the kids would do if we had managed it with a
curriculum instead of stepping back to watch where the kids would go with it.

This is interesting. This implies that the teacher has some learning to do with every lesson
they try out. Teaching with Minecraft, or other digital games, requires teacher-designers to
explore the medium for themselves.

Also, after narrating their story, Minecraft teachers show value by comparing problem-
based learning to ‘managed’, or outcome-based, curriculum. What is the difference?
Managed curriculum implies unified delivery of common lessons so the average student will
master the content knowledge. For non-teachers, this is the bread and butter of all textbook
based curricular material or even much of today’s digitized curriculum. This may be good
for making sure even the average student keeps up, but extremely limiting to quick learners
and alienating to slow learners. Differentiation or project-based learning allows all learners
to perform at their own level. The goal is that all students advance their skills, thinking, and
learning - not a common standard, or ‘bar’, to jump over.

This is a subtle shift in thinking, but illuminating: Minecraft teachers often challenge, rather
than assign; cheer and challenge, rather than provide incentives; and watch students, rather
than having students watch them. As teachers they guide, but even the popular ‘guide on
the side’ approach doesn’t quite capture the degree to which they favored the term “watch”
instead. ‘Guide’ still implies that the teacher initiates and directs learning, watch implies that
teachers wait for students to some degree and then react.

Notice in chapters 6 and 7 that some teachers invested considerable time in preparing
Minecraft lessons. ‘Watching’, in these narratives, looks more like when a filmmaker watches
audience reactions to their film. It is active and framed by a set of expectations that the
teacher has for the time spent. Teachers that used a more open approach would set the
parameters of classroom activity and expect students to ‘play’ along with those. From there,
these teachers were still curious, active observers of what students would do within those
parameters. Like laboratory researchers setting up an experiment, these teachers honestly
wanted to see what would happen and to what degree students would surprise, impress,
come up short, or delight them with their work.

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 “It wasn’t a matter of them measuring up to our expectations, they totally
exceeded them…”

So when expectations are met, the evaluation of the lesson is positive. When they are not,
the teacher would presumably go looking for new ideas. Minecraft teachers often explain
a degree of surprise at student performance, because having all students follow the same
steps, they explain a goal and watch students discover their own path toward it.

“I’ve found is that there is 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.”

Watching, or learning from students, is standard practice among Minecraft teachers, and is
consistently narrated as justification for using Minecraft in the classroom. Practically, when
they watched, they were able to learn the appropriate level of challenge, allow the activity
to set the pace for students, and intercede or redirect when needed. Others also watched
for opportunities to teach, assign challenges, new lesson ideas, or just student delight in
lesson designs and suit their own curiosity. In the stories, these are conveyed not just in
terms of Minecraft use, but as a benefit to their practice in general. Particularly, they look for
motivation and engagement.

Motivation and Engagement

Minecraft teachers share that student engagement is one of the ways they saw that Minecraft
was working in their classrooms. Engagement is an observable sign of motivation and the
two are used interchangeably by our teachers. Where other work provides more precise
definitions of these terms, I will reflect the looser general use found in the narratives. Each
story is supported with a comment about engagement or motivation. This one is a bit
awkward, but it is representative of how the teachers connected engagement to a range of
other learning benefits.

“I think this project was one of the best I’ve had so far because it was a high
level of engagement and we’re working with multiple skills… they were training
at the same time.”

So why is engagement important? Obviously, it is nice if students are motivated, but they
can still learn even when it is just… work. Can’t they? I have also heard teachers argue that
it is not their job to motivate students - students should see the benefit of learning prior to
setting foot in the classroom. Shouldn’t they? Surely, engagement and motivation are not
as valuable a measure as test scores, yet Minecraft teachers used these as internally valid
justifications for using Minecraft in the classroom. Why?

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 “I haven’t specifically used the word engagement yet, but that is the first
thing that anyone should mention. 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.’ That’s really meaningful.”

First, these teachers both value engagement and assume that a motivated student eventually
learns more than a non-motivated students. Where this study does not confirm or deny
this link, we can see more specifically what about engagement was valuable to Minecraft
teachers. Motivated students spend more time on task and universally improve learning
across abilities and learning styles.

“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. I think that is something that every teacher should
be trying to do.”

Second, Minecraft teachers are looking for engagement as a sign they have addressed
learning styles. Some of the teachers appreciate that different students learn differently, so
any lesson that engages a number of different types of learners catches their attention. This
teacher calls them ‘player types’ in relation to the game.

“I wanted to create activities for each of these player types.”

These kinds of activities are rare and usually require resources and time (like field trips), so
when a software application challenges and engages, this is worth telling me about in an
interview:

“The time on task is 90-100%. I’ve been working with middle school for a year
and a half and what I’ve noticed is that just doesn’t usually happen. They are the
most off track people I know but they are willing to sit at a computer and look
stuff up and when they get frustrated with things they go find resources that
will help them.”

Time on task, as a measure of engagement, speaks to efficiency of classroom hours.

Practicing teachers know that time is precious and they weigh activities not only on how
much curricular learning is happening, but on the degree to which the activity draws learners
into the material. Because, especially with younger learners, this can lead to learning outside
of class, investment in engagement and motivation can lead to larger payoffs in curricular
learning. Traditionally, an ‘anticipatory set’ has served to quickly pull students out of the
hallways and into focus, but these teachers treat entire lessons as engagement tools or as
supplements to the larger goals of the class. This opens up understanding evaluation not
just as lesson to lesson, but unit to unit, or even course to course.

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Third, engagement and motivation is observed when students are acting like professionals.
Minecraft teachers want to see that their students have engaged with class content so much
so that when they observe the student it looks more like they are playing at a hobby than
doing their school work.

“All my colleagues are saying [the students] aren’t working together and they
come into the minecraft class and they have prepared in their breaks what they
are going to do and they come in and sit and are totally engaged for one and a
half hours and when the lesson is over I have to tell them we are finished now
you have to log off.”

This is evidence, to this teacher, that a student can act differently in different classes based
on the experience the teacher provides. I would suggest that the comparison is not the point
here, but the notable shift in engagement is at the root of their justification. They evaluate
the effectiveness of Minecraft by observing student engagement; and engagement is not
bound by classroom minutes. Across stories, Minecraft teachers shared tips on how to
arrange classrooms (so you can see all screens from the middle), using tools to ‘finish’ class
(MinecraftEDU has a ‘freeze’ function for teachers), and students that went home to learn
more about a subject because they were engaged in the subject material.

“He had a student last year who came up to him and said, ‘Sir, I have been
reading about China,’ and we were just about to start the unit on ancient China,
‘And I know everything about it.’ [The teacher] was like, sure, yeah, whatever, not
really believing it but wanting to encourage his enthusiasm. As the unit started
and a couple of weeks in, he would be saying something and then the student
would raise his hand and say, ‘Yeah, and then this is what happened.’ He would
basically be saying all of the factual information before the teacher could even
say it. He actually did know most of the facts and information of the unit.
It was all from [Minecraft]...”

The story continues with a clear connection between why engagement and motivation are
important, finally, because they actually lead to content area knowledge. Prior to summative
assessment of a lesson, effective Minecraft teachers use constant formative assessment of
engagement and motivation because:

“...He really took it upon himself, when he knew that ancient China was
coming up, to go explore that area, read every little single info block, take
little notes on it, and sure enough he knew all the basic facts and information.
Now of course, he didn’t understand completely from our in-class activities
and our reflection papers and things like that, but so far as pre-existing
knowledge, it blows away anything.”

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Positive Social Outcomes

Closely related to engagement and motivation, Minecraft teachers evaluated effective

learning plans based on how students related socially during the implementation of the
lesson/s. Students, when engaged can work together out of pure enthusiasm. This is easy
when they are friends outside of class, but evidence of effective learning designs when
observed between non-friends.

“So, this little group of kids that wouldn’t talk to each other outside of class
unless forced are working together and figuring out or delineating their roles in
the town.”
“One or two kids figured out the mechanics of farming really quickly so they
were the experts and helped others. Some of the kids that were good at building
would build little barns for other groups. They would specialize…”

This teacher observed students negotiating ‘roles’ and was impressed as much by their
ability to work across social partitions as their content area learning. This speaks again to
their desire to teach the whole student. Part of growing up is to learn to talk and work with
those that you may not spend time with socially. This social element of evaluating a lesson is
reinforced even outside of the teacher’s own practice.

