Implementation of Minecraft in Education

Rebecca Zeng
Staff Writer

Minecraft, a game created by Markus Persson, gained its popularity among the youth, which has caused some teachers to look more closely at the video game.
Some educators claim that Minecraft has helped with teaching students art, geography and architecture by giving pupils the chance to learn in a virtual world.
However, there are some drawbacks to implementing Minecraft in the classroom. Playing a video game in order to learn skills at schools rely on the students’ amount of self-control and obedience; this may be considered a risky factor.

“[Implementing Minecraft] won’t be effective because [most] students will simply play Minecraft for the sake of playing, instead of learning the skills that Minecraft can teach,” freshman Tom Cheah said.

The implementations of Minecraft in the classroom all started with Joel Levin, who first introduced the game to his second grade computer class as a way to teach the kids about real life scenarios. Since then, he has helped co-found MinecraftEDU, which consists of a team of educators and programmers whose goal is to bring Minecraft to the classroom.

“We strongly feel that Minecraft is a fantastic tool for a broad range of subjects ranging from Computer Science to Art to Social Studies,” Levin said.