But Mommy, I have to Play Minecraft for School Tomorrow!!

It will probably take some time before this would happen for us locally, but these crazy Swedes are onto something: making playing Minecraft a mandatory school activity.

A Swedish national school competition called Future City got the idea rolling for this initiative, where students would submit ideas for “making things better”, with ideas created in virtual worlds with improving things like electricity and water supply.

The teachers at the Viktor Rydberg went ahead and made playing Minecraft a subject, and therefore a necessity, describing it as, “learning about city planning, environmental issues, getting things done, and even how to plan for the future.”

 

Monica Ekman, a teacher at the school also stated, “We think it’s a fun way of learning and it’s nice for the students to achieve something.”

Computers and gaming as educational tools have been around about as long as gaming has been, and taking into account the announced upcoming free release of Minecraft on the Raspberry Pi, this would be a fabulous tool to teach various subjects locally including computer science, electronics and playing nice with one another to achieve a shared vision and goal. This could be a great extension to the OLPC project as well…

Thanks to Gizmag for the alert and The Local for the Source!

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