Microsoft’s popular video game Minecraft helping student learn everything from programming, science and math to art, languages and history.
Concerned because you can’t pry your daughter away from Minecraft? Worried that your son spends every moment obsessing over moves in the super-popular video game? Chill. It turns out that Minecraft builds up brain cells instead of dissolving them.
Minecraft has lots of ways for people to create some pretty sophisticated machines and scenarios. One of the first is with “redstone,” a material that carries electrical signals that activate all sorts of if-this-then-that actions — like opening a door when a character steps on a pressure-sensitive plate or triggering a piston to push a pumpkin onto an assembly line when it grows big enough. Most impressively, logic circuits built of redstone can form a working computer inside the Minecraft world.
Kids pick up more advanced computer skills through Minecraft’s “command blocks” — code that changes the rules of the game. That can be anything, from altering the weather to generating an invincible flying squid.
“Because there’s no overt goal, no immediate plot, no structure, you have the flexibility and freedom to do what you want,” says Jeff Haynes of Common Sense Media, which rates software and games for age appropriateness and gives Minecraft a top “learning” score. “It fosters life skills like creativity, curiosity, exploration and teamwork.”
KIDS’ SPACE
Swedish developer Mojang released Minecraft in 2009. Since then, the game has attracted more than 100 million registered users. So far, more than 70 million copies have been sold for Windows PCs and Apple Mac computers, Xbox and PlayStation game consoles, and mobile devices running Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems. Microsoft was so impressed it bought Mojang in 2014 for $2.5 billion.
Today, educators use Minecraft to help teach everything from science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) to language, history and art. But it’s the kids who showed the way, turning Minecraft into a constructive tool by publishing tutorials, sharing designs and code, and helping each other online.
“Minecraft caught everybody off guard,” says Johan Kruger, a programmer known in the Minecraft world as Dragnoz. His YouTube tutorials are watched by more than 129,000 subscribers. “Before anybody knew its power or that it could be educational, the kids already took over and owned the world.”
Minecraft-literate kids often run rings around parents wanting to keep up. That was definitely true for Aiden’s parents, Garrett and Liz LaFrance, who incorporated the game into Aiden’s home-school studies. “He ended up teaching us most of what we know about Minecraft,” says his mom.