“I actually had my principal come into my class to sub a couple of weeks ago
during this typing class and she has not been able to stop talking about it since
she came in for that very reason. She said she saw students who she has never
seen open up before were actively involved and engaged and they were getting
along and she has just been really interested ever since.”

Student behavior was consistently reported as not a problem when using Minecraft. In fact,
because most behavior infractions happened within the digital world (griefing, stealing, and/
or respect issues) the teachers shared that these were abstracted a bit and made counseling
the students easier.

For instance, when one kid started to dig under another student’s house, the latter
complained. The teacher does not tell the story as a negative aspect of Minecraft, but instead
interprets this as an opportunity to talk about respect for ‘space’ issues that the student had
outside of Minecraft. Other problems arose when outside students were allowed into the
class server:

“The most serious thing was when a student invited his cousin who didn’t go to
our school to play and the cousin started using swear words and all kinds of stuff
like that. So, I printed out the chat log that I can get from monitoring the server,
gave it to our assistant principal, it was on her desk the next day, talked to the kid
who invited him, had him sit down after school.”

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Otherwise, negative class behaviors were perceived consistently as minimized by student
engagement in Minecraft activities, class expectations, and the threat of losing the ‘privilege’
to work on projects in Minecraft.

“We’re finding students that are doing really well with Minecraft are having
fewer discipline issues in other classes.”
“It’s almost bad because I’m afraid that when I do get some negative
reactions I won’t have had practice in how to handle it.”

Finally, Minecraft teachers noted when students started to help each other. This is especially
important when setting up a project-style lesson. One teacher will have a difficult time
answering every question that comes up. However, when some students that are excelling
at a project can handle basic questions, the teacher will take notice and appreciate the help.
A teacher that tells content might be concerned when a student ‘takes over’, a teacher that
sets expectations is relieved. A variety of class settings allows some students to excel in a
Minecraft project, where they may not in other classroom settings. This teacher points this
out and shows how they see emergent leadership as relevant in evaluating a lesson.

“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.”

Overall, Minecraft teachers consistently looked for social behaviors in students. When
using Minecraft they saw positive work habits, helpfulness, and students connecting with
other students outside of their normal friendships. They appreciated the chance to work
with students on real social issues, but use in-game situations to root the conversation.
Finally, Minecraft already has a few million kids ready to be helpful, show others, and take on
leadership in classrooms that use Minecraft.

Problem Solving

Problem solving could also be categorized as a form of positive social behavior. However,
when looking across the Minecraft stories, teachers treated this as a unique feature. Perhaps
because ‘problem solving’ is treated as both a social skill and as a learning goal in literature
and professional conversations today (STEM initiatives, 21st Century Skills, or the Games for
Learning community). Minecraft teachers agreed that the purpose of a learning design is to
create a setting for problem solving.

“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…”

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If teachers are less focused on presenting information, it follows that they have this kind
of focus on teaching learners how to find information, sort it, and apply it to tasks. This is
internally valuable:

“It is great to see them problem solving because I don’t think they are getting
enough of that.”

Minecraft teachers, at times, explained their use of Minecraft, similarly, as a kind of

supplement to the kinds of cognitive activity missing elsewhere in the school day. Similarly,
these teachers recognized a gap in school curriculum around learning professional editors
and teaching youth programming code languages.

Learning complex software to accomplish goals, (even silly ones), is relevant evidence of
some students embracing problem solving behavior because of classroom exposure
to Minecraft. Minecraft teachers regularly explain that Minecraft is a “gateway drug” for
professional software and/or learning to use professional digital tools. So when a student
engages with Minecraft, they commonly want to know more about how to make videos,
change server settings, program their own features, use graphic software to design new
outfits for their character (skinning), build group calendars and web sites, organize events
for other games, or look at professional editing software.

Problem solving improves as they play the game, because larger projects require teamwork
and communication. This too stands out when they share the results of using Minecraft.
Teachers explain that they see growth over time in problem solving skills. Effective problem
solving can be larger class conversations (classroom planning meetings) or they can be
smaller, efficient, communication that the teacher observes:

“Students were just organically building and deciding as they went with very little
communication; just deciding where things would go and how something would
be. That’s really fascinating, how much or how little communication they use
when they are building together and how organic that is and how they negotiate
how that will turn out.”

I would suggest that these kinds of informal observations are primary evaluators among
the teachers in this study, along with rubric assessment, traditional testing, and student
presentations of their work.

On the other hand, in order to represent the range of teaching philosophies in this study,
Minecraft does not have to evaluate anything to be valuable. Where some teachers felt an
obligation to teach content, other teachers insisted that Minecraft naturally leads to many of
the positive outcomes listed above. They argue that overt evaluation, (especially grades and
summative assessments), can be intrusive and even reduce the benefits (like high motivation

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or intrinsic rewards) that a game like Minecraft already offers its players. They, along with
others, advocate for the value of increasing free time, play, and hobby spaces that allow
lifetime learning without expectations.

Evaluating a Minecraft Assignment

This chapter wouldn’t be quite complete without sharing some of the ways that these
teachers used Minecraft as a tool for students to show their work. Many of the teachers did
want to see subject area learning too and asked students to show what they had learned.
Minecraft projects are commonly shared with the teacher as a picture, by opening up the
game and doing a ‘tour’ of work done in the game, by writing about experiences in Minecraft,
by taking a test on the subject matter, or by creating a video using screen capture software.
Most teachers had tried more than one of these approaches across iterations and even on
the same project. One interesting approach was to use external software to ‘pull’ Minecraft
projects into a virtual reality.

“An app called Minecraft Reality… you know chunking out the segment of their
space and creating it and putting it into an augmented reality thing we can set it on
their [desk], view it, and… and the kid can walk around and show their creation.”

After the interview I tested this out. Using an iPad as a lens, the software marks a real location
as you move the camera lens around it. Then it locates the Minecraft project within that
location. On a desk, the floor, or in a gymnasium for a ‘fair’ like event. Students can show off
their Minecraft projects in a variety of ways. All of these presentation methods depend on
the project itself representing or demonstrating what the student has learned.

This looks very similar to any project-based learning environment, starting with establishing
clear expectations, or criteria, for the project. Some teachers told the students what these
expectations were or gave them as a written assignment or rubric. One teacher worked with
students to build the criteria for the project.

“We’ll find examples of product that approximates what we would like to do

and say, ‘What makes this good? What makes this not good and what makes
something better? What qualities do you want to see in a good product?’
Then those become our project criteria and so when the student is working
on a project, they’ll look back at the criteria and say have I met those criteria?
Does my product fit the criteria for being a good or an excellent product.”

This teacher continues to point that this is effective professionally and they are attempting to
teach and model self-evaluation. Depending on the project, criteria may include: accuracy,
scale, details added, creativity, clarity of an idea, peer evaluations, or content area questions
about the project.

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Final work usually had students communicating the expectations of the class within their
Minecraft work. It is the learner’s job to synthesize work and make the connection.

“What I had them do there was to record themselves giving a tour through
their creation and so they narrated a walk through of their environment and
highlighted the things they wanted me to notice. [Learners] highlighted where
they integrated concepts from social studies. Then I tell them to try to get those
down to a five to seven minute video that I could watch and could assess
and see their learning outcome.”

This particular example includes both Minecraft and video editing software - and requires
students to learn the editing software because they want to show the Minecraft work.
Essentially, these teachers value ‘show and tell’ after ‘time on task’. Showing can take on
a variety of media formats and include photos, videos, written work, new programs,
or a combination of these elements; telling requires that students understand and can
operationalize their work within the content area; and time on task implies learner focus,
engagement, and efficient use of time inside and outside of the classroom.

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 CHAPTER 9

HOW C AN THIRD PART Y

TOOL S BE USED?
Jeff Kuhn and Seann Dikkers

“I don’t think I would have ever even tried it without that mod in place.
It makes running a server absolutely easy and seamless.”
- Minecraft Teacher

“I realized that Minecraft has servers that kids, up to 100 people,

could connect to... and so I just started messing around with
it and building the world”
- Eric Walker, Designer of World of Humanities.

Adding Possibility

This chapter profiles the more exotic, and jaw-dropping, creations of the larger Minecraft
community. As teachers, tapping into this community can amplify using the game in the
classroom. The wealth of information and expertise in this community shows the scale and
possibilities inherent in Minecraft that serves as such an allure to our students. By the end
of this chapter you should have a grasp of setting up classroom servers, modifications,
importing custom maps, and I have included a quick reference guide to outstanding
resources currently available at the end of the chapter.

