Minecraft's Introduction to Garrison Forest School

Back in November I found myself having more and more conversations with faculty concerning how to use Minecraft as an engaging educational platform. Many of the students already played Minecraft outside of school and I had noticed this only shortly after I began my first full-year here in 2012. Oftentimes while working on a student's laptops I'd see a shortcut for Minecraft or Steam and it got me curious as to the number of students who might identify themselves as gamers. More specifically, what games are they playing and why? As a lifelong gamer, this put a thought in the back of my head that maybe one day I'll ask to start an after-school gaming club or maybe teach programming courses as this could be a similar interest for these types of students. Instead, I ended up with MinecraftEdu as my platform for gaming education. Thus far, it has been received extremely well by the school which I hope will pave the way for even more educational gaming.

Garrison Forest School, for any readers who may not know, is an all-girls' K-12 independent school with a coed preschool. If you are anything like I used to be, you might think there is a large disparity in the number of female gamers versus male gamers. This is not the case. I was more than delighted to discover statistical analyses showing the genders are represented almost equally. Some suggest the current number of female gamers constitutes as much as 45% of the gaming community which is rather far off from what I would have figured. Other studies seemingly explain why this misconception exist and it turns out that the real gender disparity is with the excessive numbers of male characters in video games compared to female characters. That topic, however, is to be saved for another day.

Conversation surrounding Minecraft was becoming more frequent in the Lower and Middle Schools and it wasn't long before I was approached about running a course for the Middle School Minimester. One week is designated in January where normal academic routine is scrapped and various courses are offered to the students. The focus is less on academics and more on creativity and fun with topics that wouldn't normally be covered in class. Cooking, photography, film production, and even pickle ball are available in either the morning or afternoon. Minecraft was added to that list practically at the the last minute which left me with a little more than two months to learn the game, set up the local server, and prepare for a whole week of activities. With a background purely in IT, I was a bit overwhelmed and anxious about everything.

Lucky for me there are people like Joel Levin, Santeri Koivisto, and Aleksi Postari who comprise a team of software developers known as TeacherGaming. They are practitioners of Game-based Education and developed MinecraftEdu as a way to bridge the gap between teacher and student, game and learning platform. As far as I can tell, they are the first and seemingly only group to offer something like this to the public and it comes at an extremely reasonable cost. I contacted them after spending only a short period of time watching their informative videos and inquired about educational licensing. They were quick to respond, process the order, and provide the MCEdu software as a packaged download. The server was up and running the day after I received the email concerning the download, but I had only spent a moderate amount of time at home playing the game and would need to get more up-to-speed.

Two 8th grade students seemed to be particularly avid Minecraft players as I had seen the game on their laptops during Tech Time and continued to hear them talking about the game here and there. I asked a handful of teachers about them and it had pretty much confirmed my suspicions that they play the game very frequently at home yet they are both bright students. Perfect, I thought. I'll see if I can enlist their help to give me a crash-course in what's "cool" in Minecraft. I didn't need to learn the mechanics of playing a first-person PC game as I had started that when I was a kid with games like Doom. No. I needed to understand the perspective of an 8th grader playing Minecraft and, more importantly, the perspective of a girl playing Minecraft. It wouldn't be much of a question for me if they were 8th grade boys as I can recall myself at that exact age playing Half-Life for hours and hours and would easily be able to translate that to Minecraft. These two students were essentially going to shape the directive of the course so that I didn't end up creating something the class may find unappealing.

I scheduled a time after classes were over one day to have them meet in the Media Room and simply tell me what they like and what they would like do during the course. The level of enthusiasm and eagerness to help me was incredible. It was almost as though they couldn't catch their breath between telling me stories about their adventures, structures they created, and vast selection of available mods and plugins. Maybe, I thought, I was in way more than I bargained for, but after a few meetings we planned to do two of the standard gamemodes: Creative and Survival.

Survival Mode pits the players against the pressures of the randomly-generated world in which they must gather food, craft weapons and armor, build structures for shelter, and, when the sun goes down for the night, fend off the monsters. There are numerous ways to play survival mode, but I decided the most appropriate way to have them play Survival Mode was to delegate an experienced player to each lead one of three groups with various tasks: Food Collection, Resource Mining, and Building. It would be a good teamwork exercise while allowing them to socialize and enjoy the game in its "vanilla" state as they would play at home.

Alternatively, Creative Mode is known as a "sandbox" style gamemode such that players have immediate access to the entire inventory and can build with no restrictions; the world is theirs to shape. For this gamemode I wanted to have them re-create the Middle School building within our world using floor plans I acquired from the maintenance team. I already had the floor plans for the Marshall Offutt building with which I was nearing completion and I spent a great deal of time developing an in-game measurement scale that we would use for the MS building. In my mind, if Minecraft continued to happen at this school, eventually we would be able to build a full replica of the campus for the students to explore.

By this time, we had just returned from Christmas break and the minimester was scheduled for the third week of January. Some time in between I had been invited by another teacher to attend a Minecraft Workshop in DC which proved to be very informative and gave me a bit more confidence since so many other schools were wanting to try this. We must be on to something good here. The amount of buzz coming from the students and faculty combined with the quickly expanding amount of online content suggesting positive benefits from Game-based Education was surely pointing us in the right direction. However, no amount of research or practicing the game could fully prepare me for a week of playing video games. With kids. At work.