These NPCs can link to external resources, like those published by PBS or the History Channel-“a seamless in and out of game experience, to have students go to other sites to learn and gather other research information,” Rami explained. Teachers can use digital chalkboards to share content and program non-playable characters (NPCs) to interact with students. In groups of two or three, they can create structures that show where Egyptians ate and lived. Students can start with a digital field trip mediated by the game world. This flat world can be made up of sand blocks-a literal sandbox. A class could start with a “flat world”-one with no trees or hills, a blank virtual slate to build on. In an example more directly connected to education, Rami shared how a learning experience on ancient Egyptian history could run in the Minecraft sandbox. The opportunity for high-quality tinkering with items in Minecraft is as vast as the player’s imagination. For example, stacking a pumpkin block on two snow blocks results in a snow golem.
The nearly limitless number of items in Creative mode can be combined to create some surprises. “Once we start providing students with rich, engaging learning opportunities, fear of off-task behavior reduces,” she said. What’s more, games are often so engaging that students want to stay on task. These teachers tend to build learning by encouraging exploration and discovery rather than fixating on controlling play. I recently spoke with Rami-who is active in the Connected Learning in Teacher Education network, to which I also belong-about how teachers have adapted Minecraft in their classrooms.
#Minecraft play for free high school download#
If you use Minecraft: Education Edition with your students, for example, and you download classroom resources such as the Oregon Trail or Roald Dahl’s James and The Giant Peach lesson plans, you don’t want your students wandering off and disappearing into the digital wilderness.Įducation Edition has Border Blocks that a teacher can use to prevent students from leaving the area being used for a lesson, but Microsoft’s Meenoo Rami, manager of the Global Minecraft Mentor Program and a former English teacher, has not seen many teachers using this feature. Sandbox games can overwhelm-they can be unpredictable, and kids can go off task. Similarly, MIT’s Mitchel Resnick (of Scratch programming language fame) places high value on tinkering-in his book Lifelong Kindergarten, he writes, “Tinkering breeds creativity.” The Minecraft Sandbox Games scholar James Paul Gee refers to this kind of open-ended learning as “mucking around.” He describes learning environments that “allow children to take risks, try different things, and fail without a high cost.” These aren’t necessarily digital-you can muck around with Legos or cardboard boxes.