TechTheDay

Minecraft has the advantage of logging data that permits a hypothetical teacher to make a certain polymer or how rapid they will develop all throughout the game. Currently, digital tools that is similar to games in a certain way are mostly used in teaching, but the majority of these tools doesn’t have to do with fun or they specifically eliminate it. Educational games that truly fuel up motivation to progress could be a strong and essential tool.

Though there are many successful educational games including Kerbal Space Program and Opening Trail – Polycraft World was the first ever real deal that uses games to take over the traditional way of teaching educational course and the best thing about it, is it depends on software that’s ideal for teaching.

There is a preliminary study which recommends that it worked moderately well. A group of professors which include a materials scientist, two chemists and a game developer, has made a Minecraft expansion, which is especially designed to trick the students into learning engineering and chemistry concepts. They utilized the mod as part of a college course and determined preliminary results that shows promising results.

The main goal of the group was published in Nature Chemistry, which is to make an educational game that wouldn’t feel like work but will trigger excitement to the students that they would consume it without the need to be assigned to it. The Polycraft World expansion had two main guiding principles: “the science associated to the game must be precise and it must contribute tons of fun to the game.”

Compared to Minecraft, Polycraft World will challenge the players to put together materials in order to generate items, but it is associated with precise chemical processes to achieve it. “If you put together the correct reactants (in a chemically balanced procedure) you will obtain a new material like Kevlar,” the researchers said. They aim to make a powerful natural incentive to learn the practical concepts by allowing the player to create items such as flamethrowers and jetpacks. Polycraft World utilizes an online wiki to teach the players how to play, like in plain-vanilla Minecraft.

The chemist, Christina Thompson took the mod for a test drive with 26 students participating in the procedure. As part of the non-graded class known as “Video Games and Learning”, the students were allowed to play Polycraft World.

After 11 weeks, the students were given a pop quiz that deals with polymer science. Almost half of the students managed to draw important part of the crude oil distillation process and the majority of the group managed to recognize easy-to-make polymers that were in the game. There’s even a group of students that was able to determine more advanced concepts of polymers.

As the researchers determined, the sample size used in this study was very small and it is not enough to be considered as anecdotal evidence, however it is still promising. These students, they highlight, “managed to learn the real-world procedures which is required to obtain benzene out of crude oil since they aim to create jetpacks in a video game.” One thing that is vague from this study is whether the students enjoyed the game to get to their required stage.

The researchers suggest that gaming is a promising educational tool, especially in terms of remote education which is extremely popular today. As a matter of fact, medium games are designed for educational purposes. These games do not only allow people to learn on their own pace and experience failure in a constructive way, but they are also the best epitome to sport motivation and extreme focus: “Human beings have spent more than 1.75 billion of hours playing Minecraft.”