So I teach a Minecraft class. I can practically hear your mouth crease into a condescending smile already.
But seriously, I'm entering into my fourth year teaching a Minecraft class, and I'm starting to get into a kind of groove with it. And now that I'm settled into more of a groove, I feel like taking down some of the stories that develop throughout the year. Believe me, there are plenty of them at this point, and unfortunately many of them get lost to the test of time because I never write them down!
First thing's first though. How can a person teach a Minecraft class, I hear you ask? How is that even educational? Well, before you might go on about how video games "aren't educational", here is what we do in Minecraft class. And I'll warn you, this is going to be loooong:
Early on in the first semester, we do a series of introductions, and we lay out a series of classroom rules.
Among those rules are very strict criteria for what constitutes cyber bullying, or, as it is often called in the gaming world, "griefing". Many believe "griefing" and cyber bullying are two different things, but I believe they are one in the same, and I make it very clear to my students that I do not tolerate it in my classroom. Basically, the students' first lesson is that when you destroy something that somebody spent 2 months of their life making within a virtual world, that is going to affect them in the same way it would if you destroyed something they made in the physical world. They may have made it in the virtual world, but it still matters to them. It's still theirs. And you still destroyed it. So the general rule of thumb: "Would you do this to this person in real life? No? Then why would you do it to them in this game?"
Minecraft class takes place primarily within a virtual world, hosted on a server that I create within the classroom.
This virtual world is very much like real life, except everything looks rather blocky. That blocky appearance is what you typically see on the screen when you look over someone's shoulder while they're playing. It's quite unimpressive to the untrained eye, but much exists within that blocky world that casual observers might fail to realize.
Within this virtual world, players can get hungry and starve to death. Players can fall off cliffs and seriously injure themselves. Players can be eaten by wolves, zombies, skeletons, giant spiders, and various other potential nighttime threats. Therefore, the first goal in the game when we start out is survival.
The first official assignment I give to the students is a critical thinking exercise - a kind of survey quiz that asks them open-ended questions about how they're going to get started.
Questions like:
- What is your plan for sustainable food in the long run?
- How will you keep yourself fed if all the animals die out?
- What kind of land do you want to claim?
- What sorts of resources do you think are important to have near your house?
- How far are you going to venture into the wilderness to find where you want to build your house?
- What is your plan for material storage?
- How do you plan to protect your storage from potential thieves?
- How do you plan to make it clear that you have claimed an area, so others don't build on your land?
Anyway, the list goes on like that. Video game or not, I think these are real survival questions. If you were dumped into a large open world with nothing but yourself, these are questions you'd probably best ask yourself.
Students are heavily encouraged to find seeds throughout the world and start growing vegetables as soon as possible. Vegetation is a prime source of sustainable food. Students are also heavily encouraged to never kill the last two of any wild animal, so that those animals might reproduce and repopulate. If students run out and slaughter all the cows, that means there's no sustainable source of beef, milk, or leather left in that part of the world, until somebody ventures into the unknown and, maybe, finds more somewhere. Students have killed all the animals before in some of my classes, without bothering to breed them. This, more often than not, resulted in more than half the class dying of starvation because nobody imagined a world where they wouldn't have any animals left to eat. Almost nobody prepared for this, and almost nobody bothered to grow any sustainable food. There were only two farms in the class, and they were privately owned, and there wasn't enough food produced in the two of them to feed the entire class. That is why these critical thinking lessons now exist.
Once students are no longer fighting for survival, we move onto co-existing.
Now, since they're not fighting for their life, they have time to turn their heads to each other and realize who their neighbors are. It is at this point that we split the class into groups. I present to them a lesson on various basic forms of government, and I give them an assignment handout to take home, with all the information on it. I ask them to pick the one that they think makes the most sense to them, and to have their decision by the next class period. They are allowed to google other options, and anything not on the handout is fair game, as long as they run the idea by me first.
The options I explain during class are as follows:
- Autocracy
- Constitutional Monarchy
- Democratic Republic
- Non-Representative Democracy
- Democratic Socialism
- Communism
- Anarchy
I also do a brief explanation of what an Oligarchy is, and I cite an example of how those can come into being by telling the story of when one developed within one of my previous classes.
When the students bring in their decisions, I tally them up on the whiteboard, and they become groups. So if 5 students chose democratic republic, then those 5 students form into a group and begin their journey as a democratic republic. Every government form on the list has a different method for determining the leader. A republic, obviously, would elect a leader by tallying votes, and they would vote on what the name of the group should be. We set aside a large chunk of time during class for the democratic groups to talk amongst themselves about how they view the future of the group, and we hold an election to determine the president.
But an autocracy, since it's a bit of a toss-up who becomes emperor in real life, I leave it up to a roll of dice in the classroom. Whoever has the highest roll gets to be the autocratic leader, and the leader chooses their own title name (emperor, empress, king, queen, monarch, autocrat, etc), and chooses the name of the group.
Anarchy is a particularly special case. The only rules for those who choose anarchy is that the citizens must live in the same general vicinity nearby, in the same town. I tell them "It's like the wild west, but without a sheriff." Of course the classroom and server rules still apply, but there are no special rules for how their group is to operate unless they come up with those rules themselves.
I'm sure many would wonder why I even made anarchy an option.
