MINECRAFT IN CLASS: WHY IT MAKES SENSE
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF LINCOLN PARK ADOPTED MINECRAFT INTO ITS CURRICULUM?
Minecraft should be used as a teaching tool because it helps creativity flow. Many different schools use Minecraft as a teaching tool and do school work and projects on it because of its flexibility.
With mods and data packs, anything is possible in Minecraft — all you have to do is imagine. Say you have a project on plant growth. You could download a data pack that made plants grow slower and you could record the plant heights in Minecraft too. You could download a scale map of a volcano, temple, almost any place, and teach in areas where teaching would not be possible. Want to learn about Mars? Then let’s take a trip there using mods. Anything is possible — even going to space. You could teach about dinosaurs with a dino mod or have a competition to build the most accurate Greek fort.
Minecraft even has an educational edition for teaching. Hundreds of schools use it, like Park University in Missouri, to help teach kids about science, mathematics, civics, city planning, infrastructure, government, and history. If we use Minecraft to teach complicated subjects and visit far away places we could theoretically learn about multiple subjects at once. Using the Great Wall of China we could teach math by using the angles of the wall, along with its height, to learn about shapes and graphs.
Minecraft will help teach skills like problem solving, teamwork, and creativity. With Minecraft as a teaching tool, our teachers will have hundreds of new options for lessons and sick kids could still participate because of Minecraft servers.
With a school server, kids could make cities and apply what they learned in school in the cities. The students could make a democracy, tyranny, arrange a coup, or simply be a blacksmith. The flexibility of Minecraft allows all of this to happen and more.
So in conclusion, if Minecraft was used as a teaching tool at LPPACS, it would allow students to learn more skills, teachers to have more teaching options, and let students use what they learn in real scenarios.