Why can't you play Minecraft? “Homework” on Minecraft: what schoolchildren will learn using their favorite computer game How does Minecraft affect children

15.09.2023

If the Minecraft hobby has passed you by, then we have made an adaptation of a large and thorough NY Times article about this game. Below you will find out why you drag these stupid cubes at all, what is the point of the game, and why children who play Minecraft will grow up smarter than you and become great programmers.

Jordan wants to set a hidden trap.

An 11-year-old boy with black horn-rimmed glasses was inspired by the sci-fi thriller “The Maze Runner” and now wants to build the same maze for his Minecraft friends. Jordan has created an Indiana Jones-style obstacle course with a waterfall and collapsing walls, but his goal is an unpredictable trap that will catch his friends by surprise. Really, how to do it? This problem haunts him.

And then a light bulb goes on in Jordan’s head – animals! Minecraft has its own zoo of animals, which the player is free to eat, tame, or simply avoid. One of the animals is the mooshroom, a red and white cow-like creature that wanders aimlessly around the map. Jordan uses these cows' erratic movements to hide the trap. He sets up pressure plates that activate traps, and then brings in some cows who start circling the area and accidentally trigger the traps. Jordan took advantage of the cow's strange behavior to create, essentially, a random number generator inside Minecraft. In computer engineering parlance, Jordan hacked the system, forcing it to do something new and clever.

“It’s like planet Earth, a whole world that you build yourself,” explains the guy, leading us from the beginning of the maze to the exit. – My art teacher always said that games develop creative thinking only in the creators of these games. The only exception is Minecraft." Jordan leads us to the exit, and above it is imprinted the slogan “The journey itself is more important than what awaits you at the end.”

Since its release 7 years ago, Minecraft has become a sensation, spawning a new generation of players. With 100 million registered players and its status as the third best-selling game in history (after Tetris and Wii Sports), Microsoft shelled out a whopping $2.5 billion for Minecraft in 2014. There have been blockbuster games before, but as Jordan rightly points out, this is a different story. Mineraft is part meeting place, part tech tool, part theater stage where kids build machines, design worlds, and make YouTube videos. And it is not perceived as a game in the usual sense - while Google, Apple and other giants are trying to simplify computer interfaces, Minecraft, on the contrary, encourages the player to explore the world, break it and put it back together. It forces you to use your brains and work with your hands.

Minecraft takes us back to the 70s, to the era of early PCs like the Commodore 64 and kids who learned to code in Basic to write software for themselves and their friends. And today, when the President of the United States encourages children to learn to code, Minecraft has become a way for them to approach coding from the back door. Not because it is necessary, but because it is interesting. And if the children of the 70s became the ones who paint the canvas of the current digital world, then what will the children of the Minecraft generation bring to the world?

“Children,” writes social critic Walter Benjamin, “love to play where there is work that they understand. They are irresistibly attracted by waste from construction, gardening, housekeeping, weaving and carpentry.” According to Colin Fanning of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, European philosophers have long considered the block game, which was perfected about three hundred years ago by Friedrich Froebel (who is called the creator of the kindergarten concept), as a useful game. Starting to build with blocks, children learn to synthesize complex objects from simple parts, which later allowed them to better see patterns in the world around them.

Pioneers like Maria Montessori used wooden blocks to teach children mathematics. During the last century's cataclysms like World War II, some architects like Carl Theodor Sorensen proposed turning ruins into playgrounds where children could play and build at the same time. And Swedish teachers, afraid that children would lose touch with the physical world, introduced sloyd (in the original: sloyd) at school - carpentry lessons that are still taught in Swedish schools.

In Minecraft, children start the game free to do whatever they want: there is a pristine environment around which the player is free to build whatever they want. And it all starts with wooden blocks, which the player makes from trees that come to hand. In this respect, Minecraft is less like video games and more like Lego bricks, which replaced traditional wooden construction sets in the post-war era. Although today Lego is less about fantasy and more about brands - store shelves are littered with themed sets like Hogwarts Castle from Harry Potter or the rebel base from Star Wars.

“You buy a kit, read the instructions, assemble the model and put it on the shelf,” explains iconic game designer Peter Molyneux in the Minecraft movie. “Lego used to be a box of pieces that you took, threw on the floor and made magic out of them.” Now Minecraft does it."

As a Swede, Mojang founder and Minecraft creator Markus Persson brought Swedish sloyd into the digital realm. Persson, 36, was a child of the computer age who taught himself to write code on his father's Commodore 128 at age seven and by age 20 was developing games and tinkering with code for an online photo storage service in his CD-lined bedroom.

