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Swedish School Makes Minecraft Lessons Compulsory
SchrodingerZ writes "The Viktor Rydberg school in Stockholm, Sweden, has announced that they have included Minecraft into the curriculum for their 13-year-old students. The program is not meant to teach children about math or language, but rather as a tool to inspire creativity in the classroom. 'They learn about city planning, environmental issues, getting things done, and even how to plan for the future,' Viktor Rydberg teacher Monica Ekman told English-language newspaper The Local. 'It's not any different from arts or woodcraft,' she added."
..Quake.
''They learn about city planning, environmental issues, getting things done, and even how to plan for the future,"
My son must have somehow gone to that school without telling me. He keeps talking about Creepers being a key natural resource.
Or you could do what my 3rd grade teacher did and let a bunch of kids play with Legos.
they've made Starcraft mandatory learning.
Simcity does city planning, environmental issues, getting things done, and even how to plan for the future. Better.
No doubt minecraft, the game, is interesting
But I still curious to know if there are other better software out there that can encourage students to think creatively.
Anyone that has any example, care to share?
Thanks !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Is the school paying for it? or are they just telling kids how to download it for free (local play only)
It also doesn't have cooperative multiplayer, it's a very limited environment that doesn't encourage creativity, it's four times more expensive than Minecraft, and it requires Origin DRM.
Simcity does city planning, environmental issues, getting things done, and even how to plan for the future. Better.
... And Godzilla.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
I think this is wonderful. I'm very disheartened by the direction of the educational system in the United States. It seems that we have become a nation obsessed with standardized testing due to the No Child Left Behind Legislation (NCLB). At least at our school, all we care about is doing well on the state test because our school is graded and penalized based on the scores. It is very sad as art programs, Tech Ed, and project based learning is out the door because we have to drill and kill our kids so we can improve on the state test. It's not the teachers' or the administrators' fault. It's the laws that have been put in place by clueless Legislators. It's very sad that creativity has been trumped by root memorization, thoughtless learning!
Simcity does city planning, environmental issues, getting things done, and even how to plan for the future. Better.
I don't think they're really on the same scale. In Simcity, you play the planner/mayor/whatever-high-up that determines macro issues. We should build houses here, power plants should be there. I don't care what you think, I'm God.
In Minecraft you play an individual. You determine what you use, where you build, how you build, all micro issues centered around yourself. You have no in-game control over your fellow players. You have to resort to actually negotiating and talking about things if you want to affect the macro situation.
I most definitely agree that Simcity could be used for teaching. However, depending on what it is you're actually trying to teach, I would not call it "better."
Did you forget to take your meds today?
This will seem to work well, then kids will start getting addicted and have trouble doing things outside of Minecraft. Even worse if they find mods like Industrial Craft. I'm an adult and I have issues controlling how much time I spend on Minecraft, and kids probably have even less self control than I do.
What makes you think anyone is talking about the upcoming version? In terms of what the apparent lessons are supposed to teach could easily be taught using Sim City 2000, 3000, or 4. Why would you need cooperative multiplayer for this curricular? None of the actual goals seem to need it and the article doesn't even hint at Minecraft being played on a server.
There is no feedback from Minecraft regarding any of these topics, where as any Sim City will inform you of results caused by your (good/poor) planning, sims will complaint about environmental conditions and even get mad when you start chopping down woodlands, etc.
Minecraft can inspire creativity the same way Lego can, but for their narrowed down subject matter it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
You are obviously American. Swedes do not view "foreign" entities as scary or undeserving just because they're foreign. That would not be considered a negative here.
Simcity 4 is not bad for city planning, except for the tendency to build industry-free utopias next to a garbage pile.
I would not recommend the dumbed-down sequel.
The Anno series is good too (1503,1602, 1701, 2070). 2070 supposedly has environmentalism as a plot device. One plus with that is you could have the class split into teams and try to "win" based on rules set by the teacher.
Doesn't seem to go well together.
But are they just playing it, or will they be building maps or what? If we're just promoting the next Oregon Trail for the newer generation, it'll largely be a waste of time.
I remember when our company hired a guy to create and maintain our second life presence. His cubicle was nicer than mine, but I still have a job.
Unless they're Finnish. Now Finns, they like everyone except Russians.
It also isn't foreign since Notch is Swedish.
I honestly believe they could market SimCity as a destruction simulator, where you develop a town so that you can destroy it over and over again.
Simcity does city planning, environmental issues, getting things done, and even how to plan for the future. Better.
The landfills in SimCity 4 would never go away. The power stations simply create too much pollution. People tend to build cities simply serve as landfill site and one massive power station.
