Make It So: Mindcraft and Minecraft
You may have heard about a secondary school in Sweden that is using Minecraft to teach 13 year olds about city planning. If you haven’t heard . . . well you have now. So there you go.
This isn’t new. Minecraft and Second Life have have been used at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The Swedish class, however, focuses on a younger crowd, which probably means they instantly made their teachers feel distinctly unhip. Then also defeated their Pokemon.
Now Minecraft and Second Life are uniquely suited to education – they’re essentially construction and environment tools. I don’t see a class using, say, Borderlands 2 or Castlevania, as cool as that would be. Still, I think this is something for us nerds, geeks, and otaku to pay attention to.
We need to take this farther. Yes, it’s up to us, because we’re the people that play these things for hours on end. We know them, we understand them, we make them.
We need to take it farther because this is a great way to make education participatory. Construction, involvement, creation, projects. People learn best by doing – and games are great for doing. Boring forms and brain-deadening math problems suddenly become vital and exciting when you’re actually applying them.
We need to take it farther because there’s a huge skill base to use – people’s existing gaming skills and knowledge. They know the metaphors, the mechanics, and probably even played the games. That’s a giant body of information and abilities that could be used to build all sorts of amazing courses and educational experiences.
We need to take it farther because this is an art form (and yes, video games are an art) that is prominent and popular. It’s a common language as it were, one that’s more common all the time. Being that common, it’s a new way to learn, and we shouldn’t let it languish.
And we need to take it farther because without this, games as an art, an entertainment, and an educational tool just won’t grow. Right now some kid in Sweden is probably coming up with a fantastic game idea because school and Minecraft collided in his education.
Not every game is suited for education, true. Not every game should be. But if we apply what we have now, if we think of games as being more than we do now, who knows what wonders we’ll unleash and create.
I’d say that’s worth a little time.
So go on, look at these articles. Search for others. Shake up your college, school, tutorial website, what have you. Experiment, get inspired, get involved.
Let’s make it so.
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.