He released the first version of Minecraft in 2009. The game principle was simple, like the corner of a house - every time the player starts the game, it generates a new landscape for him with mountains, forests and lakes. Next, the player is free to dig the ground, mine stone ore, or process wood to make the coveted block. From these blocks he can erect buildings, or combine them to get a new item. Combine a couple of stone blocks with wood and get a pickaxe. With it you will get to the bottom of gold, silver and diamonds (just don't dig too deep, to the earth's core). Or use it to kill that spider over there, and use its web to make a string for a bow or crossbow.

At first, the game was just fun for overgrown nerds, but in 2011, all the children in the world got hooked on Minecraft, and sales soared. And even after 5 years, at a price of $27 per copy, Minecraft remains one of the best-selling games - about 10 thousand copies fly off store shelves every day! According to official Microsoft statistics, the main age of Minecraft players today is 28 years old. 40% of them are women.

Over time, Persson improved his game. First came the survival mode, in which the player had to build defensive structures to repel regular attacks from monsters. Residents of Minecraft Country were then able to share their maps with friends. Following this, Persson opened the game code (players began making mods) and added multiplayer. Today, for $5 a month, children play in the same world with hundreds of thousands of other players, and the concept between solo play and multiplayer has completely disappeared.

The game became a hit, but Persson felt like a squeezed lemon - he was fed up with the overwhelming popularity and the fans who constantly demanded to add/remove/change something, and then criticized the same changes. In 2014, Marcus finally got fed up with the game and handed Mojang over to Microsoft for a modest fee of $2.5 billion. And as compensation, he bought himself a mansion for $70 million, in which he refuses to remember his brainchild.

Persson left, but the blocks remained. There was also complete freedom of action. As I watched my children play, I saw replicas of the Taj Mahal, the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek, and the castle with the Iron Throne from Game of Thrones built. But then it turned out that real freedom was hidden not in the blocks, but in “redstone” - an element that is mined from red ore and is the game analogue of electrical wiring. My 8-year-old son Zev showed me the automatic doors he made using Redstone, and 10-year-old Gabriel came up with a game within a game. He constructed a giant catapult, which, using redstones, threw anvils at other players, and they dodged the projectiles flying at them, running merrily within the playing area.

Persson developed Redstone with an eye to conventional electronic circuits. By adding on and off switches to this block, you can make "logic gates," as computer designers call them. Place two switches next to each other, connect them with a redstone, and now you have an AND gate: if switch 1 and 2 are on, current will flow through the wire. You can also build an “OR” logical element, in which it is enough to use only one of the switches. If we look inside a regular microchip, we see a similar architecture.

This winter I was visiting a 14-year-old boy named Sebastian. He showed me off his mechanisms, the largest of which was the trading platform - a giant wall near which players could sell things by placing them in a special chute. This wall was full of AND gates, and it took Sebastian several days to design the wall and find a bunch of AND gates for it. “Move here,” Sebastian tells me, diving into the shaft under the device. Inside, like an architect at a construction site, he shows me the insides of his apparatus. “Levers are connected to these wires on different sides of the wall - one on this side, the other opposite. When both are turned on, they activate a piston that attaches the redstone to this block at the top of the distribution tower.”

To work with the “red stone” you need logical thinking, perseverance and the ability to find holes in the system. For example, five-year-old Natalie installed an automatic door in her castle, but it did not open. Natalie frowned briefly, and then began to look for a bug in the system - it turned out that she had connected one of the red stones incorrectly, and it was sending current to the other side of the circuit.

This is what programmers call computational thinking. And this is one of the most important educational effects of Minecraft. Unbeknownst to themselves, children learn the daily struggle with bugs, familiar to every programmer. After all, it is not the gods who burn the pots, but the gods who find and correct errors in the code. From this point of view, Minecraft is an ideal educational game for modern children - it touches on elements of science, mathematics and engineering, but teaches it through play. This is in contrast to the government's "teach kids to code" initiative, which the US government spent millions of dollars on. The funny thing is that Persson himself and his followers never considered Minecraft as a pedagogical tool. “We were just making a game that we wanted to play,” says current Mojang chief developer Jens Bergsten.

The next useful skill that Minecraft players acquire is the ability to work on the command line. In a world where lines of code have replaced sleek interfaces, the average person will break out into a sweat at the sight of a dozen simple lines of code. But without learning to work with the command line, you will never tame your computer. In Minecraft, children learn this, again, not because it is necessary, but because it is fun. Call the command line “/”, type “time set 0” into it and see the sun’s tail going beyond the horizon. Learn the command chains and you can perform magic like Harry Potter.

