The MinecraftEdu Twitter account retweeted a link to a student English paper about how Minecraft is being used in education. Great read from a student perspective, good source list at the end of the article. Always interesting to hear what students think about games in the classroom – I think we should be spending as much time talking to them about the future of games and education as we talk to teachers.

A sample from the paper:

I tried imagining how I would use Minecraft in a science class and thought of when my 7th grade earth science class. We were learning typography, both on land and in water, but were limited to sharing the only 3D model available among the twenty-five of us. If we’d hadMinecraft back then, even with only the teacher’s computer and projector available, I think we would’ve definitely benefitted from having a more “to scale” model to use. For math, the blocky composition of Minecraft’s terrain and materials could have provided an amazing challenge in geometry during high school; I can picture the frustration of trying to make an acceptable circle. Granted I feel this frustration when I try to make circles in the game nowadays, so it wouldn’t be too different. My high school physics class would’ve probably used it the most, though; having our circuitry labs with the ability to construct functioning ones, without the loss of materials, would’ve made my teacher hop for joy! So, is that a shining hypothetical of Minecraft’s potential to teach engineering, too? Turns out, hundreds of schools have been using MinecraftEdu to teach these subjects to higher-level classes already.

Well worth a read.

I’ll extend the message of this awesome presentation to say kids don’t learn from lessons they don’t like. It’s one reason Minecraft gets them so excited. You may be learning the exact same lesson about volume and area in math, but they’re going to like it more in Minecraft.

YouTube user and forward-thinking Minecraft builder LetsLente released his Minecraft map modeling the European continent in 1:1500 scale.

The process for simulating the topography of an entire continent in Minecraft is fascinating. LetsLente bases the Minecraft map on the ETOPO1 Global Relief Map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Geophysical Data Center. The map information is imported into WorldPainter, an interactive map generator for Minecraft.  For more information about WorldPainter, the Minecraft forums have a great thread that goes into more detail than the WorldPainter page.

There are no buildings on the map, and everything is not to scale, but running (or flying) around the map definitely gives you an overall sense of the geography in the various regions of Europe. LetsLente was kind enough to share a Google Doc listing the coordinates of major cities, and you can really get a sense of the original landmass before humans settled the area.

I don’t know anyone using the maps in the classroom yet, but there’s great potential (for these maps, or future maps like it) for students to discover the locations of major cities, create a rough layout of the city, and build major landmarks. Minecraft does not lend itself (yet?) to a perfectly accurate geographical recreation of a city location, but the vagueness of the location allows students to feel creative about what they decide to build and where they locate the buildings, instead of focusing on incredible accuracy.

If you’d like to see the variety of landscapes without logging in to Minecraft, LetsLente upload the following video. Give him a Like and a Subscribe if you enjoy it; he deserves the attention.