Considering Notch is Swedish, and Mojang is based in Stockholm, it's a local game for this school.
'bor de bor It's not any different bor de bor from arts or bor de bor woodcraft,' she added.
fify.
personally, I'm with the guy above.
Dwarf Fortress would be better then SimCity. While it allows you the overall control and planning element (managing many little minions who do all the work), it still offers you a great amount of creativity (which all variants of SimCity lack). What Simcity does better, Dwarf Fortress does even better.
There is a reason it's the inspiration for minecraft.
Right, but if all the students learned was SimCity, how would that help prepare them for the coming zombie apocalypse?
So now the Java 0-day Exploiters have access to school networks... awesome...
And we all know, the best way to foster creativity is...
all Swedish software will be Minecraft compatible
KERNEL PANIC -SIGFAULT AT ADDRESS #51A54D07
cooperative multiplayer is in simcity 2000 network edition
Is reality any different?
When they're looking at buying their first house, they'll just buy an empty lot with a bunch of trees and then start punching them...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I don't remember selecting ANY subjects when I was thirteen. Every class was specified by the default curriculum.
You think that it's possible to carry around tonnes of material on your back in the shape of perfect textured cubes?
No, and I don't think anyone else does, either.
Sort of like Loy Yang and the city of Traralgon, then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loy_Yang_Power_Station
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
"rote memorisation, Clara, not "root memorisation".
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Minecraft not only encourages creativity, but also teaches the benefits of planning, and forethought. It also teaches you the ability to not ragequit and give up after that creeper blows up your project again. Harumph.
Being able to get back on the horse after a major setback is perhaps the most important lifeskill. Thank you Mr. Notch.
...the creeper blew up my homework!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
If you want to teach the children to build 3d objects in front of a computer then why not just teach blender?
The results are better, the interface is much better, it's an actual skill that can get you a job in the future, you get all the basics to to 3d modeling that can be transfered to other software suits(MAYA in particular), it's free, and you can even learn some programing if you start messing with the game engine. If computer power is the problem, I can say that if their computers can run MC at 30fps, then blender will run as smooth as a hot knife in butter.
Personally I never understood why world creation games are so popular, when you can have a much better experience using a artistic software suit. I personally tried all these games: Minecraft, Terraria, Dwarf fortress you name it. If there was at least real challenge, depth and interesting rewards, just like a real game, I would understand. DF is the only one that has SOME of those atributes but Minecraft/Terraria just fells like pure work and boredom. If sparking interest in computers and digital arts is the reason they chose MC, I have a list of much better games such as Deus EX or Xenogears(amongst a few others, that yet to be released Cyberpunk2077 game looks good too). They may not directly stimulate the creative side of the brain but their storyline/settings/lore are awe-inspiring(they played a huge role in my later childhood and had a directly influence in determining who I am now).
"rote memorisation, Clara, not "root memorisation".
Yes, root memorization: 1, 1.414, 1.732, 2, 2.236, 2.449, 2.646, 2.828, 3, 3.162. Consider why you need to be 21 years old to drink beer but 4 and 7 months to drink root beer.
At least some of your points don't apply:
Lower Licensing costs ($0)
Right in TFA, it talks about a free edition of the game for educational purposes.
The ability to look at the source code.
13-year-olds aren't going to understand the code, and neither are their teachers. If you want to read the code, feel free to buy a developer's license for it as all the mod developers have done.
Huge number of scripting hooks all done in lua.
Your average 13-year-old won't be doing much of that either. If they really want to, the ComputerCraft mod creates in-game computers and robots that are scripted in Lua. However, part of the learning experience of Minecraft is doing redstone circuitry, which can be used to teach basic logic gates.
MUCH MUCH LOWER Resource usage. (Like P3 with 256 megs of ram for a client, server ram increase only base on number of users and the scripts involved.)
TFA article also points out that the free educational edition is being targeted for the Raspberry Pi, which uses a 700MHz ARM processor and has either 256 or 512MB RAM, depending on which model you get. So: roughly the same amount of RAM as you quoted, and from personal experience, a P3 will generally out-perform an ARM running at the same clock speed in most number-crunching tasks, since the P3 was designed for speed, while the ARM was optimized to be low-power.
Cross-platform (Mac, Win, Lin, plus the potential for other ports).
Minecraft is written in Java, and is already available for Mac, Win, and Lin. And XBox, I think? The only platform-dependent library it uses is the Lightweight Java Game Library, for which source is available under the BSD license, if you want to port it.
Also not a foreign commercial entity (No offense to Notch+Co.)
Huh? Mojang is a Swedish company, and the school doing this is in Sweden. You're the foreign one!