The next hero of the article is seventh-grader Gus from Brooklyn, whom we met this spring. While watching Gus play with his friends, I notice how he types the command “/give AdventureNerd bow 1 0 (Unbreakable:1,ench:[(id:51,lvl:1)],display:(Name:“Destiny”) )". She gives his character an indestructible magical bow called Destiny. Gus's desktop is full of virtual stickers with the commands he uses most often. Several commands are combined into a block, which leads to a chain of actions. Just like clicking on the icon of the desired program launches blocks of code in its depths.

“Minecraft is one of those places where young people can interact with more experienced people much older than them,” says Mimi Ito, creator of Connected Camps at the University of California, which studies the relationship between learning and computer games. “These connections become key: the kids get the opportunity to look at the professional side of things, and that’s something they don’t show at school.” And don’t let the form of such interaction between adults and children unfamiliar with each other scare you - according to Ito, when the group is given an interesting task, age fades into the background.

Ito has found that the Minecraft hobby encourages children to develop other talents. For example, 15-year-old Eli just wanted to change a few game textures, but in the end he got to the point where he mastered Photoshop combined with drawing and now posts entire mods on the gaming forum, where both adults and children help him. “Criticism there is always constructive,” says Eli. “The gaming community is very helpful.”

You may laugh, but playing Minecraft also develops stress resistance. Mojang makes changes to the game on a weekly basis, and one morning you might wake up to find that after a recent update, your giant railroad no longer works. Ito sees this as a valuable experience - in a practical and philosophical sense, children become stronger.

“Minecraft creaks and you try to fix it,” she says. – This is a different type of thinking. If your iPhone application does not work, then you just sigh. If something doesn't work in Minecraft, you sigh and then start fixing the problem. Not because you have to, but because you want it. It’s similar to the aesthetic of home brewing – you can buy a pint of lager at the store, but it’s more fun to brew it yourself.” With Minecraft now in its 7th year, Georgia Tech's Ian Bogost is looking forward to welcoming the first students who grew up playing the game into his classrooms.

Ava, a 5th grader I met on Long Island, started playing Minecraft 2 years ago. She launched into “survival mode,” not really knowing what to do next. “I thought this skeleton was kind, so I asked how he was doing,” Ava says. “Then I died.” The fact is that Minecraft is a complex and incomprehensible game. Unlike blockbuster games, there are no pop-ups or hints, no one leading you by the hand to show you how to turn your head, run or squat. Minecraft doesn't explain anything: not that skeletons can kill you, not that you can reach lava (which will also kill you) if you dig too deep, not even that you can craft a pickaxe.

During the development of the game, Persson did not have the money to write instructions. It’s unlikely that he would have guessed how ingenious the decision to abandon hints turned out to be: today, players on forums hourly share secrets and strategies of the game (there are about 5 thousand articles about Minecraft on Gamepedia), book publishers publish entire volumes with the secrets of the game, and they sell well. For example, one of the books about the red stone overtook such literary hits as “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt. In his review, writer and critic Robert Sloan calls Minecraft "a game of secret knowledge."

The most important assistant in learning Minecraft is YouTube. Having found death at the hands of a skeleton, Ava went there to look for answers, because the easiest way to learn new things is by watching how a master does it. YouTube has become a second home for Minecraft players - let's play, instructions, tutorials and just fun videos are posted here. Today, the word “Minecraft” is the second most popular search term on YouTube (after “music”), and the total number of themed videos has exceeded 70 million. For young players, these videos have become an opportunity to abandon the television diet in favor of what you personally like. “I don’t understand this,” Ava’s mother complains on my second visit. – Why are you watching someone else play? Why don’t you play yourself?”

Ava recently launched a gaming channel on YouTube with her friends. Her father bought her a microphone, and her sister drew a sign that said “Recording in progress” (on the other side “Recording not in progress, but please be quieter”). While I'm sitting in her room, Ava calls her friend Patrick on Skype and they start recording. This is pure improvisation - they joke about Ava drowning in lava traps, like real radio hosts or sports commentators. If something goes wrong, they start again. Seeing this in person, I better understand the words of the head of the gaming division of YouTube, Ryan Waite, about the blurred boundaries between the player and the viewer.

