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Design and evaluate a stem-oriented education teaching plan by exploiting the strength of minecraft education game-based platform
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This research is determined to investigate the effects of STEM activities practiced by using digital games in 6th-grade science classes on students’ level of interest in STEM fields and their scientific creativity. As a digital game, Minecraft Education Edition was applied. As a data collecting tool for this survey, the STEM Career Interest Survey and Scientific Creativity Scale were used in the quantitative part and semi-structured interview forms were used in the qualitative part of the study. As a result of the research, it was seen that there is a statistically significant difference between the scientific creativity and STEM interest levels of students in favor of the posttest. In order to investigate the results obtained from the quantitative data more deeply, the students' remarks on STEM education were scrutinized. Students have stated that they were constantly in communication with each other as they had been working as teams throughout the application process inside the Minecraft world, shared decision making processes and that this situation enabled them to learn to respect different ideas; they were fully active during the application of the lessons and thus the information was more consistent; and that the education process was both instructing and informative.
This study explored the educational potential of Minecraft, which has been widely used since its first release in 2009. Articles about Minecraft were searched for in ProQuest. Data were gathered from 28 articles that were indicative of three categories: integration into curriculum; student engagement, interest, and enthusiasm; and knowledge and skills acquisition. By using Minecraft, students acquire knowledge and skills and are also engaged, interested, and enthusiastic when Minecraft is employed in science, math, social sciences, and language arts and composition classes. Challenges with using Minecraft in the classroom include the lack of focused learning objectives, inflexible curriculum, and no previous gaming skills. Nevertheless, Minecraft holds potential for game-based teaching and learning. Successful integration of Minecraft into the teaching and learning environments requires teacher-centeredness versus learner-centeredness.
The purpose of this research is to give children a geographical viewpoint, and to encourage an interest in, and awareness of, landforms and geology. We created a system based on an exploration type computer game and verified the educational effects. Moreover, we aim to reach not only the virtual aspect but we also have a goal of creating interest in the actual field. As a secondary effect, by using a computer game that attracts children’s interest, we aim to make the experience of solving issues subjective and active even if the player is a passive child, a child with little inquiry, or a child who is not adept at self-assertion. With this new approach, we also hope to interact with young generations who usually do not interact with researchers.
Many thematic maps of geography and geology are already published on the Web. They are popular among those who need to collect and view the information for some reason or with those who are interested in observing topographic maps and are interested in geology. However, in particular, the approach to children who do not have such motivation needs one more step: a mechanism to induce an inquiring mind, and a mechanism that leads to finding the information and having interest in the real field.
The platform of this research is Minecraft Education Edition (Mojang/Microsoft). Minecraft is very popular game software which has exceeded one hundred million users worldwide in recent years, and in Japan there are many elementary and junior high school student enthusiasts of Minecraft. In the game a user explores a virtual world made of cubic blocks. The blocks imitate vegetation, rock formations, and other items, and can create various puzzles. In recent years, the release of the Education Edition assumes use in classrooms.
In this research, we have constructed a virtual world tailored to a specific junior high school which teaches science classes to first grade students. First, we re-created the actual school buildings and also included the underground geologic strata based on data from boring. In addition, we created a mechanism to expand children’s imagination and knowledge about past environments which can be understood from the geological strata. We also provided checkpoints and gave challenges regarding knowledge about the formation of the land. Together with this modern world, we created ancient virtual worlds so users may understand the geological history around the school’s location.
Through the experience of this research, we were able to confirm the mechanisms for promoting motivation in children and aiding their understanding of science. It can be applied to systems other than Minecraft, and it can contribute to educational support in a wide variety of fields.
1. Minecraft: Popular and relevant for education With over 110M players, 241M logins per month, and 2B+ hours played on Xbox alone 1 , in 2016 the video game Minecraft ascended to be the second most popular game in history, passing Grand Theft Auto V but still well behind Tetris (Peckham, 2016). One way to think about its reach and appeal is that millions of children worldwide decide on a daily basis to interact deeply and meaningfully with a game that is essentially a simulation of the natural world. We believe it is likely that this vast amount of time spent playing Minecraft is influencing the way children think about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), and are engaged in a research project that explores this question. Because of its flexibility, appeal, and inherent connections to STEM learning, Minecraft has seen a dramatic rise in its adoption by educators worldwide who are using it as a platform for student projects, sharing, and learning (Schifter & Cipollone, 2013; Schwartz, 2015). Interactions in Minecraft involve a broad range of educationally relevant content (Lane & Yi, 2017): Exploring and investigating different biomes and climates that match those on Earth, including deserts, forests, jungles, taigas, and many others. Navigating in and around different types of terrain, such as hills, mountains, caverns, caves, oceans, and more. Interacting with a wide variety of wildlife and agricultural content, including animals, fish, birds, wheat, grass, fruits, vegetables, and a long list of fictional content. Searching for, mining, collecting, and combining many different resources such as different kinds of wood, stone, metal, dirt, and more. Building electrical circuits, switches, complex machines, and automated farms. Players have even reconstructed world wonders, many of which can be found online (e.g. YouTube, dedicated servers). For example, the Taj Mahal is a popular project, as are fictional places, such as Westeros from the Game of Thrones. To achieve such feats of engineering, players often work collaboratively by planning and coordinating their tasks. They assume roles (e.g., mining for resources, planning a base/fort, crafting tools and weapons, etc.), work iteratively to refine their creations, and of course, share their work with friends, family, and the online community. Thus, not only is there a need to better understand how Minecraft may frame STEM learning generally, there is also a need to provide research-based support for its use in specific contexts and educational settings. 2. Top level categories of Minecraft activities Soon after its release in 2009, educational uses of Minecraft quickly appeared online via teacher blogs, YouTube videos, and in educational technology news sites. Arguments for its appeal for STEM learning were often intuitive and compelling (Short, 2012), and its rapid adoption ultimately lead to Microsoft's release of Minecraft: Education Edition, a version of the game that comes prepackaged with tools specifically for teachers and classroom uses. 2 However, despite the success and rapid rise of Minecraft as a learning environment, very little effort has gone into formalizing its various connections to STEM. If the game continues to be popular in educational settings and we are to work towards evidence-based practices, it will be important to provide a substrate for the activities learners perform while playing. The goal of our taxonomy is to act as one possible foundation for more rigor in examining Minecraft. We seek a thorough, although certainly not comprehensive, overview of everything you can do in Minecraft.