Is the school paying for it? or are they just telling kids how to download it for free (local play only)
While I do not know the answer, the kids could of been required to pay for it. Well, the kids parents.
Be seeing you...
DF teaches you that the people need alcohol. ;)
Then they would learn about economy, markets, profit/hour, logistics (the moving goods kind), supply chains, book keeping (the accountancy kind).
I'm suprised no one mentioned Portal
ya know you could make use of far useful stuff thats more fun
heck go get a few open source games and use all the facets and software you can freely to make the game look and be better
a swedish version and when you contribute to the world you gain reputation
na lets go at proprietary crap that looks like a dos game cause ya can right...
ugh
lol i can see there future is lego perhaps they shuld ask the lego company to bring in lego for graduation.
Minecraft's fun and all, but there are a lot of good "educational" games. I really like SpaceChem. Why specify Minecraft instead of having a few educational games in there so you can choose?
I've never played either but the comments suggest that SimCity is for a model of autocratic rule without dissension and Minecraft (at least on a server) requires negotiation with other players. Opinion seems to be very polarized between the two, other than a couple of people who prefer Dwarf Fortress.
Hmm... can't quite put my finger on what that's making me think of...
What Simcity does better, Dwarf Fortress does even better.
Irony is promoting the game most in need of a tutorial mode as a teaching tool
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is the school paying for it? or are they just telling kids how to download it for free (local play only)
What?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nope.
- Zimbabwe was a rich and industrious country when the British left. Mugabe screwed his own country.
- Haiti? It rebelled against France and took control over its own destiny. It did pay a huge bribe, then again it did have good revenue sources. It's too bad sugar isn't that valuable any longer. The perils of resource based economies!
Since Minecraft is Swedish (see Notch), they'll just rewrite all software to be based on Minecraft.
Is the school paying for it? or are they just telling kids how to download it for free (local play only)
None of the above.
http://www.mojang.com/2012/11/minecraft-is-coming-to-the-raspberry-pi/
Soon you’ll be able to play and program with Minecraft on one of the snazzy little devices. Aron and Daniel have dedicated time to porting a version of Minecraft: Pocket Edition that comes with a revised feature set and support for multiple programming languages. We’re calling it Minecraft: Pi Edition, and it will be completely free to download.
Wanker.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
13-year-olds aren't going to understand the code, and neither are their teachers. If you want to read the code, feel free to buy a developer's license for it as all the mod developers have done.
What developer's license are you talking about? Any one can look at Minecraft's source if they have a copy of the game and have downloaded a copy of Minecraft Coder Pack (available for free and maintained by a group of Minecraft players, not Mojang).
So a simcity-type FPS?
???
Profit!!
Defining Statistics and Social Research
http://www.mojang.com/2012/11/minecraft-is-coming-to-the-raspberry-pi/
Soon you’ll be able to play and program with Minecraft on one of the snazzy little devices. Aron and Daniel have dedicated time to porting a version of Minecraft: Pocket Edition that comes with a revised feature set and support for multiple programming languages. We’re calling it Minecraft: Pi Edition, and it will be completely free to download.
Already discussed.
http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/11/24/2334209/minecraft-ported-to-the-raspberry-pi
13-year-olds aren't going to understand the code, and neither are their teachers. If you want to read the code, feel free to buy a developer's license for it as all the mod developers have done.
Not if we never give them a chance and assume they're too young to get into coding, anyways.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
roman_mir just accidentally hit the 'post anonymously' box.
No, schools are not allowed to demand any money from kids, in any situation.
Public schools in Sweden are free. Which annoys some people when they want to arrange trips and the likes.
I always hated wood working class, they always seemed to need a massive amount of funding for what could be done by hand. In one case the computer networking course and computer eng course ( at highschool ) got shutdown due to lack of funds, kicker is the wood working course got all new wood working machines. Another course I never understood was Art, they always poured money into the Art program but frankly I never saw it go anywhere. Now we have a story about another computer course opening up and I hope this time that they decide to fund it instead of the courses where you don't even need the funding.
Swedes don't do X, unless they're Finnish, and thus not Swedes?
The US Republicrats?
it sucked elephant balls
13-year-olds aren't going to understand the code, and neither are their teachers. If you want to read the code, feel free to buy a developer's license for it as all the mod developers have done.
Not if we never give them a chance and assume they're too young to get into coding, anyways.
This is a general, compulsory subject. Whatever people on slashdot like to think, not every child is going to be interested in coding. I'm all in favour of encouraging kids to learn programming, but making it compulsory is not going to work.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I have a little brother that is that age, and LOVES MineCraft. I guess we can pass it off as educational now.
Code, eat, sleep, repeat.