Some Minecraft broadcasters have become really famous and make good money from it. These stars are mainly not children, but young people. For example, 25-year-old Stumpy Cat from Brighton has 7 million subscribers on his channel. His colleague Mumbo Jumbo from Brighton only has a million. But this million accumulated very quickly when the guy uploaded a video with 20 homemade mechanisms for opening doors. “Of course, it’s not the new Gangam Style, but it still turned out well,” says Mumbo Jumbo, whose real name is Oliver Brotherhood. Now Oliver spends 50 hours a week on the game itself and recording thematic videos. It's actually work.

“I told my mom I was quitting my job as a postman,” Mumbo Jumbo recalls. – When asked why, I showed her my channel and my first 40 thousand subscribers. That's more traffic than the corporate newspaper she consults for." Oliver will be studying programming in college next year. In his opinion, programming is very similar to Minecraft - you experiment, learn, make mistakes and ask for advice on the forum. By the way, the guy was accepted into college even before the final exam results - his YouTube channel became his admission ticket to the university.

Last year, 12-year-old London launched a separate server for his friends and acquaintances. A couple of days later he saw that some merry fellow broke into their holiday and blew up all their buildings to hell. Then London did a little magic with the settings and opened individual access to the server for friends. Now try to imagine this in some World Of Warcraft, where the server settings are controlled exclusively by the developers. Microsoft allows you to play on a shared server, rent your own, or create an individual game and play over Wi-Fi with a friend. And here the most interesting part begins - how will children take advantage of this freedom? Will their world be equal for both creators and destroyers? And what to do with rule violators?

Sociologist Seth Frey from Darmouth College studied the behavior of hundreds of children on Minecraft servers for three years and came to the conclusion that the game improves their social intelligence. “Kids are running around with their blocks and you think it's just a game,” explains Seth. “But in fact, they are solving one of the most difficult questions in the history of mankind - how to establish interaction between different social groups so that everyone is comfortable.” In the experiment that Seth conducted, most of the participants were teenage boys with all their complexes and problems of puberty. “These are the worst people on Earth,” Seth says, either joking or seriously. “And in my opinion, this experiment in socialization should have failed. It’s all the more surprising that everything worked out.”

Three years ago, the Darien, Connecticut, municipal library launched a public Minecraft server that could only be played by library card holders. In the first month, they added 900 new readers under the age of 20, according to John Blueberg, the library's director of development. “And this is a real community,” John shares. “As a rule, I receive up to a dozen calls a day like ‘Hello, this is Dasher 80, some idiot blew up my house while I wasn’t here, figure it out,’ or ‘Hello, someone robbed me.’ We used to deal with conflict resolution ourselves, but then we noticed that if the children were given a little freedom, then towards the end of the day you would have other messages on your answering machine like ‘This is Dasher 80, we have sorted out the problem, ignore my previous message.’”

Many parents and experts believe that Minecraft is an additional dimension, a digital sandbox in which children learn to socialize and respect other people's space (even virtual) without the supervision of elders. Previously, the street played the role of this sandbox, but in Minecraft, although children are at home, they communicate with friends using new technologies. In a sense, Minecraft is not so much a game as it is a social network.

Life on a Minecraft server constantly requires more advanced technical skills from children. 11-year-old Leia was furious about griefers (as vandals are called in the game) and one day asked the server administrators for moderation rights. For several months Leia worked as a police officer. A program called "command spy" allowed her to watch recordings of players' actions: she moved all the bad guys into a virtual "time out" zone and soon she was promoted. “I'm supposed to give punishments to anyone who breaks the rules,” she told me at the time. In fact, Leah played the role of system administrator on the server.

But not everyone adapts so easily to the world of Minecraft. Shy 17-year-old Tori has been playing Minecraft for 2 years, but mostly in single player mode. When she decided to try playing online, other players, having learned that she was a girl, posted “BITCH” blocks. Her fellow players consoled her and said that this happens everywhere. For example, a study of Halo players found that girls were bullied twice as often as boys. And in a typical survey of 874 people who identified themselves as online gamers, 63% of girls said they had been bullied. Some parents get angry because of this and forbid their daughters to play online games, some daughters do not pay attention to this and simply hide their gender or put animals on their avatars. Like Leia.

How long will Minecraft's popularity last? This directly depends on Microsoft management. The company's executive directors have little control over the game. All major issues regarding the development of the game are resolved by Mojang in Sweden. They can improve the game, or they can, on the contrary, negate all the magic by making a new interface or changing the combat system. Once Mojang tried to change the battle system, but this caused a storm of criticism - children did not want their sandbox to be turned into a regular field for fights.

