Teacher Gaming: Computer games as educational tools

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I present the concept of the company Teacher Gaming to take good use of computer games to use them as educational tools in classrooms. The company had its first success with MinecraftEdu and is now working on its second project: KerbalEdu.

Teacher Gaming[1], a company based in Tampere, Finland, has recently started a new project: KerbalEdu[2]. The company’s first project is MinecraftEdu[3], a project to enhance education with the engaging environment of Minecraft.
MinecraftEdu is a collaboration of educators and programmers from United States and Finland to make the game an educational tool in schools everywhere. The team is also working together with the creators of Minecraft: Mojang AB[4].

Browsing the MinecraftEdu Wiki[5] gives a good overview about possible use cases of the Minecraft projects in classrooms[6]. Pupils can discover the history of ancient civilizations, doing experiments to measure gravity or get their hands on creating topographic maps.

Minecraft is an open-world sandbox game, that allows its players to shape the world as they like. Players can explore the randomly generated world, dig deep into the earth to mine different kinds of ore or create huge buildings using all kinds of ressources of the game world. The combination of activities is vast and every kind of player can find a way to play the game that suits them best. The aspect of randomness and open-world makes every game and every experience unique to Minecraft players[7].
The above described gameplay is also very addictive to players, because they always discover a new thing they want to do. The desired break after a ore vein is mined out is postponed because an opening of a cave was discovered behind the ore vein. The exploration of a valley suddenly reveals an awesome looking mountain that needs to be explored …

Combining this engaging environment with real world educative tasks can enhance in a great way the motivation of pupils to use the freshly learned facts to proceed in the game. Additionally, pupils can ask „what if…“ questions and do their experiments without the danger of being harmed.

Recently, Teacher Gaming has started the new KerbalEdu project with the intention of bringing Kerbal Space Program[8] as a new educational tool into classrooms everywhere as, too. Apart from a special lower school price, Squad [9], the developers of KSP, will offer additional technical support.

As I’ve already discussed in previous articles, KSP is teaching its players knowledge about physics and space travel in a very fun and engaging way[10][11]. By bringing the game into classrooms, pupils can even better understand how basic principles of physics work out. They can get their own first hand impressions on how a plane stays in the air or how Newton’s laws of motion work out.

I’m really looking forward to see the results of the first implemention of KerbalEdu.