top button
Flag Notify
    Connect to us
      Site Registration

Site Registration

Is Minecraft an Educational Game or Not?

0 votes
755 views

There is a great debate going on regarding the educational worth of Minecraft. Some say it is just a game, while others say it teaches children valuable life skills. It was high time this team investigated.

Minecraft exploded onto the game scene after its official 2011 release. Trialled from 2009, this game was the masterpiece of “Notch”, a Mojang company programmer. In 2020 the game had over 126 million monthly active users. They have sold 200 million copies+ of this game. The game itself takes a sandbox format. Indeed, Minecraft was the original sandbox format games. It lay the groundwork for games like Roblox to come later.

The question to tackle today is whether Minecraft – or minecrack as it gamers affectionately dub it – is an educational game or not. Let’s discuss.

Minecraft as a “Sandbox” Video Game

Let’s start with the format. What exactly do you do in Minecraft? You open the game with the ability to choose a creative world, where you have access to every brick the game uses, or a DIY one. In the classic game mode, you need to mine for the bricks you use to build things. The whole open world lies before you with no instructions on how to play the game. There’s no real plotting, although you can follow a loose storyline to get to other plains of existence. Though, you start with a character who has nothing.

The Minecraft world consists of blocks and that’s where things get interesting. Everything you build in Minecraft has square edges because it is all made from these bricks. If it isn’t built from bricks, it uses bricks to create it. You can chop down wood from trees, gather flowers, water, farm animals, you can build villages, design cityscapes, and recreate your favourite scenes from movies. Children can even use a Minecraft banner maker to make their world more inviting to others, teaching them that creating things individual to themselves encourages social interaction. Minecraft is a sandbox game because you are placed in an open world and allowed to build anything you like. In a very real sense, Minecraft is the digital version of LEGO® - but with all-square bricks.

Is Minecraft an Educational Game?

Minecraft isn’t just the answer to one of our many riddles, it is also an educational game. Disagree? Let us prove it to you. We would argue that any sandbox game encourages free expression and creativity. Any game that encourages recreating houses, understanding mechanics, and animal husbandry cannot be far from teaching.

Some of the things players learn from Minecraft include:

  • Correlations between cause and effect
  • Animal husbandry – where baby animals come from
  • The limitations of particular building materials, for example, that wool burns easily
  • Crop knowledge – which crops grow where
  • Reading and writing skills as you communicate with other players or plant signs
  • Problem solving techniques
  • Engineering parts which go with other parts and understanding how they work
  • Helps with math skills
  • Encourages free thinking
  • Encourages self-direction
  • Teaches kids that creativity has rewards

In short, Minecraft teaches our kids to interact and play in a friendly, sociable way.

And that’s without even talking about the Educational Edition.

posted Sep 14, 2022 by Divya Bharti

  Promote This Article
Facebook Share Button Twitter Share Button LinkedIn Share Button


Related Articles

The iGaming markets have become a stand-out in the global iGaming industry over the past decade. Thanks to ongoing development and innovation in gaming technologies, iGaming is now one of the most popular gaming verticals, reportedly on track to be worth $134.5 billion by 2027 (PR Newswire).  

In certain territories, online casinos, poker gaming rooms and sports betting websites are actually outperforming their brick and mortar counterparts, proving that the digital space is where operators need to focus their efforts if they want to future-proof gaming resources.  

iGaming in 2021 

As it stands at present, the iGaming sector is one of the most innovative in the global gaming industry. Today's gamers can access a wide range of exciting and engaging experiences via online gaming platforms, while sports betting apps online bookmakers deliver up to the minute betting odds and markets.  

In order to engage the next generation of players, who by their nature are inherently tech-savvy, gaming developers in the iGaming realm are creating gaming mechanics, formats and features that offer new and immersive experiences. It’s not enough for today’s gamer to simply play online versions of roulette, poker, or slots games, there needs to be extra gamification and additional elements that transcend the limitations that would ordinarily be associated with casino gaming in its more traditional format.  

Game Design for Online Casinos 

Providing provably fair gaming experiences is at the heart of reputable iGaming operators, so games developers working in this vertical are tasked with different objectives than traditional video game developers.  

As Lloyd Butler, Chief Exec of digital gaming studio Live 5 stated, these new measures are allowing the best-designed games to stand out above lower-quality alternatives (which typically feature faster and more frequent gameplay) since “quality will be an important factor for players”.  

Future-Proofing iGaming 

As the gaming industry as a whole undergoes advanced development over the next few years thanks to the widespread integration and adoption of the ‘next generation of digital technologies, we can expect iGaming to experience the same.  

The standout technologies that will help to ensure iGaming is future-proofed for the next decade and beyond are VR/AR, cloud gaming and 5G.  

We typically associate VR technology with gaming industry leaders like Oculus Rift, Razer OSVR, PlayStation VR and Samsung Gear, but virtual reality is an avenue that iGaming developers and operators have already begun to explore.  

In recent years, we’ve seen the release of VR poker games, which transport players to exotic, imaginative locations. Newer applications of the technology, however, will be in the realm of live dealer games, which will release the vertical from its current restrictions and provide gamers with real-time interactions in fully-equipped virtual casinos.  

AR (augmented reality) is also expected to disrupt how iGaming mobile apps are designed and played, enhancing players’ realities even while gaming on the go. 

Cloud computing is another technology that’s been doing the rounds in the wider gaming landscape, with major players like Amazon and Google jumping on board the train. As the technology becomes more mainstream and adopted by iGaming developers it’s likely to cause significant changes in the way that people can access games and add further layers of competition to an already highly saturated market. 

Due to the accessibility of cloud gaming, players will expect the latest games at their fingertips almost instantaneously. The process of developing and distributing games will need to be sped up and developers can expect to see the periods between game design, creation and time to market shorten significantly. 

The 5G rollout is an exciting time for game development, particularly here in the iGaming world. With the technology promising to address gaming bugbears such as lagging and slow-loading games, it will open up a whole world of possibilities for the type of gaming experiences developers can create for the sector.  

Multiplayer games, for example, are a hit with online casino players and 5G, coupled with the availability of cloud-gaming platforms will provide the optimum landscape for multiplayer slots games or casino tournaments with friends. 

 

READ MORE

What is Silverlight ?

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering media and rich interactive applications for the Web. The Silverlight browser plug-in is freely available for all major browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Apple'a Safari and Windows Internet Explorer running on the Macintosh or Microsoft Windows.

Microsoft Silverlight is a deprecated application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications, similar to Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is available for some browsers, but not for Chrome due to Silverlight's use of the NPAPI framework. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, current versions support multimedia, graphics, and animation, and give developers support for CLI languages and development tools. Silverlight is also one of the two application development platforms for Windows Phone, but web pages that use Silverlight cannot run on the Windows Phone or Windows Mobile versions of Internet Explorer, as there is no Silverlight plugin for Internet Explorer on those platforms.

Silverlight development has officially been shelved by Microsoft, although security patches and bugfixes for it will be extended until, I believe, 2021. This has forced Netflix to start looking for an alternative (probably HTML5) and those of you that use Netflix will no doubt be kept informed of future streaming technology developments.

Video for What is Silverlight?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m5vJK3Xp0Q
READ MORE
...