Minecraft: Video games & Education

Once again I ventured outside my comfort zone as I am currently attending the international Tool Fair XV at Vila de Gaia in Portugal. It is a place offering the opportunity to test and taste new tools, analyse, exchange and evaluate them, in order to valorise creativity in non-formal education pedagogical initiatives.

One of those is an experience workshop on how to use video games in education. Videogames can be used in non-formal learning contexts, and some of their elements can be transferred to offline environments. In some games it is easier than in others, so we focused on the world-famous game Minecraft as a first playground to test different dynamics, activities and possibilities for non-formal learning in videogames and offline-online transitions.

The workshop provided an opportunity to focus on digital transition (adapting tools from offline to online and vice versa). This tool uses a fully digital element, videogames, as a starting point to show the possibility to adapt non-formal learning approaches to digital spaces – and then aims at bringing some elements of videogames themselves in offline, regular training settings: either in terms of designing learning activities including videogames, and in terms of using creativity applied to videogames elements, so this was a practical demonstration of the digital transition. And we all learnt during this year and more of digital-only interaction should be put at work to figure out new ways education, that could be more and more in the direction of hybrid experiences mixing up online and offline, or even better, more in general, digital and analog spaces and tools to engage and interact with participants in different and innovative ways.

I wonder if you:
🕹️ play any video games?!
🕹️ ever thought about the alternative uses of them?
🕹️ do you perhaps have any tips or ideas that my reflection brought you you would like to share?!