On Tuesday, I met up with com_cult_girl aka Noreen Dunnett and some fellow students in the IDEL Minecraft realm.   

The aim of the meet-up was to get to grips with the basics of Minecraft; building, moving and using the text chat.  I confess, I have ambivalent feelings about Minecraft; I am intrigued by seemly endless possibilities and potential that I am told Minecraft has, yet I am also frustrated with myself because I don’t “get it”.  Somewhere inside me there is a resistance to the blocky, pixelated graphics and the notion of laboriously constructing a building that I’ll never set foot in.

What has become of my inner-child?

My ambivalence aside, one thing I know for sure is that my eldest child does not struggle with any of those Minecraft issues! She loves, or rather loved it (at 15 she has moved on from Minecraft).   In contrast, my two younger children have played Minecraft and enjoyed it at times but seem to prefer creative free play in the domain of the real world.  Just as a side note; my two younger daughters are 12 months apart and at a similar developmental stage .  My eldest daughter is four years older than her closest sibling and whilst she also was very keen on creative free play she was equally captivated by solo and social play in Minecraft.

When I think about the tremendous appeal of Minecraft for children, I keep coming back to the sense of agency that it must give them.   For the first decade of my life, I lived in West Yorkshire during the late 1970s and early 1980s.  At the tender age offour or five, I played in the street, in and out of neighbour’s houses and gardens.  During the latter years, I lived on a working dairy farm in Heptonstall.   Here a gang of us local kids roamed the area, building dens, climbing trees and playing cowpat frisbee, free from the watchful gaze of adults.   Not wishing to romanticise my childhood in anyway,  I want to acknowledge the sense of freedom we enjoyed.  There were boundaries to our extensive domain, we were forbidden from playing in the river or in the milking sheds and common sense told us to stay well away from any field with a bull in it.

If we jump forward 30 years,  my South African born children, have grown up in urban Cape Town.  Crime is a serious concern here and I don’t allow my children to walk unaccompanied to the local shop or their friend’s houses nearby.  They are restricted to the confines of our property unless they are with an adult.  In the light of this, it becomes quite easy to see the appeal of a virtual environment over which a child has free reign.

One thing I am curious to learn about are the pedagogical applications of Minecraft.  My teaching experience is in the primary school and Minecraft is a big hit with that age group.   I have enlisted the help of my daughter and her friend to help me get to grips with Minecraft and learn how to record and add a voice-over to sessions, which I will duly post on the blog.

 

Feb 14, 2019