Hi all,

I've had a few people email and DM me about my Minecraft CCA after I tweet about it on Monday afternoons, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts here and get the word out.

If you aren't familiar with Minecraft - it's a sandbox style game where users can mine for resources, create buildings, fight off monsters, and use their skills in crafting to make weapons, armour, tools for harvesting, and even rollercoaster-like mine carts. The game was designed by Markus 'Notch' Persson and it comes in a free online version and a paid downloadable game that has all the goodies you'd expect from a first person (sometimes 3rd person) FPS like game.

I originally got into this game because I love FPS like games - and people like @colingally, @TSherwood and @joramlh thrive in these sorts of environment in our 'downtime'. When I first saw the video of the dude who created a 1:1 scale model of the Starship Enterprise in Minecraft, I knew this game was something different. If people can invest the time and energy to create anything they can dream up...this MUST have applications in the classroom. After watching the hilarious (and sometimes NSFS) tutorial videos by Seananners on YouTube, I was hooked.

After playing for a little while, and getting some experience in the basics (building shelter, finding resources, fighting off baddies) - I decided to give it a try in the classroom in the form of an after school CCA. Honestly I didn't really know what to expect, but what I discovered was that the game really afforded some nice learning opportunities for the students. First, the kids really needed to know how to make decisions based on priorities. Is it more important to start exploring right away? How important is shelter? Should I kill all the cows and pigs around, or build a rudimentary axe and start collecting wood? How important is a torch on that first night alone in the wilderness?

It was really interesting to see how students made different decisions, and how they learned from each other which strategy worked better depending on what they wanted out of the game - most students quickly discovered that having a torch on the first night meant they could still work in their shelter, and there was no time wasted while they waited for the sun to come up. :) Maximizing efficiency...loved it.

Another thing that came out of it was how students quickly developed an appreciation for the value of hard work. It takes a significant amount of time to collect resources and build up your shelter...so when you start exploring more dangerous areas of the maps (which are all randomly generated BTW) you put yourself more and more at risk of losing everything, and having your hard work end up in disappointment. Now, this doesn't mean that students were playing it safe...in fact it was quite the opposite. Students were quickly realizing that in order to get to more valuable areas where more resources were - they had to plan and prepare. Torches are key, ladders for climbing out of pits, armour, weapons (even a bow to strike from a distance), having food as a backup in case of injury - they were planners like they were going on a long excursion, and it was wild to see some of them even making compasses and clocks so they knew how to get back home and what time it was on the surface while they explored the deep dark underground. Planning...loved it.

Lastly, as we started getting into the multiplayer versions of the game - it became clear (quite by chance) that the discussion around Digital Citizenship was more and more relevant. When students found themselves exploring a server (there are tons online) that had a large amount of work in it - they were faced with choices: Do I take these resources that were put here for everyone? If I take some, should I replace them with ones that I've got? Someone made this nice big glass wall...what would happen if I just broke one of the windows? I'll be exploring the multiplayer issues with the students more in the coming weeks, but I'm excited to tie this into the larger picture of how their choices online can have consequences - even when nobody's looking. I'm almost hoping for a student to get banned from a server for not contributing to the piles, or for griefing someone else's work - just so I can talk about it with them. Responsibility online - love it.

(I know I'm not even mentioning the incredible amounts of math you can get into when you start to talk about building plans. We're talking about endless opportunity here. I'm hoping someone like @davidwees will take the reigns on that one.)

In closing, I think it's pretty obvious that I love this fantastic little game. In fact, it's not so little any more really...it's getting bigger and bigger, and I believe there were over a million users signed up according to stats on Wikipedia. I've played MW2 for months and months, F.E.A.R. 2, Batman Arkham Asylum and even Black Ops, but this is one of the only games in recent memory that can really get my heart racing as I explore underground mines and caves - I don't want to lose all my stuff. You can find out more about Minecraft at minecraft.net - and there are TONS of tutorials online on YouTube, etc. There's even a video of a guy who made a 16bit ALU inside the game - a computer, within a computer. This game is awesome...and I'd say check it out for some fun.

Oh, don't forget your torches.

Ciao Meow,
Rob.