Six-year-old Billy watches as everything burns with fire on the monitor screen. “I set the earth on fire!” – he rejoices. Parents, perhaps, a little discouraged by his delight. But don’t let them worry – he plays MinecraftEdu.
The Minecraft empire is constantly expanding. Now its pioneers have found an approach to teachers. From now on, the educational game MinecraftEdu is at the disposal of teachers. This is a Shsat tips new training project, whose inventors were Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin, teachers-programmers from Finland and the United States. Support for them, of course, was provided by MojangAB, a Swedish company that develops video game Minecraft. To date, MinecraftEdu is used in more than 400 schools. Whether children follow the scenario of the game, proposed by the developers, or – like Billy – prefer to open its new features, in any case, teachers now have a new layer of teaching tools.
“Bravely introduce our innovations directly into the curriculum! – Advises Levin, a New York teacher who developed the TeherGaming program with Santeri in 2011. – Look, science teachers in Australia use Minecraft cubes to build RNA models. And an English teacher in Denmark assures that using MinecraftEdu is the fastest, easiest and most effective https://argoprep.com/blog/shsat/5-tips-multiple-choice-shsat/ way to learn a language he’s ever seen!
Billy got acquainted with MinecraftEdu at the festival of games Britannia, which is held in the English city of Rotherham. He barely made it to the monitor – the game became a hit, and the six computers on which MinecraftEdu was installed have never been empty. And at this time in the meeting room Santeri Koivisto presented the teachers brilliant scenarios of MinecraftEdu, which teaches children to cooperate and solve problems together – for example, if you need to build a virtual bridge.
And the teachers liked these scripts! Especially when you consider that MinecraftEdu is not expensive at all, and there is an opportunity to attend various seminars and training sessions on its use. Robert Drummond, an elementary school teacher from Brockburn, knows that seven-year-olds can’t talk about anything except Minecraft when they go to the computer room. Having attended the Britannia Festival, he is overwhelmed with ideas on how to use MinecraftEdu in English, Math and Geography classes.
Parents who attended the festival are also delighted! Minecraft is a truly phenomenal game: both children and adults love it. “It develops social skills, teaches children to interact with each other,” says Kelly Laughlin, one of the moms, “and besides, it doesn’t have this stupid advertising in it.
During the lesson, children quickly moved from the “each on its own” model to an organized queue to climb the stairs.
Parents approve of Minecraft – and children spend their free time in Mincraft mines. And for classes, as it turned out, the game in the so-called “sandbox” genre is ideal. Thus, https://argoprep.com/blog/shsat/revision-punctuation-practices-commas/Edu takes the initial training beyond the traditional ideas about it.
Many people are worried about this; however, listen to Harvey McCarthy, senior teacher at the North Yorkshire school: “There are children who are constantly fighting with themselves and others; they are in constant tension. Discover MinecraftEdu for them, and they will learn to work in a team, purposefully and with dedication. According to him, MinecraftEdu also warns about “sex war”: although boys are already interested in playing Minecraft, but playing Minecraft with girls is even more interesting.
Of course, Harvey McCarthy is easy to reason – he is a gamer himself, and the game Minecraft mastered long ago. “To convince teachers who are not familiar with computer games, the benefits of MinecraftEdu, you need ready-made packages of educational ideas with lesson plans and detailed schemes of work, – he said. – Like any innovation, MinecraftEdu needs people who are passionate about promoting it.
And they are! There is a growing number of teachers who talk about their Minecraft lessons on YouTube, Tumblr and Wiki. Among them, of course, is Levin, the creator of the new project. In the Internet we will find and discussions about the benefits of scripts MinecraftEdu, and study the learning opportunities of games – “sandboxes”, and tutorials, how to use Minecraft to learn arithmetic and geometry, get acquainted with electricity, be able to organize a virtual community, etc.