Minecraft in Education

[aero]

So this just launched and there's already a divide about how useful this is:

[Julia Pseudo]

Eh, it's kind of an interesting concept. I've heard of Minecraft being used in education before this edition was actually announced.

The only real problem I have with it is that a lot of the kids are probably already playing Minecraft outside of school, so I feel that for those kids, Minecraft in the classroom might not teach much more than what it can teach at home on its own.

[aero]

Eh, it's kind of an interesting concept. I've heard of Minecraft being used in education before this edition was actually announced.

The only real problem I have with it is that a lot of the kids are probably already playing Minecraft outside of school, so I feel that for those kids, Minecraft in the classroom might not teach much more than what it can teach at home on its own.

Yeah I get this concern. To me it seems like they're kidding themselves about how much the game can really do for education. I mean there are ways to integrate MineCraft into education such as for creative projects/modeling and stuff, but when it comes to teaching kids about biomes or whatever was specifically mentioned in that video it just seems too far out there.

The hour of code thing though reminded me of this video by Veritasium because he talks about basically the same exact thing being tried with teaching kids procedural reasoning skills:

[Nato]

It say it depends on the objective your trying to go for (i.e what your trying to teach) when you integrate gaming into education. Using minecraft to teach, for example, physics can only go so far with teaching a person until supplementary lessons are needed to pick up what minecraft can't teach you. If there are ways to maximize the effectiveness of the games to be as goof if not better then that's good.

Right now all we need is a proof of concept that it works to that effect which probably exist somewhere. Then it needs media bias to favor "Gamification".


There are also people who simply might not like gaming, so taking into account they're probably not represented in the debate as were a gaming forum.

[migueeel]

I can see it being used for some logic stuff (redstone is very visual and helps a lot), or art projects like build contests.
Maybe a server that is always open to hook up with your friends from home?