This week we met Heidi James and some of her middle and high school students who have used, and advocate for using, Minecraft in education. Heidi spoke passionately about the engagement and benefits for students of using gaming in education and it definitely got my mind working on how I could incorporate this form of technology into my own classroom one day. “Learning through Play” is a frequent mantra heard in early childhood education, so why not continue this into older grades? So many students find school uninspiring and so if it’s possible to inject some technology that can be used in a cross-curricular way, then great! I am curious how many students would love it, and how many would groan. I know I would have groaned as a student because I find the learning curve for learning technology to be quite steep.

What concerned me though is the hoops that need to be jumped through in order to do that legally in the school districts. Since Microsoft bought Mojang 3 years ago, it doesn’t seem to be something that we are actually allowed to use in class… so… hmmm…

I did check out the Minecraft Education version that we discussed in class because I would love to give my own server a try one day. The ideas that Heidi gave us sounded really fun!