Minecraft in Education

It turns out you can use Minecraft to teach almost anything.

according to many millions of users, including some Concordia faculty and students, Minecraft's malleability is its strength. Free from constraints and easily modifiable, the game can be used in countless ways, including as a game-based teaching method. In a period when classrooms have had to pivot online with little warning or prep time, the realm of Minecraft has provided educators with a massive sandbox in which to play, experiment and teach.

Darren Wershler, professor of English, and Bart Simon, associate professor of sociology and director of Concordia's Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology, describes how Wershler used Minecraft to teach a class on the history and culture of modernity. The course was based entirely within the game server, with instructions, in-class communication and course work almost exclusively carried out within the Minecraft world and over the messaging app Discord. This new pedagogical framework presented the researchers with the opportunity to see how the students used the game to achieve academic goals.

He admits to being happily surprised with how well his students adapted to the parameters of the course he co-designed along with a dozen other interdisciplinary researchers at Concordia. Wershler has been using Minecraft in his course since 2014, but he realized this approach created a scaffold for a new style of teaching.

"Educators at the high school, college and university levels can use these principles and tools to teach a whole variety of subjects within the game," he says. "There is no reason why we could not do this with architecture, design, engineering, computer science as well as history, cultural studies or sociology. There are countless ways to structure this to make it work."