But so far there is no reason to worry, and Minecraft is reaching the masses. Teachers are starting to try to bring elements of Minecraft into both math and history lessons. Many libraries already install Minecraft on their computers. For example, the Bronx Library Center recently installed Minecraft servers. A local librarian gave the kids, who didn't have their own PCs and came to play in the library, a task to build the Parisian Arc de Triomphe in 45 minutes. Three guys started working together, while the fourth, younger one, developed his own design. The trio teased each other all the time, and after 45 minutes, when the arch was ready, they stuffed it with dynamite, admired the fireworks from the cubes and went off to play another game.

In the corner, the fourth boy continued to work on his Arch. He told me that he often stays late playing Minecraft with friends. They built the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center, and even a replica of the library we were in. He clicked the blocks with his cursor, creating an inverted staircase to mimic the rounded arch of the Arch. He sat back in his chair to enjoy the work he had done. “I haven’t blinked in I don’t know how many minutes,” he said. The model was finished and looked quite realistic.

“I’m actually proud of it,” he said with a smile.

The original material can be read at the link.

For those who want to know more

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Minecraft is an incredibly popular computer game that is loved by many children. However, some parents cannot share the joy of their sons and daughters regarding this game. There are a huge number of reasons why children love Minecraft, and the same reasons make parents fall into a stupor and scratch their heads thoughtfully. These are 5 things kids really love about Minecraft. But you don’t even suspect that most modern parents simply don’t understand them.

Minecraft language

How can you even explain the language of Minecraft? Friends come to visit your child, they gather in the room and start talking about noobs and endermans, laughing and giggling while the parents listen and think that it would be better if they talked about sports. Many parents aren't even into sports, but they can at least participate in this conversation.
Parents want to be involved in their children's lives, but as soon as they start talking about Minecraft, they immediately begin to think it's Latin. And when parents ask their children to explain one concept, it immediately becomes necessary to explain another concept, and then another. And by the time you understand why your child needed to kill the Ender Dragon, half of your day has already passed. As a result, it all ends with the child telling the story, and the parents simply nodding and hoping that they didn’t just agree to buy some add-on.

YouTubers

It’s not enough that Minecraft itself is strange for parents, but there are also a million YouTube stars who talk about this game, show off their achievements, and share jokes that only those who play Minecraft can understand. And we're not talking about any specific YouTuber here. Parents who have had to rip a tablet out of the hands of a child who has been listening to someone talk about a game for hours on end will understand the problem. Yes, many of these YouTubers earn more in a month than their parents do in a whole year, and maybe this annoys parents just a little, but it's not about money. It's about sanity, and hour-long videos of teenagers recording loud, annoying Minecraft movies in their rooms cause adults to say such banal things as "What is this world coming to?" and so on. And this is terrible, because it makes parents feel the way their parents felt before - old and outdated. And the circle is closed.

Addiction

Many parents don’t understand one thing: is there really nicotine or some other drug added to Minecraft? Every parent whose child plays Minecraft understands how difficult it is to get him to turn off the game. It comes to tears, screams and even fists. Children even begin to swear at their parents. Moreover, both small children and teenagers do this. Sometimes you get the feeling that if zombies break into your children's real house, they won't care, but if this happens to their Minecraft house, the world will end. For many parents, this game looks like some kind of pixelated disgrace, but children cannot agree with this.

Disorientation

If you're trying to bond with your child by playing Minecraft, you'll want to remember the barf bowl. No, the game is not disgusting or disgusting, but it is disorienting. You start to feel dizzy from everything that is happening around you, you don’t understand what to do, and you find yourself in some room with a pickaxe in your hands. And then your child begins to laugh at you as if you are a complete idiot, and not an adult with a higher education and a prestigious job. And then the child himself sits down at the computer, his blue eyes begin to dart around the screen while he corrects the situation you created, and he begins to say: “See? Do you see? But you still don't see the difference between what you did and what he does.

Trying to understand makes everything worse

Like any good parent, when your child starts playing Minecraft, you try to better understand the game by reading about it online. Here's an excerpt from one such article, called "A Parent's Guide to Minecraft": Minecraft is a sandbox game created by Swedish programmer and gamer Markus "Notch" Persson. The game world is generated procedurally, and its essence lies in collecting resources, creating objects, building and (if the player wishes) battles.” Many parents have encountered strange texts in their lives, but this is just crazy.

conclusions

The conclusion can be drawn as follows: most children like this game, while some parents simply cannot understand it. And the saddest thing is that many parents initially believed that they would not have problems with understanding. Not just Minecraft, but everything that concerns their children. When people become parents, they don't think they'll ever have to say "that's the way it is these days" or "why can't you play normal games?" as these are some of the most unpleasant things they've ever been told. their own parents when they were young. However, this is what parenting is all about. It's a reality where you get older and try to understand your children, wishing they would just do what you understand.

