From Wooden Blocks and Lego to Minecraft: Designing and Playing with Blocks to Learn in a 3D Virtual World
Minecraft, a virtual 3D world game to fight nighttime monsters and a design environment for building shelters, strikes a balance between "want to" and "have to" participate, that is, students "want to" use it (self directed learning) and educators can impose constraints by knowledge (curriculumdriven learning) These two goals often seen as contradictory are reconciled by taking advantage of the unlimited number of opportunities block building and role playing provide, and treating learning as a constrained based design process. We are in the midst of organizing a pilot study of using Minecraft in a university course in education. We are interested in understanding Minecraft's capacity to engage students in learning and we conjecture there is a connection between building and playing in Minecraft and developing knowledge and skills. We survey related work and use a theoretical framework to guide our efforts. Our findings are preliminary with open issues for further research.
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