That'ssssssssss a nicessssssssssssssssssss sssssssssssssssssscity you have there.
While those are nice things, I think Minecraft does cooperation and infrastructure development better. For example, I can divide my games into three phases. In the first phase, I gather enough resources to survive (basically you need a secure, well lit (light keeps the monsters from spawning) shelter that you can find again, once you die). In the second phase, I construct "farms" for making various things. This is the initial stage of the infrastructure building that one can do. In the third stage, it's ego-driven pyramid building.
I'm not particularly experienced or diligent a player, but I was able to make with a few hours of effort an underground tree farm which in my version of the game is both a great, renewable source of monster-free wood (which in turn can be turned into a principle component of tools, some building structures, a fuel source, and a permanent light source) and a minor food source (I occasionally get apples) as well.
This is classic engineering. Develop a system that saves you work in the long run. In theory, you can do it all by yourself.
But cooperation really expands what you can do. For example, I played for a time with a second player. He was a real builder. So I'd gather resources for him while he built hovering glass buildings.
One of the time killers is simply the effort it takes to travel. With more people playing, you're more likely to have someone in or near a place with resources you need. Similarly, you're more likely to be in a place where you can help someone else.
So I might say to him, "I'm in the HQ. You need anything?" Sometimes he might need something like a pile of glass blocks. Or he might need me to do a short task there (say, reload the furnaces with more sand and charcoal so we can make more glass blocks). These might take him several minutes to get, if he were to go there on his own. But since I'm doing it anyway, I can save him some time. Instead of having to do that, he got more time for building.
We'd also try things and bounce ideas off of each other. There was a vast amount of stuff to try and do. And that's a particular strength of the game environment. It is open-ended to a degree that is nearly unheard of in a game.
Why would you need cooperative multiplayer for this curricular? None of the actual goals seem to need it and the article doesn't even hint at Minecraft being played on a server.
The summary mentioned "city planning". For the intent of what they probably want to teach students, it seems likely that they'll do something similar to what I did in the Art Institute, where coordinating with an entire class to make a small town. While this seems very simple, you learn a lot when coordinating the style of buildings, ensuring you have a roadwork that everyone can work with (and fit their buildings with), and so forth.
There is no feedback from Minecraft regarding any of these topics, where as any Sim City will inform you of results caused by your (good/poor) planning, sims will complaint about environmental conditions and even get mad when you start chopping down woodlands, etc.
There's no direct feedback, in many cases, but again, I think the focus in this case is more about interpersonal relationships. Such as, if you knock down all the trees in the area for wood and don't replant, other people will get pissed off at you for making their life harder (or at least view more ugly). Similar for people playing with fire too much; imagine what happens when someone's fireplace isn't properly insulated, and they burn down an entire city block.
There's surprisingly large value in seeing how doing your grunt work affects others, and coordinating to achieve the best result. That's something that Sim City can't achieve, and the emergent aspects for things like resource acquisition make it better suited than Lego.
From a nationalist prospective, Swedes just want to compete with their Scandinavian brothers. Ever since Denmark created Lego, Sweden wishes to usurp the creativity throne. The problem is, the creativity throne is just as artificial as both toy building blocks and an open ended computer game. Let's ignore the groups that want to coerce people, and give credit to those who create amazing things with Lego and Minecraft. Novelty, what a concept!
I remember playing SimCity in high school geography class. I guess you have to move with the times and play a more modern game to learn about the more modern world.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
I honestly believe they could market SimCity as a destruction simulator, where you develop a town so that you can destroy it over and over again.
YOu mean, it isn't?
I honestly believe they could market SimCity as a destruction simulator, where you develop a town so that you can destroy it over and over again.
Obviously you are way too young to remember:
Crush, Crumble & Chomp.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush,_Crumble_and_Chomp!
Now, get off my lawn. You are blocking my light!
Students, your first MineCraft assignment is to build a cat fountain.
Lincity even more (except for getting things done)
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Not every child is going to be interested in reading, science, sports, history, or math either, but those are compulsory and introduce those subjects to children who may not otherwise receive exposure. I think at least a little bit of programming introduces problem-solving in a way that's more immediate and tangible than math.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
There's Second Life. That's a better choice than Minecraft, aka Second Life for Atari.
Are you sure about that? I seem to recall that garbage would, eventually, disappear from a landfill. If anything, it seems that SC4 actually modelled that rather accurately in that trash in a landfill takes a long time to biodegrade. If you never stop using a landfill then it will never begin to clear up. Of course, the problem is that there is no way to control garbage dispersal/destination in SC4 at a fine enough level. The only way you might notice a landfill shrinking would be to export all of your garbage.
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max