Minecraft in higher education, beyond learning activities

University of Edinburgh MSc Digital Education IDEL final assignment

April 2015

Minecraft in higher education, beyond learning activities

Its great potential for stimulating a sense of presence for distance learners

By Catherine Coudray

Cover's picture: Dean Groom - Kids statues -

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Welcome

Embedded video on the website

Additional assessment criteria relating to user experience

The International Organization for Standardization (2008) defined user experience as 'a person's perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service' (ISO 9241-210). The following criteria are partly based on Dan Saffer's Disciplines of User Experience (2009).

Information nature and architecture

? Is the outline clear? ? Is the internal navigation easy? ? Does the site efficiently take advantage of the multi-modality allowed by the media?

Interaction design

? Are the external links sufficient and consistent? ? Are visual interactive elements sufficient and consistent?

Visual design

? Is the graphic chart engaging? ? Is the graphic chart adapted to this kind of work? ? Is the content easily readable?

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Introduction

Virtual worlds (VW) are one of the learning environments capable of helping their participants both access to engaging new way of learning and feel they belong a community of learners, for the enhanced sense of immersion they give. This is the reason why platforms such as Second Life (SL) had a great success in education at an early stage of development. Citing the EDUSERV annual survey, Warburton (2009) reported that quite one quarter of the UK universities were or were about to be present in SL environment in 2008. In addition to its lack of openness, addressed by the environments created with OpenSim, SL presents several disadvantages underlined by Dawley and Dede (2014). Technical progress fortunately allowed new tools, solving the critical issues of former virtual worlds' environments, to emerge. Coming directly from the game's universe, Minecraft is a new virtual place that competes the existing multi-users virtual environments (MUVEs). Its great popularity amongst the population of gamers, and some of its features, perfectly fitting instructor's needs, already made it a successful tool in primary and secondary education, as a complement of face-to-face activities. Higher education is a step behind, but the gap is about to be filled, for great initiatives begin to show up in an increasing number of universities. While there is yet little literature on the subject, the capacities of this environment to host learning activities has massively been reported by instructors themselves. The topic of this study is to underline Minecraft's potential for stimulating a sense of presence, out of, or at least before, any learning activity, in an online context, i.e. to give the students this feeling of 'being here' often reported to be missed in distance programmes. For the purpose is to show how this universe may give a global support for presence's feeling alongside a whole course, and not inside one or another learning activity, Garrison's community of inquiry's framework (2003), directly related to learning, didn't seem adapted. Lee's definition and explanation of presence (2004), for they don't specifically relate to education, have been privileged.

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Minecraft and education

What is Minecraft ?

Minecraft is above all a video game, although its lack of narrative could at a first stage seem surprising in this field.

The game belongs to several categories depending on the criteria used to characterised it. From the educational point of view, the following attributes seem, however, the most relevant: an open-ended sandbox game and a first-person perspectives game. Indeed, as Minecraft is also a survival game, this feature may be disabled in some of its modes.

Minecraft's environment and artefacts are made up with blocks (16 * 16 pixels), that make it look like a digital Lego-land. Minecraft's map however mimics actual environment as it represents, for instance, real and various geographical and climate features, combined to create 'biomes' (montain, forest, desert...), and also geological characteristics.

Seashore

Snowy mountains

Sunset on the desert

The gamer's aim is, above all, to shape the world, to build and craft things within it, and, additionally, to survive to monsters' attacks in some of the modes, where the map is populated with a wide range of creatures, that are mainly hostile. Five modes are, indeed, currently available: survival, hardcore, adventure, spectator and creative. The creative mode is particularly interesting for educational purposes, as it allows users to create easily, without any constraint or threat.

The game may be installed on a personal computer, and played alone or opened to LAN parties. He may also be hosted on a server to open the world to a more or less large number of participants. In a multi-players configuration, the capacity to build also means capacity to destroy, which raises a critical issue. Various permissions depending of the group a user belongs to, and protected areas, may fortunately be set up to make the map secure, and to choose the features that can be used in a particular context.

The game's success

For its success somehow hides it, Minecraft is a very recent game, as it was created and distributed in its alpha version in 2009. The success of the game was quite instant and its increasing popularity conducted to Mojang (the company that owns the game)'s acquisition by Microsoft company in 2014.

Minecraft passed 100 million registered users in February 2014. Although there are no precise statistics available about Minecraft users, it appears through the exploration of forums' discussions, and also in the author's descriptions of identified communities, that the success of the game crosses both countries and generational boundaries.

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An ability to avoid some MUVEs' drawbacks for education

The table below highlights Minecraft's answers to Dawley and Dede's list of limitations (2014) to the use of Virtual Worlds in education. The points that relate to the topic of this study are further developed under the 'presence' tab.

Collaboration

Limitations

Time

Economics

Standards Persistence and social discovery

Minescraft's answers

Collaboration is eased during synchronous sessions. Asynchronous collaboration must however be performed with external tools, such as forums.

The new participant is able to use the game after a few minutes of training, and the learning curve is rather steep. From the teacher's point of view, designing activities is a little more complicated, but clearly not insurmountable.

The Minecraft's licence, which is sold ?17.95, allows the purchaser to install and use the game, including on a server. Whoever wants to use it for his students have just to buy his organization's licence and one licence per student, or at least to make sure that students have already bought their own ones.

Developed in the Java language, Minecraft's source code is fully open. The End-user license agreement allows modifying the game, and sharing these modifications.

The world itself, with all the gamers' creations, remains after everybody has logged out. While Minecraft may ease social discovery, it doesn't provide social persistence.

Minecraft's current and potential application in education

Minecraft has been quickly adopted by teachers as an additional tool in their face-to-face courses, mainly with a constructivist approach. Its characteristics made this environment, on the face of it, particularly appropriate to teach sciences (Short 2012) . Indeed, we already brought up above its geographical and geological features, and Minecraft also offers built-in electronics and electricity elements.

The environment has nevertheless encountered a great success in a broad range of non-scientific topics, in primary and secondary school at a first stage and, later, in higher education.

Garcia-Martinez (2014) studied five applications of Minecraft in higher education, within diversified courses: Digital storytelling, Writing and Rethoric for English as a Second Language, Computer Art Applications, Virtual Worlds, Fundamentals of Video Games studies. In all these

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