A video of the computer game Minecraft collects a huge number of views on YouTube. The game, which involves building a world out of Lego blocks, was the most popular search term after "music," according to the site.

According to a study conducted by Octoloy and Newzoo, the above game collected about 4 billion views during the month of March alone.

This figure is unlikely to surprise many parents who are hopelessly trying to get their children away from screens. Neither football, nor cycling, nor a picnic in the forest can distract young gamers from watching videos of people building with little green bricks.

Parents call this passion differently: some call it obsession, others call it addiction. However, both of them are very concerned about her.

Opinions vary.

In numerous articles and online messages, parents complain that Minecraft has taken over their children's lives, they neglect household chores and school assignments, and are annoyed when they are not allowed to play. As a result, many parents have to prohibit this game altogether or strictly limit their time on the computer. One father explained his decision to limit time this way: “Minecraft, like other addictive games, is limitless, but children’s childhood is not. I would like them to explore not the virtual, but the real world.”

Other parents don’t see a big problem in this game. As the father of two boys notes, his children spend hours watching videos with different versions of Minecraft. “Nowadays they watch YouTube a lot more than regular TV. Am I against it? Probably a little - yes, however, I am fully aware of the place this game occupies in the lives of my children and their peers. Banning it means separating your children from their friends,” he says.

Interest in the game also has beneficial consequences, since children have mastered the program well, learned to create their own game modes, manage their own game server, create and edit videos and run their own channel on YouTube.

Minecraft on YouTube is a vast ocean of materials - there are almost 42 million videos. There are hundreds of channels dedicated to Minecraft, the most popular of which are SkyDoesMinecraft and Yogscast. Some Minecraft channels have become real sensations. The cat-moderated YouTube channel Stampy has 5.6 million subscribers and about 3.4 billion views. Last year, this channel was the fourth most popular on YouTube.

There are also channels for parents, such as the MineMum blog, created by educator Bec Oakley, which aims to help parents navigate the minefield of Minecraft. “YouTube is a new generation of television. It allows children to learn and share knowledge. He entertains the children. When they watch others play, they gain new experience of the game and can also share it with others,” she notes. - Unlimited content. It is extremely interesting, educational and useful."

According to Oakley, this hobby is not a serious problem. She emphasizes that attention needs to be paid to the time children spend playing and the impact on their mood and health. “It is important that parents teach their children to enjoy play without compromising their healthy lifestyle. Parents need to teach their children “healthy” gaming, which involves, first of all, the ability to stop in time. Parents need to establish rules for safe play, as well as rewards for following these rules,” she notes.

It is worth noting that Minecraft is the creation of Swedish game designer and programmer Markus Persson, who is also known as Notch. Initially, the game was not designed for young players. Persson was inspired by games such as Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper.

Some time later, the programmer founded the Mojang company, which produced the game for some time, and last year it was sold to Microsoft.

How games affect the human brain.

There are many studies regarding the effects of computer games on the human brain. Some of them are quite contradictory. Researchers in China used MRI to monitor the brains of eighteen students who spent about ten hours online, mostly playing games such as World of Warcraft. Compared to a control group of students who spent no more than two hours a day on the computer, scientists found less gray matter in the brains of gamers, which is responsible for reasoning skills.

In the early 1990s, scientists warned that because video games stimulated only the parts of the brain responsible for movement and vision, other parts responsible for emotion, learning and behavior might be underdeveloped.

Regarding research on the game Minecraft, an article by Robert Paisonau and psychologist Yun Lee, published by Quartz, notes that it does not seem to be as creative as some parents believe. “In fact, the creativity of the game is inherent in the program itself - this is a huge number of combinations, materials and tools. And the only task left for players is to create more complex structures. Despite the fact that at first glance the game seems creative, in reality it is a rather monotonous activity. Most of the children we studied experienced irritability after a long period of play."

The child is trying to show you new achievements in his Minecraft world, and you routinely praise and add: “It would be better if you did this at school.” Just don’t say that this doesn’t happen to you. In Minecraftalmost half playschildren in the world. And this is really more interesting to them than.

