
Minecraft is not just fun – it's changing education - bdcravens
http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-08-06/when-video-games-are-educational-they-are-fun
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pdkl95
Minecraft - especially _modded_ [1] Minecraft - is not just good for
education; I believe it gives first-hand experience in on of the most
important lessons for the future, which is the value of _automation_. In a
future where "humans need not apply"[2], knowing how to automate tasks is one
of the best skills you can have.

In modded Minecraft, some of the fancier equipment has very high resource
costs. Most people figure out very quickly that _manually_ mining for several
thousand iron blocks and hundreds of diamonds is a waste of time, so they
learn to instead invest in the automated quarry robots. Later on, when their
chests are overflowing, the Applied Energitics[3] "(literal) storage area
network" becomes a priority. Some of the more recent mods require things like
"8x compressed cobblestone" (9:1 compression, requires 9^8 = 43,046,721
cobblestone) which are so expensive they are not actually possible to make
without automation.

Learning to say "lets build a machine to do that" when faced with a repetitive
task may be one of the few jobs that exists in the future, and I've seen quite
a few youtube videos where people of all ages discovered the lesson on their
own by playing Minecraft.

[1] An archetypal example might be Jadedcat's "Agrarian Skies" modpacks (
[http://ftb.gamepedia.com/Agrarian_Skies:_Hardcore_Quest](http://ftb.gamepedia.com/Agrarian_Skies:_Hardcore_Quest)
), which are empty "skyblock" maps where you start with a minimum set of items
(e.g. a dirt block and a sapling) and grow those into silly amounts of
automation that can build just about anything in the game.

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

[3] [http://ae-mod.info/About-Applied-Energistics/](http://ae-mod.info/About-
Applied-Energistics/)

/* and if you want to take this to a silly and frustrating extreme, try
_GregTech_ */

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FloNeu
Agreed, these are things you can take away from playing minecraft... and we
are on the same page, if we both think computer-games are an awesome way for
explorative learning and creative development.

But still this doesn't change anything in the way our educational system
works... Even if you see it as a new tool... i highly doubt you can build
traditional courses around minecraft ( because some will love it and use it,
while others will not see the potential and would just use it as another
internet-surfing course. ) But as our educational systems fail more and more,
bores us to death... motivation towards autodidactical styles of learning
rise... and i think this is what we see in the sometimes incredible outcomes
of minecraft games.

As it seems the empty canvas and creative outlet for people ( i admit i never
played it and therefore can't fully understand the hype around it ).

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baerga
I'm not sure it would be new courses; but it would be new manners to do
projects and present, much like PowerPoint was introduced decades ago. It's
right there alongside the course, like a chem lab is right behind the desks in
chemistry class.

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byron_fast
Always amazes me that someone can talk about Minecraft in education without
mentioning ComputerCraft, and the EDU variant:
[http://computercraftedu.com/](http://computercraftedu.com/)

Simply the best way for kids to learn programming ever made.

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FloNeu
Ok, this article is just weak... Kids are using minecraft to live out their
creativity... So how is this changing education? They are not learning how to
be creative ( at least i see no prove for that in this read), they just
exercise the skills they already have, which of course will train their
creative muscles. Maybe you can say minecraft is a superior tool for doing so,
as it doesn't enforce phisical limits ( and maybe introduces new challenges
like mentioned materials etc. ). I read this because i expected something like
the claims they made for second live, while i was in university, which we used
for online courses ( also building auditoriums and stuff ) and soon failed to
deliver the platform for courses with user-interactions and so on...

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pdkl95
For traditional education, Minecraft serves two purposes: 1) it gets kids
interested, and 2) it's a blank canvas the teacher can use similar to how they
use a blackboard or any other teaching aid.

As usual in education, tools like Minecraft do not work _on their own_ (save
more maybe the creative uses you mentioned). The teacher still has to be able
to use the tool effectively.

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germinalphrase
And have the time to build the appropriate constructs for the learning to take
place within. The knowledge that minecraft could be a useful learning
environment hardly means that it is a practical one.

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pdkl95
That's true for any teaching aid. Teaching is a hard, time-consuming process.
The fact that some teachers have used Minecraft very successfully in their
lessons proves it can be practical. It's up to the teacher to decide if they
can use it practically in their lessons.

Software tools (in general, not just Minecraft) could become a lot more
practical in the future if the community creates a CPAN/rubygems/npm style
archive.

