Swedish school Viktor Rydberg makes Minecraft a required subject for 13-year-old students.
Add this to the list of things I wish they taught when I was in school. A Swedish school has made Minecraft a required part of the curriculum for 13-year-old students. I’m pretty sure I would have happily traded in my recorder lessons for a Minecraft class.
Minecraft is widely known as a game that inspires not only extreme creativity but cooperative planning. Players work together on servers to create everything from virtual cities to recreations of Star Trek‘s USS Enterprise.
But, as it turns out, teachers at the Viktor Rydberg school in Stockholm have found they can use it to teach students about city planning, environmental issue and how to plan for the future. According to Viktor Rydberg teacher Monica Ekman, “It’s not any different from arts or woodcraft.”
Now, don’t think kids will be getting out of the core classes. Rather Minecraft is a suplemental class much like music or art.
That the school is using Minecraft to teach kids about these subjects might not be a huge surprise to those of you who pay attention to the company behind the game. A while back we reported on the fact that Mojang was working together with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme to help rebuild urban areas world wide.
The project, called Block by Block allowed people living in the areas being rebuilt to help design and give important input into what would be done.
Interestingly, practical things such as urban planning aren’t only things that Minecraft is being recognized as useful for teaching. Not long ago I ran across videos called Let’s Play Musicraft, where the creator is teaching viewers music theory using tools such as the note blocks and books available in the game. You can see the first video in the series below.