Microsoft has figured out how to use children's love for Minecraft to benefit learning. The educational version of the game Minecraft for Education in Ukraine will be available from September this year.

What subjects can be studied with the help of your favorite toy, and whether teachers in Ukrainian schools are ready for such changes, Roman Rudyuk, Head of the Partnership in Education program at Microsoft in Education, told the site.

Modern children were born and growing up in the digital world. They have a different way of thinking, speed of perception. Contacting the world through a tablet screen comes naturally to them.

These children understand computers and the Internet, sometimes better than their parents. At two or three years old, they find and download cartoons for themselves, remove passwords from their parents’ smartphones and play games.

This is not surprising given the pace at which technology is advancing. Another thing is surprising: the school of these children is still trying to teach according to the old principles and schemes.

A tablet or smartphone at school is perceived as a hindrance to learning. They try to stop the child’s communication with the computer and reduce it to a minimum. They discuss the dangers of computer games and advise how to wean a child off the computer. If they allow it, it’s as a toy, as a reward for good behavior.

But why not try to teach and educate with the help of gadgets? After all, tablets and games are wonderful tools, and they are closer and more understandable to children than textbooks and notes on the board.

Two years ago, when Microsoft bought the rights to Minecraft, no one understood why. And with the help of the game they decided to introduce gamification into the educational system.

Why Minecraft?

Because children love him, and because he opens up enormous scope for creativity. The basic element of the game is cubes. An absolutely universal thing from which you can create any objects, set and solve any problems. At the same time, children do not passively perceive information, but actively participate in the process. This makes it easier to understand the topic and remember it.

Mathematics, biology, history: where else the benefits of the game Minecraft are obvious

Minecraft for Education is not a collection of ready-made diagrams and lessons. It is a platform that teachers can use to create lessons. It does not replace the traditional curriculum, but complements it, visualizes it and fills it with creativity.

The program works for any school subject because any idea can be implemented in it.

Geography

It’s one thing to see a picture of an Egyptian pyramid in a textbook with a couple of paragraphs of text. Another thing is to move inside the structure, examine it in real size, wander inside, see what it consists of, how the tombs are located, etc.

Or create a pyramid of cubes yourself - first study the topic in detail, and then transfer this knowledge to the world of Minecraft.

You can build landscapes from cubes, study the structure of the earth's crust - not look at dusty plaster models from the closet, but create projects yourself.

Or contour maps. Don’t paint over it with a pencil in a notebook, but build it in Minecraft, just like in this lesson.

Story

Instead of memorizing dates and names, we build, for example, wooden fortresses, give participants the roles of historical characters and act out, for example, the history of the baptism of Kievan Rus as part of the lesson.

The same applies to any historical event. Minecraft allows you to create a world with all the nuances of the time being studied: architecture, landscape, etc.

Mathematics

Equations in a notebook are boring. And if you set the equations directly in the game, and the solutions to these equations are the coordinates of the point on the map in which the treasure is hidden, solving them will become much more interesting.

Biology

Build a dinosaur skeleton out of cubes? Easily! Or a model of the human body. It’s interesting what we are made of.

In this lesson, children travel inside a living cell and study how its organelles work.

Chemistry

Here you don’t have to limit yourself to building a model of a molecule. Chemistry is at the very core of Minecraft. Having started the game, the character mines minerals and crafts the necessary materials and items from them.

The idea of synthesis can be used during lessons to help children understand how substances interact and what comes out of it.

Physics

The teacher explains the behavior of matter in solid, liquid and gaseous states. All participants have their own characters, and the properties of matter in Minecraft allow you to display real physical processes on Earth.

What else>

Computer games are often used in education. But they are usually formulaic, the plots and possible solutions are limited.

Minecraft for Education isn't limited to just one subject. This is a constructor thanks to which phenomena can be studied from different angles.

The teacher created a task: you need to build a hotel. He assigned a price to each gaming resource, and the children received a certain budget at their disposal.

The children started the task. They are thinking about how to build more conveniently and profitably. They calculate costs, choose materials, think through the layout of rooms, from automatic door opening and switch location to flowers on the balcony and toilet.

This complex object first appears in their head, and then is transferred to the space of Minecraft.

They look for information, consider, discuss. They learn to argue and defend their opinions, and work in a team. Is it possible to attribute such a project to any specific subject? Or evaluate its benefits only within the framework of the school curriculum?