If you have never spent time playing video games, it’s not just the initial excitement that
makes them engaging it is the potential - or possibility. I would argue that possibility is more
important than excitement, because possibility is the feeling the player puts into the game.
Players initially play a game out of curiosity, but they embrace and play a game like Minecraft
over time because they have projects, goals, expert achievements, and internalized hopes for
the game. After a first exposure to Minecraft, most players look forward to trying new worlds,
customizing servers, and import pre-generated worlds; these are possibility spaces. These
kinds of customizations allow for the world itself to be part of the story for your learners.

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For instance, in Bethesda Softworks’ Skyrim the land of Skyrim is a character unto itself.
Every facet can be explored; the mountains and forests are not just distant backdrops but
fully rendered environments brimming with wildlife and brigands. Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed
III features a historically accurate revolutionary-war era Boston, simmering with rebellion
and detail so rich that the window frames of King’s Chapel are exact. Both may not be
appropriate for classroom use (yet!), but model how powerful a world can be when rich with
detail and visual impact. Below you will see how to bring exceptional pre-made worlds into
your classroom.

Yet it is not just the worlds that are important to gamers; it is what we can do in those worlds.
Great games entice the player to explore. We play games because we want to make a
difference in the worlds we choose to inhabit. We want to see the world shaped by our
actions and ingenuity; it’s why we play. We want to make our mark. When you learn how to
import a world, you also learn by default how to use worlds as a student deliverable within
your classroom. They can make their mark, tell their story, build their models… and turn it
all in!

This chapter explores how we as teachers can ‘mine’ these dynamic worlds to create new
possibility spaces for learning in the classroom. My goal is to present options that increase
opportunities for classroom use and provide you language to ask for those things (say, with
your technology facilitator), but leave more elaborate tricks, sources, and skills to the often
updated internet.

The chapter begins with an overview of how to start using ‘seeds’, ‘maps’, and ‘mods’. Then,
the chapter concludes with a list of maps and worlds by subject areas. Throughout the
chapter I have included ideas and suggestions for classroom possibilities for these seeds,
maps and mods.

Add Classroom Possibilities with ‘Seeds’

Underneath the blocky trees, past the gold ore and diamonds, past the bedrock an algorithm
rests, it is what powers Minecraft - ‘seeds’. When a new map is created, Minecraft generates a
set of numbers and letters that will determine the characteristics and layout of the new map,
the numbers are called a ‘seed’ and they uniquely identify every map made for Minecraft
prior to a player moving the first block.

If you tell me your seed number, I can easily type it in to my Minecraft program and take a
look at your map as it was originally generated. For many players this is their first step into
a larger world. I will not be able to see what you have built on your map, but I will see your
original starting map, so you can share unique landmarks, quirky bugs, or quickly show me
how to find diamonds deep below the earth.

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Seed trading is one of the first major activities to drive online Minecraft communities. Using
seeds is easy, it requires no special modifications to Minecraft, and as such make an excellent
introduction to using and saving unique maps. Accessing a unique seed is a simple process.
Seeds are a great way to get new maps to play but require care; each time the algorithm gets
an update the seed will produce another world. Finally, consider taking time to play different
maps yourself! New seeds can dramatically change the game experience itself from map to
map.

Sharing Your Map’s Seed Number

1) Begin by opening up singleplayer Minecraft and create a new world, naming it

Seed Test.
2) Once inside the game, press [T].
3) Type ‘/seed’. Minecraft will reply with your seed number.
4) Copy this seed number, write it down or you can take a screenshot [F2].

Next let’s import the seed. First delete our last map named Seed Test, we can recreate the
map now that we have the seed.

Importing Another’s Map Seed Number

Figure 1: Copy your seed number on the Create New World screen

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 1) On the ‘Select World’ screen, select [Create New World].
2) On the ‘Create New World’ screen select [More World Options].
3) On the More World Options screen input the seed number.1
4) You return back to the ‘Create New World’ page. Enter an original name for this
world and you are set to open it up and play.

While seeds are unaltered products of the game itself, maps are player designed. These
player maps are what have turned Minecraft into a phenomenon2 . Utilizing the wealth of
resources online is a surefire way to get the students invested into your Minecraft classroom.

Classroom Ideas for Using Seeds

• Students can venture into different parts of the world mapping shorelines,
mountains ranges, or discovering biomes and the flora and fauna within. Using
grid paper your adventurers can create a world map, and because they are using
the same seed, they will be able to combine their maps into a whole.
• Provide students a physical paper map with directions to a particular point of
interest. Find this location or locations ahead of time and make sure they are far
from the starting point (or ‘spawn’ point) so that they are hard to find without your
directions. Challenge students to follow your Minecraft map.
• Use a seed number to provide a particular kind of map to students. This can
serve as muse as they experience a specific geography or to write exploration
journals in the vein of The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
or South by Ernest Shackleton. For example, if your class is reading South, you
can use a seed that features extensive use of a polar biome.

Simple enough? Simply knowing how to grab a seed number and passing that along to
others opens up a few exciting classroom possibilities. Once you get comfortable with that
skill, it’s time to play with importing maps.

Adding Classroom Possibilities with ‘Maps’

Minecraft players can save and share designed worlds commonly referred to as ‘maps’.3
‘Maps’ are seeds that have been modified by players or showcase a particular player creation.

1
Changing the [World Type:] variable can interfere with seed generation so leave it as Default.
2
Great websites to find unique and interesting seeds are: http://www.Minecraftseeds.info/ and
http://Minecraft-seeds.net/
3
Note that ‘seeds’ are untouched ‘maps’. Once you start building and want to show what you’ve built,
you will want to share the ‘map’, not the ‘seed’.

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Maps show off projects and world designs that are stunning - and they can be educational.
Imagine that instead of just reading about Johnny Tremain, students could tour Boston in
1776.

“I’ll have a room of fifteen computers and half the kids run their own servers.
They are typing in each others ip addresses. They are hopping on each other’s
servers. They are seeing what each other is doing.”

Maps range from the simple objects or buildings, like Shakespeare’s Globe theater; to
larger projects, like a full recreation of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, Tolkein’s Middle Earth, or4
the Odyssey’s Grecian World. Look to the end of the chapter, for a list of popular maps by
subject area.

Figure 2: 1940s New York recreated block by block

You do not have to build awesome Minecraft settings, you can import them. The community
around Minecraft is teeming with shared maps.

As a side note, make sure you properly cite your source - especially when you use it in class.
Mapmakers encourage fans to share maps under the condition that the mapmaker is given
proper credit. As Shirky (2010) describes, in Cognitive Surplus, failure to give credit is the
crime of online communities. The use of any map in Minecraft is the result of a mapmaker’s
labor, and therefore they deserve credit for their amazing work and this is a chance to model
digital ethics to your students.

4
A great source for Minecraft maps is Planet Minecraft: www.planetMinecraft.com/

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Minecraft community etiquette also asks that if parts or structures of a map are integrated,
a ‘sign’ indicating the creator of the structure should be placed outside the main entrance
within your world. Any student should be able to walk up to your Parthenon, for instance, and
see who built it.

Installing Maps

Installing a few single player maps is great practice before moving onto custom maps. It has
a slight intimidation factor at first but once the basic system is understood you’ll be able
to install any map you want. Maps are easily imported into Minecraft but the route differs
slightly for PCs and Macs - we’ll cover each.

First, you will need a data file to import. You can download these from community sites
(bundled as a compressed, or .zip, file), or you can pull that file from your system if you want
to share a world you have built.

# WINDOWS OS APPLE OS

1 Press the [Start] button. Click anywhere on your desktop.

Select the [Go] menu at the top of the screen,

2 Type [%appdata%], in the ‘Search’ field.
then [Go to folder…].

Double click the folder

3 Type [~/Library/Application Support/Minecraft].
“Roaming\.minecraft\saves” 5

You are in the “Saves” folder. Find the “Saves” folder.

4
(To share maps, share any of these folders) (To share maps, share any of these folders)

5 To add maps, drag and drop into this folder. To add maps, drag and drop into this folder.

This folder, once located, is your local information for each world you have played in. In
Minecraft terms, this means that all of your buildings and designs are in these data files.
When you share this folder, other players can see all you have done at the point you shared
it. When you add another’s world folder6 to this file, you will be able to see their work.

