This wiki was put together by Lucas Gillispie (@PCSTech) from the Penderton County School district in North Carolina. Minecraft is used widely in PCS and this wiki provides great resources for those using or interested in using minecraft in a school setting.
The official wiki for the minecraftEDU community. Every day, more and more teachers are using the world-building game Minecraft to engage and educate. The game is a true phenomenon and gamers young and old are using it in countless creative ways. Practitioners of Games Based Education have realized the potential and have embraced Minecraft in classrooms around the world. MinecraftEdu is the collaboration of a small team of educators and programmers from the United States and Finland. We are working with Mojang AB of Sweden, the creators of Minecraft, to make the game affordable and accessible to schools everywhere. We have also created a suite of tools--a modified Minecraft server and client--that make it easy to unlock the power of Minecraft in your classroom.
Recently I've spent some time reading parenting websites about Minecraft. What is said is often repetitive, aggregated and lacks much substance. If you are a parent, or Minecraft player, then I hope this post will provide you with some further ideas about how the game works on our minds.
It's been almost a year since I first wrote about the work of Joel Levin (aka " The Minecraft Teacher") bringing the 3D world-building game Minecraft into his second-grade classroom. Much has changed since then -- the full release of the PC version of the game, for starters.
We may think we're pretty smart, but in fact we have very little notion of how humans learn. Kids know: They play games. Until, that is, they go to school. That's when the games stop. And often, so does the learning.
This article features the popular fast-talking video making its way around the web that showcases how Mincraft may very well be "the ultimate education tool." Whether you agree or not, the video raises some interesting ideas. Basically, the Idea Channel folks (who made the video) posit that Minecraft is such a valuable tool because it's so customizable. They talk about how video games have long been used in education but how Minecraft offers a new approach by letting the player construct the game. In other words, a teacher could build his or her own video game tailored to the lessons being taught in the classroom. The students could then enter that custom game and explore, learn, and even build upon it themselves.
This blog post editorializes the video and provides both pros and cons regarding the use of Minecraft in education based on comments made about the video.
There's a popular fast-talking video making its way around the web that showcases how Mincraft may very well be "the ultimate education tool." Whether you agree or not, the video raises some interesting ideas.