"Available game modifications, called mods, add a variety of gameplay changes. One mod, MinecraftEdu, is designed to make the game more classroom-friendly. The mod allows educators to incorporate their own curricular content and run a custom server for each of their classes."

"Minecraft is also a very social game, where students can rely on other players for help in the sometimes-unforgiving Minecraft world."

Minecraft is an insanely popular online video game that allows players to build their own virtual worlds using blocks. More than 22 million people own the game, and more than 7,000 classrooms in 40 countries already have MinecraftEdu.

"It's not that it helps kids learn different," Rafranz Davis said in a video statement. "[It's that] it helps us see the way that they learn different, and I think that is the biggest game changer." She's a teacher and technology planning administrator in Texas.

While some may fear that the game will decrease the amount of time kids spend socializing, Davis has found the opposite to be true.

"The first time, there is that fear," she told CNNMoney. But it's great for group projects, she added, and students end up training teachers sometimes.

Some teachers use it to teach math concepts like ratios and proportions, while others use it to support student creativity and collaboration.

Jacqui Murray, a K-8 technology teacher of 15 years.

My students hang my picture in the Teacher Hall of Fame every time I let them play Minecraft in the classroom, which I do regularly. Of course, I provide guidelines, which they love.

It’s fascinating that today’s game-playing youth want a set of rules they must beat, parameters they must meet, levels (read: standards) they must achieve, and a big goal (think: graduation) they can only reach after a lot of hard work, intense thinking, and mountains of problems. Look into the eyes of a fifth grader who just solved the unsolvable — something most adults s/he knows can’t do. You’ll remember why you’re a teacher

Bennett's comments have not been well received by the UK's community of game developers. Ian Livingstone, co-founder of Games Workshop and the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, has gone so far as calling out Bennett as a luddite for his stance.

Clearly tombennett71 believes a child should rote learn silica sand + heat = glass rather than learning-by-doing in Minecraft. #luddite https://t.co/To3Q6OZq2E

— Ian Livingstone (@ian_livingstone) November 21, 2016

Although it’s true that games have been empirically shown to teach lowerlevel
intellectual skills and to improve physical skills, they do much more than this.
Games embody well-established principles and models of learning. For instance, games
are effective partly because the learning takes place within a meaningful (to the game)
context. What you must learn is directly related to the environment in which you learn
and demonstrate it; thus, the learning is not only relevant but applied and practiced
within that context. Learning that occurs in meaningful and relevant contexts, then, is
more effective than learning that occurs outside of those contexts, as is the case with
most formal instruction. Researchers refer to this principle as situated cognition and have
demonstrated the effectiveness of this principle in many studies over the last fifteen
years.

Researchers have also pointed out that play is a primary socialization and
learning mechanism common to all human cultures and many animal species. Lions do
not learn to hunt through direct instruction but through modeling and play. Games,
clearly, make use of the principle of play as an instructional strategy.

Games that are too easily solved will not be
engaging, so good games constantly require input from the learner and provide
feedback. Games thrive as teaching tools when they create a continuous cycle of
cognitive disequilibrium and accommodation while also allowing the player to be
successful.

Entertainment Arts (EA), a game-development
company, and the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts (NESTA)
in the United Kingdom have entered into a joint partnership to study the use of COTS
games in European schools, and similar initiatives are being proposed in the United
States. If the United States is like the United Kingdom, where 60 percent of teachers
support the use of games in the classroom,11 the United States may be well-positioned
to begin generating the evidence (through the use of COTS games) that the game
industry needs to begin developing serious games.

The meanings of signs (words, actions, objects, artifacts, symbols, texts, etc.) are situated in embodied experience. Meanings are not general or decontextualized. Whatever generality meanings come to have is discovered bottom up cia embodied experience

Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about their cultural models about learning and themselves as learners, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models of learning and themselves as learners

29) Transfer Principle
Learners are given ample opportunity to practice, and support for, transferring what they have learned earlier to later problems, including problems that require adapting and transforming that earlier learning

The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of the meta-cognitive strategies on the academic and gaming achievements. Exploring the effects of those achievements on the social problem solving of students is also of interest. For this purpose, the MMORPG Gersang was used. The participants, consisting of ninth graders, played the game until they all reached the third level to ensure that they have the same gaming ability prior to gaming for the study. Three meta-cognitive strategies were developed: self-recording, modeling and thinking aloud. Those strategies are specially related to gaming activities and applied in pre-gaming activities, gaming activities, and post-gaming activities. Three meta-cognitive strategies were set as independent variables. The social problem solving ability was set as a mediating variable, and academic achievement and scores in the game were chosen as dependent variables. The path between meta-cognitive strategies and both academic achievement and game performance by mediating social problem solving abilities were discovered. The social problem solving ability, which is the mediating variable, affects the academic achievement and the game performance very strongly. These results imply that a commercial game playing in conjunction with meta-cognitive strategies can be an effective way to increase students’ performance both in learning and gaming by keeping them involved.

He takes exception to Bennett calling the game a “gimmick” – lots of the technology that is used in classrooms now, like interactive whiteboards and even projectors, initially received similar labels, he argues. “If people say it’s a gimmick they usually don’t understand the full potential. The way we engage with information is constantly evolving, and the people that can’t keep up are often the biggest critics. I’d certainly be happy to stand in a room with Tom [Bennett] and say that to him.”

The appeal of Minecraft: Education Edition is obvious. Adam Chase teaches Year 5 students at Old Hall Primary School in Bury, and first used Minecraft in the classroom after he heard his students talking about the game. “We spend so much time trying to get children interested in stuff, and they were already interested, so I thought I might as well use it,” he tells me.

He’s built the Pyramids of Giza when teaching about Ancient Egypt, and an Anglo-Saxon village in History. But he’s used it in more imaginative ways as well: when teaching his class about Philip Pullman’s The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, his students collaboratively built the volcano from the book in which a fire god lives. They then walked through it one by one and described the experience. “Living in Bury, it’s quite hard to describe what it’s like to walk inside a volcano and meet a fire god,” he says. “It’s a little bit easier once you’ve built the volcano, which collaboratively took them half an hour.”

Plus, it’s got individual children to try new things: one girl who excelled in every subject except art is now passionate about design. “She says her hands don’t do what her brain wants them to, but in Minecraft she can do it, so she’s enjoying the engineering side. Another student used Minecraft to complete some homework on natural disasters: “He created a tsunami frozen in time ready to hit a Japanese town. He spent four hours on it, this lad never spends four hours on his homework. He’d looked at pictures of Japanese villages and applied it, and he’d also made a tsunami proof shelter.”