This article describes a recent teacher researcher's investigation of digitized literature study at a Midwestern U.S. high school during the 2015–2016 school year that explored the use of digital literacies to support student-centered literary analysis. Digital literacy practices position literature students to connect with texts in authentic ways. In their reading of The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, students used the video game Minecraft to re-create scenes, respond to literary elements, and analyze deeper meanings. The analyses of one particular student resulted in powerful explorations of identity. Using qualitative research tools, the author analyzed her case through observations, interviews, and student-created artifacts to understand how this popular technology could facilitate literary analysis at the secondary level.
Minecraft is the best-selling and the most popular digital sandbox games, allowing children to freely create their own buildings and objects. It has been widely used in education. In this research, we developed a real-scale Forbidden City in Minecraft, as a history education platform for Hong Kong secondary schools. The platform allows teachers to manage the class in Minecraft, meanwhile preserving the freedom for students to explore, collaborate, and create. We piloted the platform with 3 teachers and 50 students, and collected feedbacks on the teaching and the learning experience, for future development.
This article explores six effective principles for teachers to use to understand and apply Minecraft in today’s classrooms. Video games have become one of the fastest growing forms of media for youth and adult consumers. Minecraft, a multiplayer online game (MOG), is one of the most popular video games to date. By allowing its players to build simulated, virtual worlds, Minecraft aims to foster creativity, control, and imagination. Yet while the affordances of playing Minecraft spark collaborative learning, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills among youth, one constraint still remains: there appears to be a disconnect between some teachers’ and parents’ understandings about the Minecraft world’s mechanisms, uses, and benefits. Due to the success of Minecraft in the digital era and in some schools, studying this game is significant. For instance, students bene t from using Minecraft to enhance learning in STEM/STEAM [Science, Technology, Engineering, (Arts), and Math] and English Language Arts content areas. In addition, teachers bene t from us- ing Minecraft to increase academic engagement with students and reinforce parental involvement. is article (a) provides an examination of educational research on the use of Minecraft in classrooms; (b) suggests educational benefits for students and practical classroom approaches for teachers from various disciplines; and (c) presents a handout for teachers to share with parents about what they need to know and use to support their children’s literacy practices and learning while playing Minecraft.
Spatial skills belong to a group of functions and capacities that allow for the manipulation and processing of spatial information. Spatial skills are essential in STEM fields where students need to imagine objects in different orientations, manipulate three-dimensional models, and mentally reconstruct drawings from two to three dimensions. However, many students have difficulty with understanding 3D spatial geometry and the transitions between 2D and 3D. Making accurate drawings of spatial objects and 3D visual-spatial understanding are factors that impact one’s ability to learn spatial geometry. Spatial skills can be developed through specific training with appropriate tools, and Minecraft allows for the creation of and interaction with 3D objects and scenarios. The present study investigated the impact of a block-building workshop that implemented Minecraft activities on the development and training of students’ mental rotation skill. After the workshop, participants showed an improvement on the mental rotation task. In the development of mental rotation skill field have been carried out in other research different strategies using 3D modeling, SketchUp, Tetris, Block 3D apps and Augmented Reality. The activity carried out with Minecraft offers good results, only surpassed by augmented reality.
One of the issues with teaching artificial intelligence (AI) for games is that many AI algorithms work in theory, but have production consequences in terms of speed or memory when actually used in a game. We report on the benefits and drawbacks of modifying or “modding” the commercial game Minecraft for a course on Game AI. This was done to give students the experience of dealing with a commercial game environment where they would have to worry about production consequences with their algorithms. The course was run as an upper level undergraduate elective during the fall of 2011 and included assignments on dynamic terrain generation, character behavior, and world events.
STEM/ STEAM education: from hands-on to minds-on
- N T Hai
Game Design Features for Facilitating Identity Exploration: An Exploration of Minecraft: EE Chemistry Lab
- A Petrovich
- M Fornaro
- C Barany
- A Foster
STEM education: A project to identify the missing components
- J Tsupros
- N Kohler
- R Hallinen