Video game ‘Minecraft’ finds a home in schools

By John Keilman, Chicago Tribune

Sunday, May 4, 2014 | 2 a.m.

Seventh-graders at Northbrook's Maple School had just started learning about the Cold War when a handful of boys sat down at the school's library computers to cement their understanding of the subject.

They weren't scouring Wikipedia for historical information or reviewing old news footage on YouTube. They were building a model of divided Germany with the help of one of the world's hottest video games: "Minecraft."

"It's really a great visual tool for presenting our knowledge, just like you would use something like PowerPoint to show off your research," said Arie Estrin, 12, who was assembling a nuclear submarine, block by digital block. "That's what we do with 'Minecraft.' It's a good way to channel your thoughts into understanding how something might have actually looked or happened."

A game like "Minecraft" might seem better suited for the rec room than the classroom, but more and more teachers are tapping its creative power to educate students in everything from history to engineering to biology.

It's part of a movement that aims to motivate kids through familiar and beloved technology. Teachers are using games such as "Assassin's Creed" to illustrate the Revolutionary War and "World of Warcraft" to inspire creative writing exercises, but nothing has had the impact of "Minecraft," which has more than 100 million registered users worldwide.

"It's virtual Legos," said Zack Gilbert, a sixth-grade teacher in Normal, Ill., who hosts a podcast on gaming in education. "When parents are like, 'I don't know (about the merit of using video games in class),' I say, 'Did you play Legos as a kid?'

"That's what this is, except it's virtual and there's more building and creating than you could ever do (in the real world)."

"Minecraft" was the brainchild of Markus Persson, a Swedish game designer enchanted by the relatively simple graphics and open-ended play of the games he encountered in his youth. Released in 2009, "Minecraft" lets users build almost anything they can imagine out of multicolored cubes.

The results are frequently stunning. YouTube is teeming with guided tours of highly detailed "Minecraft" worlds, ranging from university libraries and New York City skyscrapers to the fantasy lands of "Game of Thrones" and "Harry Potter."

Northwestern University student Ben Rothman spent hundreds of hours rendering the school's campus on "Minecraft" two years ago, then ran his creation through a 3-D printer. The resulting model, roughly 5 feet by 4 feet, was put on display in the lobby of the university's Technological Institute.

"The main driving force was that I noticed that I had been spending 20 hours a week playing video games," said Rothman, 22. "I figured, 'I'm going to do this anyway. Why don't I do something that will let me play but also get something out of it?' "

That's a pretty good summation of the recipe that has helped "Minecraft" catch on at hundreds of schools worldwide. Joel Levin, a former teacher who helped create a version of the game for educators, said his young daughter picked up sophisticated math skills such as estimation and proportion merely by building a "Minecraft" house.

"'Minecraft' is offering teachers a new type of learning experience, but the secret sauce is that kids are engaged," said Levin, whose company, TeacherGaming, has sold the "MinecraftEdu" version of the game to 2,500 schools worldwide. "They love it. They want to do it."

Some kids want to do it so much that they sign up for weekend or summer classes that use "Minecraft" as a teaching tool. Dana Stewart, who teaches a course for Northwestern's Center for Talent Development, has her students build ancient Egyptian structures with the game, a lesson that requires them to contemplate design issues and available building materials.

"It's an experience you can't replicate any other way," Stewart said. "It's kind of, sort of, like walking through it in real life."

Jana Sebestik, who works at the University of Illinois' Office for Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education, teaches contemporary lessons with the game. She had university students build a nuclear plant and windmill farm in a "Minecraft" world, then asked middle schoolers in Urbana to construct houses that share the same virtual power grid.

The idea is to use a game that kids love to introduce them to real-world science and engineering problems and to kindle an interest in the subjects, which Sebestik hopes will last to high school and beyond.

"Middle school is the place you can catch a kid and create enthusiasm," she said. "By the time a kid is in high school, they've already crossed things off their list."

Quest Academy, a private school in Palatine, has incorporated the game into Heidi Senetra's fifth-grade class this year, using it to reinforce lessons on J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit." Since November, students have been building their own fantasy worlds — designed to be populated by virtual dragons — and writing about the adventures they have there.

Amelia Landau, 11, who was creating a realm called "Fading Soul Island" beneath clouds of spider webs, said the game has allowed her to let her creativity run wild.

"'Minecraft' is a nice way to make your imagination fly a little bit better," she said. "If you want to create a huge sculpture, you can do that easily with thousands upon thousands of materials."

Though more schools are adopting the game for the classroom, some academics wonder if its appeal will be limited to districts with relatively generous budgets and high-achieving students.

Maria Cipollone, a Ph.D. candidate in media and communication at Temple University, recently used the game in a research project at a Philadelphia public school, asking kids to re-create famous buildings such as Rockefeller Center in "Minecraft."

She found that while the game helped the students develop conceptual math skills such as estimating proportions, it didn't translate into the sort of arithmetic prowess that would boost a standardized test score.

"I think what you find is that there's so much crisis education going on that there's no space for tools like 'Minecraft,' " she said.

But Dan Rezac, a technology specialist at Maple School in Northbrook, said that when kids do get a chance to play, the results can be amazing.

"With 'Minecraft,' they can build anything," he said. "They can learn social skills so they can work together with other people, who may not be in the same room, to build worlds and lands and objects, or, as one of our kids was saying, to re-create the human body so they can test diseases on it. There are really just limitless possibilities."