Minecraft for Education helps you look at the world, not dividing it into objects, but holistically. Understand and recreate the mechanisms and processes that work in it. The child understands that bread does not begin with dough. You need to plant the grains, grow them, harvest them, grind them, and then prepare the dough and bake them.

And the spoon on his table is ore that was mined, melted, refined, turned into metal and made into the desired object. He realizes this without explanation or cramming - these are just processes that take place in his game.

Minecraft and Minecraft for Education: what's the difference

In the game version of Minecraft there are many materials and phenomena that are not found in nature. For example, there are dragons, there are non-existent materials and chemical elements. This is interesting in the game, but in the training version it just gets in the way.

There is no way to add fancy mods (modifications) to Minecraft for Education. There are only realistic processes that exist in life.

The second feature is technical. In the game version, to play with friends, you need to look for a server and connect to it. There is no guarantee that outside players will not come there and destroy the buildings - children love to misbehave.

Minecraft for Education does not require servers. The teacher creates a web class, students connect to it through their accounts, and the game can begin. You can connect from any computer, both at home and at school.

A rich toolkit has been created for the teacher: he can create tasks, distribute zones for construction, and manage the process.
How to create learning worlds, how to give tasks - there are clear instructions for everything.

Computer games in education: what teachers think about Minecraft for Education

There is bad news and there is good news.

Of the minuses: it is difficult for most teachers to change their minds and agree that the usual methods of teaching with modern children do not work well. Not everyone is ready to use gaming tools.

What can we say about games, even if not all teachers are familiar enough with the Internet to use it in their work?

On the plus side: there are many young teachers who are ready to teach in a new way and are looking for progressive methods. Starting from September this year, about a hundred schools in Ukraine are planning to introduce a computer game into education. Perhaps there will be more, it depends on the initiative of directors and teachers.

For now, this is difficult: in addition to the desire for something new, at this stage the teacher also needs knowledge of English. Volunteers during beta testing have already created their own lessons that can be used as an example. True, this is only English-language material for now. In June, Ukrainian teachers also received access to beta testing. So, there will be quite a lot of ready-made lessons available.

For teachers who want to speak to children in the language of the game that is understandable and interesting to them, Microsoft holds meetings and training. Prepares trainers who pass on knowledge to colleagues.

There are already about 150 teachers in Ukraine who are learning to use new technologies and immediately apply it in their work.

Microsoft does not create lessons or courses on subjects. It gives overall ownership of the program, overall direction. And every teacher or parent who wants to teach a child in an interesting way will be able to create their own lessons and implement their own ideas.

In no case do we want to express disrespect to the authors of this game. The purpose of the material is more to show that even popular games can be very controversial - and mass fame should not necessarily encourage you to start playing them. And this can be applied to many other examples of a similar type.

Why can't both children and adults play Minecraft?

The reasons why you can’t play Minecraft, which will be described below, are universal and apply to all ages. But this restriction applies especially to children. Because at a young age it is especially bad to play like this. There are several reasons for this:

The game has scary elements.
There is violence against other players and animals.
The game requires long sessions, and children should not sit at the computer for a long time.

Reason number “1” - Addiction

Now let's move on to the general reasons why you can't play Minecraft - or, at least, it's undesirable. Take addiction for example. Any good game creates a small degree of pleasant addiction. Play the magnificent EVE Online, at least to understand how the desire to constantly return to the game can be pleasant - and developing, because this is a very smart thing.

With Minecraft the situation is completely different. Dependency arises there due to the fact that any processes proceed there quite slowly, there is always a feeling that you have not completed something. I want to go back and continue. But such dependence is unproductive. You return to the game not because of its depth in order to study it better, but simply because of a feeling of dissatisfaction.

Reason number “2” - Waste of time

The next reason why people shouldn’t play Minecraft follows from the previous one. Due to the fact that everything in the game is done very slowly, it takes a lot of time. Crafting, building various things from blocks, is a very leisurely thing.

Even some small constructions can take hours. But you won’t want to leave the game without finishing what you started. As a result, the result is achieved so slowly that you can spend all your free time playing the game.

Reason number “3” - Fatigue

Finally, the specific thing about Minecraft is that it has very specific graphics. On the one hand, it is extremely interesting in its stylization, but on the other, since the texture resolution is very low, it makes your eyes very tired when playing for a long time. And even stronger than from the old “pixel” games.

What do you personally think about this? Are there any other reasons why you shouldn’t play this game, or would you like to speak out in its defense? Any of your comments will be extremely valuable - we will try to form a general opinion about this interesting, but controversial game.