Minecraft is an open-world game that promotes creativity, collaboration, problem-solving and reflection in an immersive virtual environment. Players build their own 3D worlds using a series of different blocks similar to the blocked based architecture used in Scratch. Players are able to build and interact with objects like castles, dragons, creatures and environments for formulating narratives, worlds and characters coming from their own imagination. Creativity and imagination is an essential prerequisite for players to play mindcraft as all in-game objects are build from players.
The Minecraft Education Edition is the original Minecraft but applied in educational settings for particular subject areas that teachers would like to teach using minecraft. Subjects such as math, sciences, languages, business and environment could be structured and designed as lessons to be delivered from a problem-solving and inquiry-based paradigm.
For example the minecraft code town lesson is a complete lesson plan that teachers may use for helping their students to learn coding. A series of learning objectives are provided in the lesson plan along with a narrative of the goal that the student needs to achieve during game play. For example, students need to use their coding skills for gathering all puzzle pieces and place them in the frames to restore the mural.
Student's learning activities are also documented in the lesson plan. Challenges are explained and the order of executing them is provided. Assets that students will use can be downloaded and repurposed by teachers. Adding notes and solutions of the lessons are also available for teachers to access. Filters such as age of students, subject area are provided as tags for teachers to decide whether the lesson can be used in their own context.