Could Minecraft hold the key to the future of how kids learn…?

‘That is it I have got it, the future if education is Minecraft’ I say to my husband then he looks at me across the kitchen coffee in hand, ‘erm, am not sure you are right there’ he says. I am not sure I am right  either but I think I am on to something. I then go on to tell him that a university in the UK aims to teach children biochemistry using Minecraft and he thinks about that.

The reason for my revelation is this. Well there are many reasons, one of them being that I realise that so many children totally and utterly love the game. If Minecraft was a person she or he would have a lot of friends.

The thing that I noticed is this, the learning goes beyond Minecraft. Here is an example, our kids are talking to a girl in Slovenia this morning, she is eleven and fluent in English with a slight Slovenian/American accent. I butt in and ask her how she learnt English, she said she learnt a little at school. But really she learnt through Minecraft. She also talks with her friends around the world and they correct her. She writes on Minecraft and she also watches youtube videos about Minecraft. I make the assumption that her parents are good at English and she says they can’t speak English and she tells me that she thinks English is the future. That she loves English. She also says her parents are quite old then we find out that one of them is younger than us.

I try to think what was the thing when I was young, Pac Man? Asteroids? Space Invaders? That is what I was doing.

Then there is poetry and Minecraft. Poet Victoria Bennet and digital artist Adam Clarke have worked together using Minecraft as a form of expression and storytelling this beautiful poem. My Mother’s House was inspired by the poet caring for her terminally ill mother. For me this is a way to understand Minecraft as I love poetry and for the children maybe it is a way to understand poetry as they love Minecraft, I feel like we are on the edge of something, a wave of incredible learning and it is changing fast. I think that the younger generation, especially the digitally switched on unschoolers ( I say unschoolers mainly as they have more time to explore technology)  are learning in a way that I possibly don’t one hundred percent understand, there is something about this that I find extremely beautiful and exciting.

There is a wave of change happening. So could Minecraft be the future of education? Or could it get sucked up in to the world of having to learn and get turned in to something it isn’t? Or is education moving so fast right now that we can’t even see it happening and the kids, like our Slovenian friend are learning on their own and more than anything they are not even noticing that they are learning they are just loving it!