Installing maps works well if you are operating with single player accounts and maps on
unique computers.

5
If the search results do not return “Roaming\.minecraft\saves”, double-click the “Roaming” folder
and look for it there.
6
Note that these are data files, not .exe files. You should never have to ‘run’ a program for this task.

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Installing Maps... on a Multiplayer Server

Once the maps have been downloaded for single player installing them onto a multiplayer
server is simple. First, if you pull a ‘map’ folder from online, you may have the luxury of
handing that over to your organization’s ‘tech person’. (In fact, in many school settings, that
person may not want you even loading Minecraft onto the school computers!)

“I’m blessed with an IT staff that is open and excited about this stuff.”

This should get you started and enable you to set up a server for multiple players to see an
imported ‘map’ together.

1) Find the map folder for the world you would like to install and download
it to your desktop.
2) See the last section to open your Minecraft folder. Instead of “saves”,
look for a file called “server”. Open it.
3) Find the “saves” folder here and move the map folder here.

Next we need to associate that map folder to the server. To do that we need to adjust the
server properties.

1) Open the server properties file by right click on the file and select ‘Open with’
either Notepad on PC or TextEdit on Mac. This file controls the behavior of the
server and can be used to change to fundamental properties of the server game.
2) In the server properties file, find the level-name=, which should be the fifth
line of the list.

Figure 3: Mastering the server file opens

new game possibilities

3) Type the name of the new map after the = with no space. It is critical that the
name inserted into this line matches the name of the new map exactly, so it is
best to copy/paste the name.

With the above instructions you be able to switch worlds on your server quickly depending on
the subject matter of your class. For a list of worlds that you can bring to the classroom see the
end of this chapter. Running a vanilla server can accommodate almost all classroom activities,
but we may want to add a little panache to our world and for that we need modifications.

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Classroom Ideas for Using Maps

Custom maps are a fast-track option for the classroom and can be incredibly useful when
targeting a specific learning opportunity. We can use maps to place the students in scenarios
or situations that foster particular skill sets.

• Explore the streets of an ancient Roman city as part of a history class, or recreate
the adventures of Lewis and Clark in a blocky replica of frontier America - both
available in the maps at the end of this chapter.
• Create redstone circuits to power an algorithmic logic board or to fabricate
machinery such as railcars and mining equipment. The game mechanics that
students must manipulate in these scenarios are the same mechanics used in
simple programming.
• A class studying genetics can use dye to color sheep then breed them to study
mendelian inheritance. As the sheep breed their color traits are passed to their
offspring - certain colors are recessive while others are dominant ‘genes’.
• Investigate the complex systems of supply, demand and resource management
in a sustainability class by using Dr. Short’s Tragedy of the Commons map at the
end of the chapter
• Students reading Harry Potter can wander the halls of Hogwarts or engage in a
Hunger Games scenario to bolster in an after school reading club.

Adding Classroom Possibilities with Mods

‘Mods’, or modifications, allow players to add options, new game rules, alter game content,
modify the textures (appearance), or give players added abilities. Basically, you can add a
mod to alter the core programming of the software - so they broadly can do almost anything
to the game, but tend to be smaller changes that lend themselves to player, or classroom,
preferences. For example in my writing class students experience the zombie apocalypse.
I used mods to change ‘skins’ (the appearance of the player) of the creatures and made the
creatures immune to daylight.

Some modifications have become large enough that they utilize their own launcher, which
has simplicity issues for us as teachers and server hosts.

Some mods incorporate elements of other video games such as the Portalcraft mod. Others
are just for fun - the Natural Disasters mod integrates random earthquakes and volcanic
eruptions in a Minecraft map. Mods such as Bukkit are designed to streamline the creating
and managing of servers and most single-player modifications have a server counterpart.

130
While not extensively covered in this chapter I overview the leading modification systems that
exist outside of the official Minecraft game. Namely, I will review the major mod managers:
1) MinecraftEDU, 2) Bukkit, and 3) Forge. Any of which are well established and easy to use.

MinecraftEDU

Joel Levin has made an excellent Minecraft mod specifically for classroom use called
MinecraftEDU. Over time it has expanded into a wide range of customs packs that has nearly
turned Minecraft into entirely new games.

“We have a large number of building tools that make it easier for teachers to get
their content in the game...we put in a large number of tools for ease of use to
create structures and buildings or whatever. We have the server which is dead
simple to use.”
Features:

• Pre-installed tools manage that students’ movements and building abilities to

create focused learning situations.
• Unique teacher tools such as information blocks, freezing student movement,
and the ability to assign homework in game.
• Access to support material that includes lesson plans and curricular goals
• Included server tools that enable quick server installation and management.

Bukkit

The Bukkit pack is a set of server management tools designed to make the installation and
use of Minecraft modifications easy for server managers. Over time it has expanded into a
wide range of customs packs that has nearly turned Minecraft into entirely new games.

Classroom mods:

• MC MMO - This mod takes Minecraft into the realm of role-playing games such as
World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy. It adds XP systems, party systems for group
play, and thirteen skill sets that players can use to level-up. Altering this mod
to make those skills sets reflect 21st century skills for the classroom would be a
huge boost to classroom teaching.
• Multiverse – This staggering mod allows server hosts to create a series of
interconnected worlds that can each be configured for unique configurations,
biomes and even creature spawning.

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Forge

Forge allows for installing and maintaining modifications in both single player and server
games of Minecraft. It’s widespread use and simple interface has made it a popular choice
for modders and is a great choice for the classroom.

Classroom mods:

• MCA – Minecraft Comes Alive breathes new life into the game’s generic villagers.
The mod provides new skins, customizable dialogue and conversation trees for
the villagers to better integrate them into the play experience.
• Buildcraft - This mod includes machines that can be constructed to dig for
resources and build structures. A great mod for teaching engineering.
• Chisel - This mod is just one example of the many mods that incorporate
decorative blocks to increase the level of design and customization of buildings.

We have tested seeds, saved maps and learned a mod or two. Getting comfortable with
these functions in Minecraft takes practice and time, but doing it is great experiential
learning. Keep in mind that Minecraft is very forgiving of mistakes so if you seem to have
placed too many items in the wrong place, you can delete your entire Minecraft folder and
start fresh. Each time Minecraft is initialized from scratch it will generate all the needed files
and folders in the ‘.minecraft’ folder. As you experiment with maps and mods never be afraid
to start anew and give it another go.

Finally, there is an incredible community of teachers, players and programmers out there
willing to help those truly lost so be sure to seek help as needed. As this chapter is dated,
those communities will not. They will continue to post new ideas, videos, and connect people
figuring out how to use not just Minecraft, but the next new thing too. Even remarkable
teachers pointed out that connecting was key to their learning. For instance, World of
Humanities builder Eric Walker:

“I first looked at videos of what people were doing like um, Steven Elford… who’d
been using it for science purposes in the classroom and Joel Levin, himself, who
has been using it in the classroom in his technology classes”

Get online, look at some videos, meet some new people, and start with a few of the
suggestions above. Seeds, maps, and servers are more of a ‘stage 2’ skill level, but you will
do fine if you just approach it step by step and with a few online friends.

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 REMEMBER

Play before you teach - scout maps before bringing them into the classroom. All the maps included in
this chapter are classroom friendly, however maps found on the Internet may need to be previewed for
content.

Be sure to visit the Minecraft Teachers Google Group

Maps and Mods can be found at:

— Minecraft World
— Planet Minecraft
— Mojang
— Minecraft.net

Be sure to check the Minecraft version number of the seed. Seeds are random and the alphanumeric
strings used are not indicative of the type of world that will be created.

A Possibility List

Here they are, the maps. Each personally tested and played, these maps represent the wealth
of resources available for the Minecraft teacher. The maps are organized by teaching context
and from there listed alphabetically. All maps feature a download link and where possible a
link to further information. Each map features teaching suggestions.