Well I'll let you in on something... Anarchy groups never actually stay as anarchy. Throughout the school year, most of the groups shift in nature, and they evolve to meet the needs of their citizens. Most anarchy groups evolve into an unofficial form of non-representative democracy without the students even realizing it. I point it out to them and ask if I should change what I have listed in the group roster. So far they have always admitted that they've changed, and they have me change the list to confirm it.
I don't focus on telling the students how to operate within their chosen government unless they ask for my advice. I ultimately let them figure that part out themselves, letting them debate how things should be run when issues arise, which can sometimes lead to changes in leadership, or changes in government altogether.
From this point, after the students have chosen forms of government and been split into teams, the rest of the class takes place within that context.
So now we move on. We're all in groups, we all have our governments. Where do we go from here?
Well, I figure what's the harm in pitting all the governments into a friendly competition for resources and technological advancement?!
For the next 5-6 months, I give the students lessons on various technology concepts and efficiency strategies, to see which things catch their attention the most.
These technology lessons often include proper blacksmithing, where you melt down ores, pour them into casts, wait for the poured metal to harden, and combine the various parts that have hardened into tools. This method, in Minecraft, can create far superior tools than the regular way students typically make tools.
Other examples of what we could cover in class could be:
- Creating new alloys by mixing molten metals. For example, copper and tin make bronze, a potentially cheaper alternative to iron.
- Basic electrical science, for generating electricity.
- How to build a basic electric furnace/stove for melting ores, or cooking food.
- How to refine oil into more potent forms of fuel.
- How the basic physics of large and small gears work, multiplying or dividing torque and speed.
- How to create steam engines for powerful and fairly cheap rotational energy.
- How to create internal combustion engines, for efficient ore processing and drills for mining sites.
- How to generate power from the thermal radiation produced by the sun (how to make solar panels).
- How to create electric motors for solar powered engines.
- How to create vacuum pipes using engines to transfer items or liquids quickly through a tube from point A to point B.
- How to build a jet turbine with enough torque to mine/grind through the bedrock mantle of the Earth.
- How to build a computer within the game using Minecraft redstone.
- How to apply theoretical physics to some of the fictional items in Minecraft, allowing the conversion of matter and energy.
- Building a computerized storage system so you may convert your physical items into electrical data, to be stored on a hard drive.
Anyway, the list goes on. Our imaginations are really the only major limits on what we can do within the virtual world of this class.
So the groups are all working on making fancy technology for the rest of the class?
A large amount of time is spent showing the students how a lot of this stuff works. But bear in mind, when it comes time for them to actually work on these pieces of technology, they have to mine the resources themselves. They have to make every single component from scratch. They have to spend a great deal of time and effort working on these projects within the game, and sometimes they don't have the materials they need to finish the project they're working on.
Remember, now, that all of this is within the context of those government groups. This is when mutual bartering trade comes into the mix, and groups will start communicating with each other, often delegating the communication with other groups to a chosen or elected ambassador.
But bartering trade is not all we cover in the class either!
Once it looks like the groups are prospering fairly well, and they're settled into roles within their groups, and they have some projects going, I introduce the "Concepts of Currency" assignment.
This is the assignment where students learn about the world history of paper money. How is was conceived, how it was received by the public in concept, how long it took before it caught on, and how meaningless it truly is without context.
After watching some videos that explain through all of this history of currency, I give the students a survey quiz assignment asking them various questions about what they learned, and what knowledge they're going to take away from those videos.
Then, after they answer those questions, I give them a choice. Do they believe we should adopt a form of currency to use within the class, or do they think we should stick with a bartering trade system instead?
Thus far, every one of my classes has chosen to adopt a form of currency. In the event a class does not adopt a form of currency, I would tell them that if they change their mind, we can hold another vote.
The currency that we have used in all my Minecraft classes thus far has been thaumium, a fictional metal that cannot be produced by the students, and is therefore finite within the game world.
Students are each given 24 thaumium ingots by me, and I am the only person in the game world that can create the substance. Thaumium ingots can be turned into nuggets and blocks. The conversation rate is as follows:
- 9 thaumium nuggets = 1 thaumium ingot
- 9 thaumium ingots = 1 thaumium block
Shortly before personally giving all the students 24 thaumium ingots each, I introduce them all to a document I typed up called the "Thaumium Standard", which displays the general value guide for thaumium, in relation to other commonly traded materials. Any materials not listed in the Thaumium Standard document should have their prices estimated based on the other prices listed. This document becomes available on the class Canvas page, in case anybody needs to reference it, and I type up the conversion rates on signs at the neutral trading post building.
After introducing this thaumium currency to the class, the group ambassador conversation you hear within the classroom slowly begins to sound like real merchants buying and selling on the streets. The thaumium standard was intended for students to get an idea of the general value levels for things, but as the market gets competitive for certain high-demand materials, the prices start to increase and decrease as supply and demand fluctuate. If groups neglect their food supplies and farms, a food shortage can cause the price of food to fluctuate at different locations, where food is more or less abundant.
So there you have it! That's my explanation of what we do in Minecraft class. For now. Who knows? It changes over time.
There is plenty more to this class, but most of the material is based on what the students respond to, and what feels natural to introduce at the time. Much of the content is student-driven in that way, and a great deal is honestly improvised as I go.
In this series of blog posts, I'm going to take down some stories that come to mind from these classes. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up with everything in my life AND still type in this blog. I guess only time will tell if that actually happens. I'm making the attempt nonetheless!
