Using Minecraft in class as learning tool

SEMINAR: Roles were reversed as pupils helped teachers grasp the learning potential of popular game Minecraft. PHOTO/SUPPLIED 141014MINECRAFT2

Teachers and students from as far away as Kerikeri and Wellington met at Mokoia Intermediate last month to share teaching and learning tips around Minecraft as a learning platform.

Students had the chance to voice their experiences of the game and what they learned from it.

Their experiences showed Minecraft, a digital Lego-type game, could be used in the same way many of the older generations used Lego, Plasticine and ice block sticks when they were at school.

Learners were using it in curriculum areas such as maths to teach scale, position and direction, English to infer from the words what the setting could look like, history and geography through recreating Anzac Cove and finding out about the Romans and values by collaborating with other gamers in a multiplayer world to build a city.

Teachers loved having the opportunity to learn from the young ones.

The voices of the Mokoia student presenters:

Recently we have used Minecraft to visualise our novel study. Our class has been working on it and it's looking amazing. Our novel is called Hoot. It is about a boy who makes unlikely friends in a new town. These friends are trying to save an endangered owl species. We all drew maps of what we thought it looked like and we then voted on the best.

We have a private world which only our class can access. It all started as an endless flat world but it has become a working town setting.

Everyone in the class has contributed to it and we've had lots of fun working on it. Minecraft helps us visualise settings and gets us working as a team. It also helps us with developing bird's eye view maps. We learned to follow co-ordinates, build our structures to scale, and work out the perimeter and area of buildings to keep them realistic.