Social Studies

World of Humanities – Eric Walker

An educational map of immense scale, Eric’s World of Humanities map has developed over
time into a full scale RPG adventure where students can interact with characters and com-
plete quests in a social studies-based narrative. While the rest of the maps all have specific
content tied to them with World of Humanities that is almost impossible. In Eric’s magnum
opus students can study history, social science, cultures, geography, economics; if you can
find it in a school curriculum you can find it in World of Humanities!
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53773950/World of Humanities/minecraftEdu - World
of Humanities - May2013beta.zip

Minecraft Denmark - Danish Geodata Agency

Denmark has taken it as a source of pride to become the first country to be recreated at
a 1:1 scale inside Minecraft - in Minecraft scale one block = one meter. Designed to get
students interested in spatial data, the designers encourage players to explore the country
and build a home of their own. The maps is a great choice for classes on geography, history
and language arts. How long will it be before we see a language arts class create a Hamlet
machinima? Currently the map exists on a server but can be downloaded - yet be warned it
weighs in at a whopping 1TB.
http://download.kortforsyningen.dk/content/danmarks-frie-geodata-i-minecraftverden

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Oakland Minecraft – The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment
Even if you do not live in Oakland, this incredible map is less about what it is than how it was
built. A faithful recreation of Oakland California, it is unique in that the builders were solicited
from the news-aggregator website Reddit. The map builders were not from Oakland but
used Google Maps and other online sources to recreate the city. Teaching the kids spatial
thinking and skills? Have them examine a city via Google Earth and then build for accuracy
in Minecraft. Imagine a messy classroom with students huddled around computers, sheets
of butcher paper and chalkboard sketches as they build Chicago.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/y1i3nr9o0pqyzxu/y_meOs4EDi/Oakland04.26.13.zip
website: http://www.themade.org/node/184

Project Zearth – Xoyjaz

This sprawling map feature five major cities and several villages spread throughout the world
connected by road and rail. This map weighs in at an impressive 461MB but in it students
could be separated into city groups to examine common core standards of competing
beliefs and goals, methods of engagement, and conflict and cooperation. A great option
is to place different classes into different cities and teach the topics of movement, region
and human settlement. Create a disaster in one city; forcing the students to migrate into
cities controlled by other classes could be a powerful way to teach the high school world
geography course standards.
http://www.planetMinecraft.com/project/zeon-city/

Roman Domus – WLhokies

A map of a fictional city of ancient Rome that strives for historical accuracy. The map
features details such as impluviums, household shrines, and tablinum. Students studying
Roman history could establish a Senate to run the city while the teacher – or clever student -
instigates civil war, then bring peace through the exercise of new consolidated powers and
the class can experience the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire.
http://www.planetminecraft.com/project/roman-domus---historically-accurate-world-save-
schematics/

Project America Map – Blake

The continental U.S. is rendered into block form in this expansive map. Largely undeveloped,
this map could be used for exploration, geography lessons or even a simulation of the
Oregon Trail. Students can replicate the frontier lifestyle of early America or even run a
simulation of the founding of America. After a few hours of playing this map my students
began to call for rules and codes of conduct. While it’s great to teach civic participation,
when it derives naturally from student play it is epic learning.
http://dudeguy.com/mceworlds/worldfiles/ProjectAmericaMap.zip

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The Tourist – Stratocrafteur
This adventure map features four hours of content set in the Montmartre district in the north
of Paris. True to its real-life counterpart, this map centers on the Sacré-Cœur basilica and
replicates the streets of Paris to a remarkable degree. Students could use the map to create
walking tours of Paris or explore the streets and journal what they find or using French to
demonstrate the Common Core call for language and cultural understanding through
create using of resources.
http://www.planetminecraft.com/project/adventure-map-the-tourist/

The Zone (Chernobyl Exclusion Zone) – tsarcorp

70% complete at the time of this writing, the map replicates Pripyat, Ukraine, the city
abandoned in 1986 days after the Chernobyl disaster. A city which has been largely isolated
since. Combined with readings on the events leading up to the disaster, students could draft
first person essays on what they had to abandon as they evacuate the Chernobyl exclusion
zone. Combine this map with the the Uranium Mod modification and high school students
studying scientific inquiry and application could investigate the city to uncover what caused
the mass exodus. Gamer Pro Tip: Students may recognize this map as Pripyat as the city was
featured in the popular game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
https://mega.co.nz/#!U5cECaQR!Ygu1kT3jvis5aqyyR36XxxTirN5BFA8GF1Gy3RnYdJs
website: http://tariqsarwar.net/zonecraft/

Tragedy of the Commons - Dan Short

In this map players experience the depletion of shared resources and how to promote
sustainability through co-operation. Dr. Short’s places players in a glass dome with a limited
number of trees to harvest as resources. Round one of the scenario seeks to educated
players on the dangers of the tragedy of the commons while round two encourages players
to develop strategies to prevent the depletion of resources. Common core standards to
explore in this map include writing standards that demonstrate student ability to state an
opinion in writing on the issue presented and support that opinion with structures in which
related ideas are grouped to support the writer’s purpose. This map is excellent for the
Common Cores topic of sustainability.
http://faculty.rmu.edu/~short/research/minecraft/MC-Tragedy-Commons-v2.zip

United States Capitol Building - Senator Aubin

This replica of the Capitol Building can help students develop the inflated self-interests of
Congressional members. Students can practice core topics of roles and systems in the heart
of the U.S. government. While this map is an excellent external replica the inside of the
building is largely unfinished and so requires a little prep time.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/u50npq5664o07w6/Famous_Buildings.zip

135
Vertoak City - fish95
Vertoak is a city-themed adventure map for Minecraft. All the buildings are fully furnished
with hidden secrets and treasures. City maps like this one can be populated with villagers
that will then begin to craft materials and trade with student players. Students can also begin
to mine and craft resources to develop an economy to explore issues of resource scarcity
and economic response to scarcity. Thriving city-style maps are excellent tools to explore
economic decision-making, understand the issues of costs and benefits, and investigate
economic alternatives.
http://www.Minecraftmaps.com/creation-maps/vertoak-city/viewdownload

Math and Science

Skyblock – Noobcrew
A classic map that has been downloaded over 5 million times, Skyblock features one tree, 20
blocks of dirt and a chest containing two items. What you do and how you survive is up to
you. This is a great map to generate divergent thinking and problem solving skills.
https://dl.dropbox.com/s/ye1mist5lgpda0y/SkyBlock1.1.zip?dl=1

Survival Island Map – Ashien

Similar to the famous Skyblock, this map come with rules and challenges to increase
the challenge level. Build a wheat farm, ten bookcases and a cobblestone generator all
without leaving the island. Puzzle maps are excellent tools to generate communication
and collaboration among students as they work through problems of spatial thinking and
mathematical problem solving.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/zca5iu3vpgmuv2u/SurvivalIslandv1.zip

Environmental Sampling – Dr. Dan Short

Dr. Short has created a series of interesting single-focus maps. This one focuses on methods
scientists use to sample for pollutants. Besides making maps, Dr. Short has some great
resources and a paper on using Minecraft in the science classroom. You can find more on his
website, so be sure to check it out.
http://faculty.rmu.edu/~short/research/minecraft/MC-Env-Sampling.zip
website: http://faculty.rmu.edu/~short/research/minecraft/

The Periodic Table of the Elements – Dr. Dan Short

This particular map showcases a massive periodic table of the elements. The map does a
great job of relating real-world elements to Minecraft resources such as copper and redstone.
Yet not all the elements feature descriptors, leavings science students ample opportunity to
fill in the blanks. This map is a great way for students to learn to define and classify minerals
and called for in the Earth and Space Science strand of the standards.
http://faculty.rmu.edu/~short/research/minecraft/MC-Periodic-Table.zip

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Writing

Globe Theater – GSACommando

Explore the home of Shakespeare’s plays in this historical map. Combined with custom
skins and machinima players of this map can stage and record the Bard’s plays. For teachers
unfamiliar with it, Machinima is the creation of movies using the real-time graphics of video
games. Minecraft players have produced some phenomenal examples of machinima and
developed considerable 21st century skills in the process. Staging a machinima version of
a Shakespeare play would involve planning, collaboration, scripting, storyboarding, digital
costuming, filming, editing and post-production. In the process they would have extended
exposure to one of the greatest writings in English history.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/egphma029p15gpd/GlobeTheatre.zip

Kingdom of the Sky – Blame the Controller

Kingdom of the Sky is unique as it uses Youtube to create a voice over narration to the map.
Designed as an adventure map, the world is perfect for exploring or questing. Use this map
for some experiential learning fun before students develop written narratives focused on
details and clearly structured events as called for in the Common Core.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/3uhwsves4em49ll/KotSv14.zip

