Minecraft is not just fun – it's changing education | Hacker News Reader

Minecraft is not just fun – it's changing education

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20 pointsbdcravens9 comments

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 ), 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

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

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

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 ).

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.

Minecraft can be an immensely powerful learning tool, but it has to be carefully curated and controlled by a teacher- having played a lot of modded MC, most kids just do the bare minimum, or follow some tutorial online to get what they want. Of course, some branch out and do amazing things, which is what you want. Schools will fail to understand this (and fail to understand mods) so when the whole thing falls apart it will get ignored and cast off as "not workable" when in reality all that was needed was a teacher that understood.

Unfortunately, (especially in public schools) the teachers that end up teaching these are coaches that find out what they're teaching the month before school starts.

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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