Putting Out the Welcome Mat With Minecraft

Purpose & objective

In our school there is a cohort of students who have never been inside their campus, because of the COVID lockdown and distant learning. Some of them, if given the chance, will choose not to, due to health restrictions or personal and family preferences. Engaging students and creating a sense of community has never been more urgent and harder to accomplish.
To solve this, a group of students worked together to create a virtual version of our campus using Minecraft Education Edition. Quite difficult since some of them had never set foot in their school. Using photographs, videos and descriptions of senior students, the Minecraft World started to look each day more and more like home. They digitally measured and translated their physical space into a scaled version of our campus. It allowed our students to enhance their creativity, problem-solving, self-direction, collaboration, and sense of community.
Most students have more experience using Minecraft than their teachers, so this allowed for an inverted mentoring, where students taught their teachers how to best build our project. This means, that any teachers, regardless of his or her experience, could replicate this project within their communities. This empowers students because they realize, it’s up to them to solve the problems they’ll run into.
Some of the advantages of this virtual version of our campus is that we can help students from outstate know our facilities, students with disabilities can virtually "walk", and get familiar with what you will find, and our own students learned to see their school in a whole new way. Even if the project is still under construction, new students have sign in, and are interested in participating, hence creating the sense of engagement and community we were looking for at the beginning. All this while teaching students to monitor their own progress and take responsibility for and become self-directed in their learning.

Supporting research

Karsenti, T., Bugmann, J., and Gros, P. P. (2017) Transforming Education with Minecraft? Results of an exploratory study conducted with 118 elementary-school students. Montréal : CRIFPE. https://education.minecraft.net/wp-content/uploads/Minecraft_Research_Report_Karsenti-Bugmann_2017.pdf

Lewis Ellison, T., and Evans, J.N. (2016) Minecraft, Teachers, Parents, and Learning: What They Need to Know and Understand. School Community Journal, 26(2). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1123979.pdf

Petrov, A. (2014) Using Minecraft in Education: A Qualitative Study on Benefits and Challenges of Game-Based Education. University of Toronto. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/67048/1/Petrov_Anton_201406_MT_MTRP.pdf