PotterCraft – Musicdudez
This map aims to recreate Hogwarts and contains Hogsmeade, Diagon Alley, Ministry of
Magic, and the Malfoy and Wesley residences. A creative literature class could use the map
to inspire students to write fan fiction in the Potter universe.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/ht4vmjbjmw3t7ht/PotterCraft+Pre-Release+1.zip
website: http://www.planetMinecraft.com/project/pottercraft---the-wizarding-world-of-
harry-potter-in-Minecraft/

Crafting Azeroth - Rumsey

The entirety of World of Warcraft’s land of Azeroth is featured in this truly epic 24 GB map.
While the team continues to work on Outland and Northrend, the Eastern Kingdoms and
Kalimdor are available in the download. The map features enormous cities and expansive
wilderness. Students can use the medieval backdrop for learning the 21st century skill of
communication and collaboration as they build in-game communities.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/997352-crafting-azeroth/

Herobrine’s Mansion - Hypixel

This map is an example of the work of Hypixel, whom many consider to be one of the best
Minecraft mappers. This is a map all teachers should explore as this is what our students do
for fun after school. Hypixel has created many great maps and developed online fame as a
result. It is cognitive surplus and the digital world at its finest and a fun map to boot.
http://hypixel.net/threads/herobrines-mansion-adventure-map.200/

137
Lord of the Rings Mod
The Lord of the Rings is an in-progress build of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. This will include
content from J.R.R.Tolkien’s most famous work, the Lord of the Rings series, and eventually
other related tales such as the Hobbit and the Silmarillion. Currently the mod is still in the
early stages of development, but a new public beta download is released approximately
every month. An after school fantasy book club could use the map to trace the travels of
Bilbo and Frodo or create new adventures for their own Middle Earth characters.
http://lotrminecraftmod.wikispaces.com/home

WesterosCraft
This massive server is an active process of replicating George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice
and Fire land of Westeros. The server currently allows visitors with no build access and parts
of the map are available for download – King’s Landing, The Dreadfort and Winterfell at the
time of this writing. An incredible example of the skillsets players bring to Minecraft, this
server requires players seeking to help build the Westeros map must submit an application
including examples of previous builds. The map of Winterfell could be used for K-8 social
studies projects exploring the concept of feudalism and the resulting social systems.
http://westeroscraft.com/home

Bio

Jeff Kuhn is a writing instructor and technology consultant at Ohio University. Each semester
Kuhn teaches a first year writing class using Minecraft. He has presented widely on the use
of video games in higher education, specifically in the field of language acquisition. He has
taught English as a second language in Japan and served as a teacher trainer in Peace Corps
Mongolia. Since 2011, Kuhn has created a series of contextualized learning classes where
students use Minecraft to experience events that serve as the foundation for writing journals.
His current project is “Journaling the Zombie Apocalypse”. In class students read selections
of Max Brooks’ World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide while playing a modified version
of Minecraft that replicates a zombie invasion. The project ends with students devising
a zombie preparedness plan for the city of Athens, OH using what they learned playing
Minecraft. Kuhn also worked on the U.S. Department of State’s Trace Effects, a video game
designed to engage students in English language learning. He is currently pursuing his PhD
in Instructional Technology advised by Dr. Seann Dikkers.

138
 C H A P T ER 10

USING GAME-BASED
APPROACHES TO INCREASE
LEVEL OF ENGAGEMENT
IN RESEARCH AND
EDUCATION
Joseph C. Toscano1 , Andrés Buxó-Lugo1,2 , and Duane G. Watson1,2

“Minecraft is coming into different venues than what

we thought was possible”
- Carl Manneh,Mojang, Co-founder and Managing Director

And Now for Something Completely Different

[A note from the editor...]

What you are about to read is a bit of a departure from the rest of the book. So far each
chapter has focused on some element of teacher appropriation or evaluation of Minecraft.
In the following pages, the authors have generously volunteered to publish their research as
as a chapter in this book. Normally this kind of piece would be found in a journal and it will
read as such. That said, the authors provide us glimpse of the range of impact Minecraft has
in other fields, and I believe opens up an exciting host of possibilities for classroom use of
Minecraft as a tool for action research, scientific method, and data collection. In that light,
though different, this chapter fits perfectly.

1
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
2
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

139
Using game-based approaches to increase
level of engagement in research and education

Abstract

Improving student engagement in the classroom has the potential to increase academic
success. Similarly, increasing participant engagement in experiments may allow researchers
us to better study behavior. As a result, both educators and researchers would like to have
tasks and activities that are interesting and engaging, and game-based approaches have
been proposed as one way to achieve this goal. We describe a paradigm based on Minecraft
that we have been using for basic research in psycholinguistics, the study of the cognitive
processes underlying language use. This approach provides us with a task that is interesting
for participants, elicits naturalistic language, and allows us to run controlled lab experiments.
Moreover, it demonstrates that level of engagement can have large effects on behavior. This
illustrates how platforms like Minecraft can provide us with a useful new tool for creating
studies that are more engaging, allowing us to examine research questions that we have not
been able to address using other techniques.

Context

Many researchers have argued that more engaged students show better learning outcomes
(Skinner & Belmont, 1993; Finn & Rock, 1997; Marks, 2000), and as a result, teachers want to
ensure that students remain engaged in the classroom. Level of engagement also plays a role
in basic research: laboratory experiments are often needed to address certain questions,
but these studies typically lack the naturalness of real-world environments and abstract
away from many details (Clarke, 1997; Wertsch, 1998). This can make the experiment much
less engaging, and it can unintentionally change participants’ behavior (Orne, 1962). Thus,
a major challenge for both researchers and teachers is to find ways for participants and
students to be highly engaged.

Several approaches for increasing student engagement, in particular, the use of technology
in classrooms (Kulik & Kulik, 1991) and game-based approaches to teaching and learning
(VanSickle, 1986; Moeller, Cootey, & McAllister, 2006), have been proposed. Though
debate about the effectiveness of some techniques continues (see Randel, Morris, Wetzel,
& Whitehill, 1992, and Vogel, Vogel, Cannon-Bowers, Bowers, Muse & Wright, 2006, for
reviews), previous work has shown that game-based approaches can increase engagement
and lead to better learning outcomes (Squire, 2003; Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Carteaux, &
Tuzun, 2005). Given this, we were interested in whether game-based tasks also provide a
way to increase participant engagement in the lab.

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To test this, we developed a platform for running experiments using Minecraft (see Chapter
2). Our research focuses on language use, and we used the game to create an experimental
task that is more interesting and engaging than those that are typically used in our field.
Often, in lab-based studies, participants do not use natural language—for example, their
speech lacks the typical prosody (details below) we see in real-world conversations. This
creates a challenge for researchers who, on the one hand, are interested in studying natural
language, and on the other, need to have the precise experimental control offered by a
laboratory setting. Game-based tasks provide a potential solution to this problem, and as
we show here, they allow us to create conditions where participants are more likely to use
natural language (i.e., they produce speech that is more characteristic of everyday language
use).

This study is not about Minecraft, per se, but rather, it provides an illustration of how
Minecraft (and games like it) can be used as a tool for research (on language use, or on
other topics), allowing us to study cognitive processes that we could not examine using
typical laboratory approaches. Although our study did not focus specifically on learning, it
may provide insights for educators who want to increase student engagement using similar
approaches, as well as ideas for researchers that struggle with engaging study participants.

In the following sections, we discuss ‘level of engagement’ as it pertains to education and

research in cognitive science, with a particular emphasis on our own field of psycholinguistics,
the study of how humans produce and understand language. Then, we describe our game-
based task to illustrate how it allows us to run controlled experiments in the lab, while creating
an environment that affords natural language use. Our study highlights how games like
Minecraft provide a platform for achieving higher degrees of engagement in the laboratory,
and more generally, how game-based approaches give us a tool for studying phenomena
that we would not have been able to study any other way.

A Discussion on Validity in Psychological Research

One reason we are particularly interested in game-based approaches is that they can provide
experimental control, and simultaneously, allow for more natural behavior. This allows us to
study a variety of cognitive processes usings tasks that participants find interesting. Similarly,
one way that teachers might increase student engagement is to make learning environments
richer and more stimulating. Indeed, the environment can affect learning in a number of
ways, and many researchers have discussed the importance of context on learning outcomes
(e.g., Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). This ties into the idea of studying phenomena in situ,
in the way they occur in the real world, something that has been advocated by researchers
in a number of fields (Clark, 1997; Hutchins, 1995), including education (Brown et al., 1989;
Halverson & Clifford, 2006; Squire & Dikkers, 2012). Although the research questions we
focus on here require studies in the lab, game-based approaches, in general, may also give
us measures that more closely reflect behavior outside the lab.

