Minecraft revolutionizes educational opportunities
The video game “Minecraft” provides a unique experience in which children are allowed to express their creativity, while still learning valuable information about computers and the surrounding environment. Photo Credit: edge-online.com
By Kenneth Lewis, Staff Writer
Children born in the 1980s and 1990s probably remember building with Legos. Those little bricks that your parents brought home and you could build anything you wanted out of them. You could be an architect and build a city. You could be an engineer and make cars and planes. You could even be a blacksmith and make swords if that was your game. Given these building blocks, your imagination held the limits.
With computers more abundant than they were twenty years ago, we now have a new source of creativity for youth: Minecraft. For those who do not know, Minecraft is a video game, made for many different gaming systems, where the world is in 16-bit, meaning everything looks blocky, and the objective—much like Legos—is to build whatever you wish. In this world, you can obtain resources by mining, killing animals, clearing tall grass areas and cutting trees down to build your own structures.
One of the most important aspects of the game that makes it so unique is that it does not try to attract people using complex storylines or amazing graphics; this is a game based entirely on creativity. There are normally no goals, which force the gamer to create objectives and coordinate with other players to build amazing structures. Minecraft not only spurs creativity, but can educate youths as well.
There are many expansions of Minecraft that players can download, which include maps of certain locations, such as Paris and Ancient Aztec temples, among others. Teachers use Minecraft to have students explore ancient civilizations, to understand how the world has changed and even to educate their students about certain ecological issues.
In Minecraft, the term “biomes” is used in reference to different regions of the world with varying ecological features (flora, temperature, heights, etc.). For example, there is a forest biome where trees, flowers, wolves and mushrooms exist. In contrast, the desert biome includes sand, stone, dead bushes, sugar cane and the occasional well.
There is also a modification players can download called “ Environmentalist Mode” in which a player’s objective is to save the creatures called “creepers” from going extinct by making sure their environment has enough water and food to sustain the population. The player can irrigate the land, grow crops and domesticate animals for food.
Although concerned parents believe video games may rot children’s brains, Minecraft has proved useful in many classrooms throughout the world. The game can also give students a new outlook on how to use the computer constructively for social interactions; rather than the hateful exchanges that some engage in on social media websites.
As with all video games, a child should not spend all of his or her time playing Minecraft; however, this game is clearly a new tool that can have some very positive effects in terms of the education and development of younger students. As technology progresses, this is simply the next step in enabling students to be more creative.
