Educators in our Special Interest Group for Virtual Environments (SIGVE) have developed a community of practice for exploring the educational possibilities of online environments such as Machinima and Minecraft. In honor of Member Appreciation Month, SIGVE has compiled the following resources to help you delve into the vast learning potential of virtual environments.
by Victoria Zelvin. Not too long ago, I briefly touched on some video games that are already making a difference in classrooms. Included in that list was the very popular game Minecraft, which is being used as a teaching tool already.
The kids in principal Matt Renwick's afterschool computer club love the time they spend creating (and destroying) things in the virtual world of Minecraft. Can these experiences help students develop a "growth mindset" and essential lifelong skills like effort, persistence, and positive attitude? Renwick is beginning to think so.
How-to Minecraft videos.
Minecraft is an amazing game thanks largely to a massive community of creative individuals who spend their free time tweaking, modifying, and overhauling just about every aspect of the experience.
This article emerges from Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies and their effects on policy and society. On Thursday, Future Tense will host an event called "Getting Schooled by a Third Grader: What Kids' Gaming, Tweeting, Streaming, and...
By Katrina Schwartz Educators have been tapping into the wildly popular online game Minecraft for its potential as a learning tool for a while now - to teach physics, math, and computer science. But until recently, the game was mostly the territory of computer science teachers, and even they were forced to use the commercial version of the online game.
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Welcome to the MinecraftEdu Wiki! Every day, more and more teachers are using the world-building game Minecraft to engage and educate. The game is a true phenomenon and gamers young and old are using it in countless creative ways. Practitioners of Games Based Education have realized the potential and have embraced Minecraft in classrooms around the world.
Yesterday and today my 10 year old daughter and I played Minecraft for at least six combined hours. What fun we had together! Playing Minecraft as we did is absolutely a "flow" experience for me, and likely for her as well. We lose track of time, as we are so engrossed and engaged in what we are doing.
The model consists of about 4000 billion bricks, and is already being used in schools to teach geography and maths.
I was, of course, a noob about to die inside Minecraft. Calling Minecraft a game doesn't do it justice; Available on nearly every device where games can be played, from computers and consoles to smartphones, Minecraft boasts more than 100 million registered players, many of them barely out of kindergarten.
The days of video games being restricted to an after-school activity are quickly becoming numbered, as teachers continue to find fresh applications for game-based learning. John Kielman wrote about "Minecraft"'s impact on K-12 classrooms in an April 28 article in The Chicago Tribune , saying the game's "virtual LEGOs" motivate kids through a technology that's fun and familiar to them.
Gaming, including Minecraft, has important implications for students Gaming is gaining more and more momentum in education, and one of the most popular games today is Minecraft, which educators are using in innovative ways in classrooms across the country. Minecraft is a "sandbox" game that includes game-like components but offers users flexibility to build the game in any way they desire.
Minecraft might be the most important and influential indie of all time, but how much do you really know about this block buster video game? (See what we did there?) We've assembled five fresh facts for you to build your knowledge of the sandbox smash hit.
Minecraft. Perhaps you've heard of it. Writer Laura McKenna argues that it's so popular with autistic children that in a classroom, the game could essentially serve as the great equalizer between autistic and non-autistic students. I agree that many autistic folks I know love their Minecraft, but there is also a bucketload of children (and let's face it, adults) out there who love it, too.
Taylorsville * Minecraft explorers worldwide excavate sand to smelt into glass, diamonds to hone into swords and redstone to power millions of digital creations. Amber Palmer's fifth-graders visit the Minecraft universe to dig into U.S. history.
As coding becomes the lingua franca of the future, girls are still hesitant to embrace it. Last year, only 18.5 percent of those who took the AP computer science test were girls, a slight drop from the previous year.
"What's it called again, Craftmine?" I wondered aloud with a confused look on my face to a classroom full of nine year olds, playing dumb the whole time. "It's MINECRAFT!" they all yelled back in unison, smiling and laughing at how out-of-touch their teacher was with their world.
The following is a guest post written by Bo Gorcesky, a Middle school Media Arts teacher passionate about sharing educational technology findings. Once an independent filmmaker, Bo now touches lives with technology. Minecraft is a $7 app that I use with a class set of iPads during my media arts class.
Do your kids love Minecraft? Why not take advantage of that and use Minecraft to help teach history, science, language arts and more? There are dozens of wonderful sites on the internet designed to help parents and teachers use Minecraft to teach kids. Here's some of the best.
At the time of this writing, Minecraft had sold over 16.2 Million copies of the desktop PC/Mac edition. The "Pocket Edition" (for tablets and smartphones): 21 Million copies. Add in XBOX and PS3 sales and it makes it to number three on Wikipedia's best-selling video games of all time list [...]
It's almost inevitable: I encounter somewhere online-it's easy to do, because there's a lot of Minecraft out there-and I end up convinced I'm doing the wrong thing with my life. Let me explain. Briefly, for the uninitiated: Minecraft is a video game, first released in 2009 as a buggy prototype by a solo Swedish programmer named Markus Persson.
Last month, Scientific American declared, "... not only is Minecraft immersive and creative, but it is an excellent platform for making almost any subject area more engaging." That's a nod from a top science magazine to the game many parents wish their kids had never heard of.
Need more convincing that Minecraft can be a powerful tool for learning? Check out this fun video from PBS Idea Channel's Mike Rugnetta, who specifically (and very quickly) lists a number of ways the video game can and has been used to learn everything from physics to history.