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The challenge faced by researchers is that it is often difficult to design studies that are
constrained enough to give us experimental control, yet flexible enough that they reflect
complex, real-world conditions. This is a general issue with trying to maximize the validity of
a study—the extent to which we can draw valid conclusions from it—since different aspects
of the study allow for different types of validity. For example, internal validity refers to the
extent to which the results are not explained by other factors, something that is typically
achieved via the precise control offered by lab experiments. Contrast this with external
validity: the extent to which results generalize to other situations, something that is typically
achieved through fieldwork and studies in real-world environments.

Internal and external validity are opposed to each other such that changes to a study that
increase one tend to decrease the other. As a result, there is no “perfect” experiment that
can completely maximize both. However, it is possible to find a balance between the two.
Game-based approaches, in particular, provide a way to do this, since they allow us to create
controlled virtual environments that afford more natural behavior than what we see in typical
lab settings. These issues apply to research studies in a number of fields, and they have been
particularly relevant in psycholinguistics. Research in this area spans a range of topics, from
understanding how listeners recognize speech, to understanding how sentence structure
is interpreted during reading, to understanding the representations and processes that
underlie discourse and conversation.

A great deal of psycholinguistic research has used laboratory experiments. However,

language produced in the lab can differ from real-world language in a number of ways. For
example, conversational speech depends on a collaborative effort between interlocutors
that take one another’s perspective and goals into account (Schober & Clark, 1989; Hanna,
Tanenhaus, & Trueswell, 2003; Nadig & Sedivy, 2002; but also see Keysar, Lin, & Barr, 2003;
Yoon, Koh, & Brown-Schmidt, 2012), but speakers’ goals may be very different in the real
world than they are in a constrained lab experiment. In a conversational setting, speakers
are generally motivated to be appropriately informative, since their communication has
real-world consequences. On the other hand, in a laboratory setting they might be more
motivated to simply accomplish the task quickly.

Given this, we need experiments that allow for natural language use in the lab. Virtual
environments provide a platform that may allow us to achieve this goal. Part of the appeal
of a sandbox-type game (like Minecraft), in particular, is that it allows us to quickly develop
complex environments with minimal programming.

A number of previous studies have used various types of virtual environments to study
cognitive processes. Virtual reality has been used to investigate phenomena ranging from
visual and tactile perception (Atkins, Jacobs, & Knill, 2003) to the ability to detect changes
in the environment (Triesch, Ballard, Hayhoe, & Sullivan, 2003). Game-based approaches, in
particular, have been used to study processes like selective visual attention (Green & Bavlier,

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2003). Other researchers have explored language use in virtual environments: Steinkuehler
(2003), for example, describes how multiplayer online games can provide a tool for studying
language. Together, these results suggest that virtual environments may offer a viable
platform for studying cognition in a way that allows for more participant engagement. As we
describe below, we found that they do.

Using a Computer Game for Research

We developed a technique using Minecraft (Persson & Bergensten, 2011)—specifically, a

customized version for education called MinecraftEdu (Koivisto, Levin, & Postari, 2012)—
to accommodate the need for greater participant engagement in our experiments. The
goal was to create a richer environment and more interesting task, while still allowing us
to address the research questions we were interested in. The game provides a platform
for doing this, since it gives us an immersive environment that can be precisely controlled.
Specifically, in our study, Minecraft provides a context in which we can observe particular
aspects of language use.

We used this approach to investigate how certain characteristics of prosody are used in
conversational speech (see Buxó-Lugo, Toscano, & Watson, submitted, for more details).
Prosody includes several aspects of language that describe how words are produced (as
opposed to what the words are), including properties like word stress and rhythm. For
example, the statement “We’re going to the store now?” is heard as a question when the
talker’s fundamental frequency (roughly corresponding to the pitch of her voice) rises for the
word now, whereas the same sequence of words, “We’re going to the store now.”, is heard as
a statement when it does not.

In Buxó-Lugo et al., we investigate how talkers convey information about discourse status
in a conversation by making certain words prosodically prominent (i.e., emphasizing them).
Discourse status refers to whether particular information is new in a conversation or has been
mentioned previously. For example, a talker might say “Give me the red one”, emphasizing
the word red to contrast it with some other color or to indicate that they are referring to a
new item that has not been mentioned previously in the conversation.

We were interested in which acoustic cues talkers use to convey discourse status in
conversations. That is, how does the speech signal change when a talker wants to indicate
to their partner that a particular piece of information in the conversation is new? Answering
this question is important, not only for understanding the processes underlying language
production and comprehension, but also for developing computer systems that take
discourse status into account when recognizing speech.

Previous work has suggested that there are a number of acoustic cues that the talker might
use and that listeners might take advantage of in interpreting discourse status (Wagner &

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Watson, 2010). These include word duration (talkers tend to indicate new information by
making words longer), intensity (discourse-new information tends to be perceived as louder),
and different aspects of the talker’s fundamental frequency (discourse-new information
tends to be produced with higher fundamental frequencies). However, previous studies that
have used typical laboratory tasks have found inconsistent effects when measuring these
cues. Thus, it seems as though talkers do not reliably convey discourse status, and as a
consequence, we might conclude that listeners would not be able to infer information about
prosody in a conversation.

Our goal was to see whether this was really the case, or whether talkers simply do not
produce realistic language in typical lab-based tasks. Specifically, we were interested in
whether talkers would convey discourse status more reliably if the task was more engaging,
making it more akin to natural conversation. Indeed, studies analyzing spontaneous speech,
which lacks the control needed to satisfy internal validity, have found that talkers use these
cues to a certain extent, though there has been disagreement about which cues provide
the most information (Kochanski, Grabe, Coleman, & Rosner, 2005; Kim, Yoon, Cole, &
Hasegawa-Johnson, 2006). Nonetheless, with more natural tasks, talkers may more reliably
convey discourse status information to a conversational partner.

Experiment Design and Results

The experiment consisted of two tasks. One was a picture description task, in which
participants saw sequences of colored squares on a computer display, and they were asked
to read the sequence aloud from left to right (e.g., “red, black, pink”). Then, they saw another
set of colors that was either (1) identical to the first, (2) a completely different set of colors,
or (3) a set where only the second color changed (e.g., “red, green, pink”). This allows us to
manipulate the discourse status of specific words (i.e., whether they were repeated or not)
and measure the acoustic properties of the words to see which cues (if any) talkers use to
convey differences in discourse status. This task is typical of those commonly used in lab
experiments studying prosody.

We contrasted this with a second task using Minecraft. We created a Minecraft world in which
two participants had to work together to cooperatively solve puzzles. The two “players” were
seated in physically different rooms and communicated through headsets. The world was
designed so that the players proceeded sequentially through a series of rooms, each of
which contained a puzzle that they needed to solve. Each room had a locked door, and after
solving the puzzle, the door would open, allowing the participants to proceed to the next
room.

Participants were given a brief (5-10 minute) introduction to the game and a tutorial on how
to control their character and interact with the environment. Then, they completed a series
of 36 puzzles in the game. They had as much time as they needed to complete each puzzle,

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and they continued until they reached the end or had been playing for one hour. Half of the
puzzles (18 trials; 9 unique puzzles) served as fillers meant to keep the game interesting. To
solve them, one participant generally had information that they needed to provide to their
partner.

Figure 1 shows an example of one of these puzzles. Here, the two participants have to work
together to move a block to a particular location. Pressing the colored buttons on the wall
will move the block in different directions. In this case, the participant has to tell their partner
to press the blue, pink, and yellow buttons in sequence to move the block to the correct
location. After they do this, the door will open and they can proceed to the next puzzle.
Other filler trials included games where participants needed to complete a maze, fire an
arrow at a target, or guide a minecart to a particular location. Critically, each of these puzzles
needed to be solved cooperatively by having the participants exchange information with
each other, creating situations that allowed for natural conversation.

Figure 1. Example of a puzzle in the experiment from one of the participant’s perspectives. The other participant’s
character (labeled as Player 1) can be seen in the top center of the figure.

The critical experimental trials consisted of puzzles where we manipulated the information
status of specific words in the discourse, just as we did in the picture description task. These
took the form of “combination locks” in which one player was given a code (a set of colors)
and the other player needed to enter it in the correct sequence to unlock the door and exit
the room. This allowed us to create trials in the game that corresponded to those in the more
typical (but less interesting) picture description task described above.

