A Way In Is A Weigh In: Learning, Teaching, and Growing Using Minecraft and Virtual Reality

Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series.


This is a narrative of the usefulness of emerging technology through the use of video games and useable resources that engage and inform various age groups within the various modes of learning and let us not forget that the most memorable tunes and skills we associate with games. They are now appropriated using Extended Reality (XR).

Microsoft released a new product on November 22, 2013 and the XBOX One became available to gamers. In between the 8 years, 6 months and 10 days previous to that date, I had played video games religiously on the original XBOX 360. During that time, I became engaged with learning how to play games in a new fashion, within a new platform, and became open to a new manner of engaging with a community of people that I had never met in person. I was immersed. I was convinced that there was no better way to spend time. I became a gamer.

As we fast forward, my preadolescent son began a fanatical interest in Minecraft. Minecraft is a game of virtual building blocks, literally. The gamer can utilize her/his perspective to create, manipulate, reinvent, or improve upon existing in and out of game structures. For example, in our household we were discussing Mayan culture and low and behold we found this imitative ruin like structure below by Krystine Botsis on Pinterest.

I continued to watch in amazement how my son learned more and more about this process of building; asking me questions to which I did not know the answers and thus began our journey into the rabbit hole.

The XBOX One became a conduit for us both. The devices multimodal platforms of fitness, games, movie stream services, languages and learning, music, web search access, online engagement with a gaming community truly cracked the shell open and shared the code of where all the learners were engaged. I now understood why playgrounds were empty, and why blacktops and the hopscotch box were squeakless giggle free zones. Learners, both young and mature were, from what we have coined, virting. Virting is a term that supposes that an individual is totally immersed in a game or virtual reality.

Minecraft had us and over 100,000 million others virting. According to its own home page, https://minecraft.net/, at the time of this article there are over 12,114,367 followers on Twitter and the game had sold approximately 22,691,721 copies across the globe. From the perspective of a professor, a teacher, an educator and an organic intellectual, this seemed like an appropriate way to engage any class by simply going where the learners dwelled, Minecraft.

Learning how to play the game via XBOX One was simple once I learned how to use the controller, but the PC version required a tad more in the game training (ITGT), but being stubborn turned out to be a good quality after all. After I had logged about 2-6 hours per day for 4 months watching YouTube videos, reading blogs and hard cover books for beginners about what to do, I continued to observe the nimble fingered master in my home and ask him questions. His stare was focused, but he obliged my obviously lower level thinking about the game with one sentence answers and resumed smashing, blowing up, and building his world. If this “game” held his attention for hours at a time, then it would hold my students attention too, right? I postulated that if I knew little, then I needed to find experts that would not mind my lack of understanding. I reached out to students at Sumner County Middle College High School at Volunteer State Community College.

Two students agreed to help develop a Minecraft world map for my English 1010 course. The thought behind our meetings were to simply develop a “sick” (meaning awesome) world. We agreed to stick to a concept map and have four levels (and a surprise level) with two key locations within each level. The four places were 1) Island, 2) Mountain, 3) Farming Community, 4) City, and lastly an underwater library or repository. There were two attributes the three of us thoroughly discussed and deemed “cool” super powers as the ability to fly and being able to breathe underwater. We channeled our inner Hogwarts and thought it much more appropriate to walk through a portal that transported the gamer’s character from one place to the other. However, breathing underwater took on its own strand. In Minecraft, we fashioned 2/4 of what we originally had drawn out. However, the student feedback received was phenomenal! Every student that was able to engage in the environment commented similarly with, “I wish that all of my classes had this as a component embedded within the curriculum. Our failure to complete the entire design mod lead to exploratory research about what other modalities were available as resources to enhance instruction … Virtual Reality – Google Cardboard

These two virtual reality headsets have provided even greater context for what is and will be possible within the future of education. Although there use has been limited within my discipline, I am doing what learners, teachers, and leaders do … asking questions, searching for answers with the inquisitiveness of a small child. I imagine content that is proposed within an application, down-loaded or streamed to a mobile device, then further integrated into a virtual reality headset. The immersion is rich and full and has true context as learners exercise their ideas about perspective and listen to the voices of Du Bois, Baldwin, Cullen, Hurston, West, McWhorter, and others who have helped shape literary history, political ideology, and social commentary in the 20th and 21st centuries. Beyond the digital humanities, there will be collaborative practices that truly bring the pages of history, sociology, behavioral psychology, art, music, dance, industrial maintenance, mechatronics, engineering, chemical engineering, and the pre-surgical use of techniques to save lives and potentially the reanimation of tissue to life by taking us/experts into the experience of those who live beyond our locales within Tennessee, beyond the borders of our United States of America into the daily lives of our global community.

Life through the integration and use of games and emerging technology will continue to evolve. Let us all continue to reimagine our dreams. The beauty of this all is that we are only limited to boundaries of learning and living that we place around ourselves.