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Professor spoke to Sabrina Marandola about teaching his class “Video Games and/as T���ǰ���” at Concordia University within Minecraft during the pandemic.Once pandemic lockdown was announced, and it was clear university educators would have to move their classes online, Professor Wershler met with Professor Bart Simon (also a GI partner). The two��professors discussed holding the class within Minecraft instead of using Zoom or other typical online teaching tools. Additionally, they received ethics approval to study how practical this new approach to teaching “in game” was.����

Dr Wershler described the experience to Marandola, saying that before the class had even started, students found their way onto the Minecraft server and had “very thoughtfully built a little classroom,” which didn’t get much use as he had “absolutely no intention” of giving a lecture “in any conventional sense” within Minecraft. He instead opted for podcast style lectures that students could listen to whenever they pleased. ��

Wershler��explained that in the first class, students with more experience with Minecraft��immediately started helping less experienced students build tools and shelter without him asking, which set the tone for the entire class. Without much else to do, students in lockdown spent much of their free time inside the Minecraft “c�����������Ǵdz�.” They went above and beyond to help each other, showcasing “an incredible spirit of generosity.”��

As the semester progressed, Dr Wershler found that the students “weren’t just going to learn the material that I was teaching them through the game, and they weren’t just going to learn about the game, they were going to learn skills about how to work with each other in team contexts, and manage projects, and write together.”��

He expands on the effectiveness of this approach, saying, “We set up conditions for students to work in teams”, allowing them to move from “passive consumers” to “producers and researchers” when working on collaborative projects within Minecraft.��

He concludes, “it ended up being the most successful teaching experience of my entire career.” Reflecting��that “If you take away the assumption that you are there to consume things passively and create the conditions where students can effectively act as researchers, then they will do exactly that.”����

You can listen to the full interview now on the . You can learn more about Dr Wershler and Dr �������DzԲ�’s work through the ����