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Figure 2 provides an example of one of the “combination lock” trials. The two participants’
characters are located in different rooms and cannot see each other. The participant on the
left (Player 1) sees the sequence of red, black, and pink blocks on the wall. Her partner (Player
2) sees a set of colored buttons on his wall. To solve the puzzle and open the door, Player 1
tells her partner the first sequence (“red, black, pink”). After Player 2 presses those buttons
in the correct order, a new set of colors appears on the wall in Player 1’s room. She gives this
new sequence to her partner (“red, green, pink”) who presses the corresponding buttons,
solving the puzzle and triggering the doors to open. Both players then move on to the next
puzzle.

Importantly, we varied the color sequences in the same way as in the picture description
task. The same colors, color sequences, and trial orders were used in both tasks. Thus, the
only thing that differed was the task itself, where one task led to low levels of engagement
(picture description), and the other was much more interesting (the Minecraft task).

Player 1 red Player 2

black
pink

(1) Player 1 gives partner first color sequence

red (2) Player 2 clicks on corresponding buttons

green
pink

(3) Color
sequence
changes

(4) Player 1 gives partner second color sequence

Figure 2. Example of the sequence of events for one of the “combination lock” (discourse status) puzzles in
the experiment.

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The transcript below illustrates a typical exchange between two participants in the Minecraft
task on a trial in which the colors were different for each sequence (making all the colors in
the second sequence new to the discourse):

Player 1: Ok, now my order is black, red, and umm, blue.

Player 2: Ok.
[The color sequence changes for Player 1.]
P1: Ok, now, I have white, brown, and green.
P2: Ok.
[The door to the room opens after Player 2 enters the second sequence.]
P1: Ok, off we go!
Here, we are interested in how the participants emphasize the second set of colors to
distinguish it acoustically from the first set (e.g., the acoustic differences between the word
brown in the example above and the word brown spoken on a trial in which that color was
repeated).

Twenty-four pairs of participants were given the Minecraft task, and another 24 were given
the picture description task. We found that in the (more typical) picture description task,
participants did not provide very reliable information about discourse status. In contrast,
in the Minecraft task, participants provided information to their partner using a number of
acoustic cues. For example, differences in duration between discourse-new and discourse-
given words were larger in the Minecraft task (98 ms) than in the picture description task
(30 ms; see Buxó-Lugo et al. for details about the results). Thus, talkers provided more
information about the discourse status of these words in the game.

These results demonstrate that level of engagement matters. By providing participants

with a more interesting task, language use was more natural, and we were able to measure
properties of spoken language that we could not measure using typical laboratory
approaches.

Discussion and Application

The game-based task provided us with the balance we needed in the experiment: it was
constrained enough that we expected participants to say particular words (allowing us to
make the necessary acoustic measurements) but unconstrained enough that participants
engaged in natural conversations about the game. Although our task isn’t completely free of
any constraints (since participants are still instructed to solve the puzzles in the game), it offers
them much more flexibility. This allows us to have control over the stimuli and conditions,
but gives participants a more natural, and importantly, a more engaging task. The study
described above represents a middle-ground between more typical laboratory experiments
and analyses of real-world language that have no experimental control, satisfying (to some
degree) the demands of both internal and external validity.

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How do these results inform educational research and the utility of game-based approaches?
The current example provides preliminary evidence that more engaging environments can
have large effects on behavior, since we found that talkers provide information about prosody
more reliably in the game-based task than in the less interesting picture description task.
Given this, and the observation that level of engagement is related to student performance
(Skinner & Belmont, 1993; Finn & Rock, 1997; Marks, 2000), similar approaches might
translate to a variety of settings in education. For instance, our study could be used in a
science class to teach students how to design an experiment: it illustrates concepts such as
experimental control, independent and dependent variables, and randomization. The game
provides a concrete way to teach students about these ideas, and this may make them more
memorable.

Many of the other advantages that this approach provides, such as ease of use and flexibility
for a variety of tasks, may also be useful for teachers (Table 1). As we have shown here,
computer game approaches provide researchers with a tool for increasing participant
engagement, which in turn, allows us to study basic cognitive processes. For teachers,
increasing the level of student engagement is, in itself, beneficial and may lead to better
learning outcomes.

Table 1. Game-based approaches in research and classroom settings.

L ABOR ATORY RESEARCH CL ASSROOM USE

Level of engagement Higher Higher

Environment Richer stimuli More stimulating learning context

Ease of use High High

Effects More naturalistic behavior Improved learning

Can be used to study a range Can be used for a range

Flexibility/Adaptability
of cognitive processes of subjects

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The results of the experiment also mirror work in education on game-based approaches
(Squire, 2003; Barab et al., 2005). With respect to questions about language and literacy,
previous work has suggested that when students are able to choose topics in a game-based
task, they perform at a higher reading level (Steinkuehler, Compton-Lilly, & King, 2010).
The Minecraft task used in our experiment may have had a similar effect for us: by allowing
participants to choose their topic of conversation within the game, they may have been
more engaged and produced more natural language (in contrast to the picture description
task, where their speech was much more constrained by asking them to simply read the
color sequences).

This approach could be further extended to learning contexts. The experiment itself could
provide a useful platform for teaching students about language processing. By participating
in the experiment, students can gain a better understanding of the cognitive processes that
underlie language production, as well as a better sense of how researchers study these
processes.

These types of tasks could also be useful in language learning situations. If they produce
a higher level of engagement than other approaches, they could lead to more successful
outcomes. For researchers, this paradigm could also be adapted for studying other aspects
of language processing, and experiments using this approach could be constructed to
study many other cognitive processes (e.g., attention, working memory, executive function).
Because of the flexibility of computer-game platforms like Minecraft, a wide range of
environments can be constructed that are suited to studying specific phenomena. Thus,
many of the same benefits that we have outlined here can be gained by researchers in other
fields as well.

To conclude, we have demonstrated that a game-based approach can be used to increase

participant engagement in laboratory studies, providing a valuable experimental paradigm
for researchers. Thus, games like Minecraft are useful not only as teaching tools, but
also for scientific research. They offer a flexible, easy to use platform for increasing level
of engagement both inside and outside the classroom, and they open up a number of
possibilities for studying behavior in a way that few other techniques can.

149
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 CLOSING
The effort by myself and many others to better understand teaching and learning with new
media technologies is still ongoing. Even the focus on Minecraft will change by the time of this
publication and imitators/improvers will have already released new and exciting versions of
sandbox style, build anything, design spaces for players. However, I suggest that the fine art of
Teachercraft will remain the center of how we can apply of these new opportunities for teaching
and learning. Teachers will continue to become aware of, validate, experiment, appropriate, and
iterate on classroom lessons. They will continue in refining and assessing new media learning
each and every school day. If we want to improve schools, we need to likewise see and study
these amazing teachers and share their practices widely. We need to study exemplary teaching
with new media technology in order to train and support effective practice.

In Teachercraft, I have attempted to identify not only how to use a particular game, but how
teachers learn about and design new learning opportunities for their students. Where we
attempted to pack the outstanding ideas within the chapters also, this book is essentially an
extended research on formative data from a collection of exemplary educators. At its best, the
intent is to create and build on a conversation about how teachers go about their own learning.

Gaming media is a vibrant space for thousands of classroom supplements, activities, design
tools, and can inspire vocabulary and lesson design to be more playful in general. If the
patterns identified here hold true across digital media appropriation, then it may be the case
that our traditional models of lecture-based professional development (PD) are simply not as
applicable to how our innovative teachers actually learn for themselves. As delighted as I am
with the work in this book, I’m actually even more excited about what this can mean for the
design of professional development for teachers that have not yet learned about Minecraft, or
any other digital gaming for amplifying their classrooms. What if these patterns could inform
school wide PD programming? What if digital mediation of information simply can be learned
more easily using the patterns found in this book? What if Teachercrafters are actually waiting
in the majority of our teachers, we just haven’t yet shown them how to do it? Much more needs
to be explored to see if these findings are generalizable to other digital tools, other topics, and
other learning spaces.

Finally, I do hope this work has encouraged you to share, try, and tune into ongoing
development of Minecraft and mainstream game designs in general. As you try and innovate
yourself, please seek myself or any of these authors out and share what you are working on.
You never know, your story may end up in a book like this some day.

- Seann

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