Constructivist Learning in Minecraft: An Exploratory Analysis
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An exploratory analysis examined constructivist learning in the game Minecraft. The study involved 20 participants ages 14-16 playing Minecraft over a period of time. Constructivist learning theories posit that hands-on creative construction and exploration can foster learning. Minecraft allows open-ended creativity and building, aligning it with constructivist perspectives on learning through experience and active engagement.
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Constructivist Learning in Minecraft: An Exploratory Analysis
- 1. An Exploratory analysis of the constructivist learning in Minecraft
- 3. Ito (2008) Skill and drill games Construction games
- 4. Millions in revenue Creativity driven construction Gamers go edu
- 6. Participants (n=20)ages 14-16 Parents are out of town and kid is being pressured to host a party. He/she agrees and the party quickly gets out of hand. “A Burning Passion”
- 8. Piaget and Inhelder (1969) This ain’t your object permnance Emancipation from content
Editor's Notes
- Good Morning. Today, I’d like to present some findings of an exploratory study and analysis that used Piaget’s theories of cognitive constructivist learning to interpret the data. In our study, we partnered with a high school teacher and his ninth and tenth grade students to observe their interaction with the Minecraft game world. We claim, through the analysis of the participant’s creative production inside the Minecraft video game world, that the gaming environment assist students in their formal operational development in ways that traditional instruction does not.
- Whether just the “next craze” or a real and present opportunity, there is a lot of synergy about the potential of video games and their ability to provide meaningful learning scenarios to players. Many scholars, some of them mentioned here, have dedicated their careers to promoting the potential of video games to reform educational curriculum, restructure academic institutions, and effect social change. A decade ago, Jim Gee’s work on video games ignited a scholarly firestorm because his work, which was mostly auto-ethnographical, shifted the conversation about video games from fear about violent effects to a discussion to more positive directions.
- In her ethnographic work on the educational video game market, Mimi Ito reminds us that the “educational” contextualization of video games is not new at all. She also reminds us that when educational content is basically layered on top of somewhat weak game design, audiences are quick to recognize this, and the game becomes an electronic instructor—far from the meaningful scenarios Gee describes. However, Ito views construction games, such as the SimCity or Lego worlds, as providing meaningful spaces for creation and knowledge production via experimentation. In her essay though, she isn’t confident about this genre because she calls them difficult to market.
- Little did Mimi Ito know that when good game design was united with the construction genre, the game would market itself. Minecraft is a construction game that has garnered millions in revenue. The goal of the game is to thrive and survive inside the game world, either as a single player, or *much more popularly* on servers with multiple players. The game’s intrigue is based on the creative drives of it’s players—who have build entire worlds (such as the landscape of the Hunger games) or complex structures (such as the US Capitol Building; both interior and exterior). The game has proven wildly popular among all audiences, and as a result a whole culture of modifying and creating new layers to the game have ensued. What is unprecedented for most video games is that educators are embracing the game almost at the same pace as gamers. In 2011, an “edu” version of the game was released to add specific instructor tools so that the game can be more easily utilized as an instructor tool—which evidences a growing desire to incorporate Minecraft into the physical learning environment.
- Like others, we see Minecraft as a constructivist tool and virtual learning environment on many levels. First, it offer users the ability to push their understanding to greater cognitive complexity through meaningful interaction with the environment, on a physical level. Through abstract levels of social interaction, the Minecraft environment offers players the opportunity to experiment with new ideologies, world views and the collaborative process.
- In early 2012, the authors decided to collaborate with their colleague, a high school instructor in the Northeastern portion of the US, as a result of many shared conversations about Minecraft. The high-school instructor proposed that he would use the game to explore the concepts of characterization and plot with a small sample of ninth and tenth (n= 20) grade students in his English literature course, and the research team would provide a communal server for all to use as a game space. The instructor gave the students a prompt that they could use (it was optional to use this plotline) to assist their creativity. The assignment was as follows: Parents are out of town and kid is being pressured to host a party. He/she agrees and the party quickly gets out of hand. The participant’s assignment was to create their own narrative, and then create a small film of the narrative, or machinima, to demonstrate their understanding of the literary concepts. Machinima (the amalgamation of “machine” and “cinema”) are 3D animated films created within a gaming environment. The machinima featured here, A Burning Passion, is the story of a young man who tries to have intimate relationships, but for some strange reason, everyone he loves is doomed to spontaneously burst into flames, starting with his parents.
- In “The Hole” Roy is a character who must chose between the love of his family and his alter ego: a bunny rabbit who wants him to commit evil deeds.Another group created a horrific tale called, “Flesh Eating Predator”, where three friends are trying to find a party, but they seem to show up to an empty house with a creepy host (who is potentially the predator). Eventually, one of them is eaten by the predator.
- In the context of education, constructivism is a way of building knowledge through meaningful interaction and experimentation with content. We used Piaget and Inhelder’s work, The Psychology of the Child to guideour analysis because little research has explored the use of video games in the formal operational phase of development. In the Piagetian notion, children must be given the tools and space to play with “reality” in order to challenge their current understandings of space and time, and subsequently integrate this new knowledge into a more complex schema. Development is a constant process of assimilating new data into one’s existing cognitive schemata in order to progress to another one.