“Nothing’s impossible in Minecraft,” says Elizabeth Grohoski. She would know. Grohoski recently spent three months using the online game to create a virtual replica of the Mattituck-Laurel Library in Mattituck, NY, complete with a model of the working piano in the library basement (http://ow.ly/nQwCN).

Why? Because Karen Letteriello, comanager of the parents’ and children’s department at Mattituck-Laurel, where Grohoski works as a technical processor, thought the virtual Minecraft library would help attract young patrons. It has.

The project started when Letteriello read a School Library Journal feature story by librarian Sarah Ludwig about a highly successful Minecraft library club at the Connecticut school where she worked. Letteriello wanted a similar program in her library and asked Grohoski, a gamer since the age of six, to create it.

An immensely popular game launched widely in 2011, Minecraft allows users to build in a 3-D virtual world with cubes similar to Legos—but without any of the proscriptive kits and manuals. There are few limits to what a user can create in Minecraft. It’s all about gamers using their imaginations.

After creating a beta version of the project, Letteriello launched the finished site on June 20. The reaction has been a “tornado,” she says, with children clamoring to sign up and play.

Letteriello and Grohoski’s vision of the game features an appealing library-centric scavenger hunt. Each room of the Minecraft library offers a clue inside treasure chests tucked into the virtual shelves. Clues provide students with a summary of the plot, title, author, and call letters—so children can locate the books inside the physical library.

There are other activities as well—a maze, mini-games in which children can locate objects like sheep wool in multiple colors, and eventually a racetrack, which Grohoski hopes to build. Children can play a few notes on the virtual piano or ride up and down the virtual elevator—just like the one inside the real branch. And for those looking to explore outside the building, Grohoski shifted existing Minecraft destinations closer to the virtual library. These include a desert temple, village, ravine, and stronghold.

Students with their own Minecraft accounts can log on from home, or they can play at the library free of charge. The library offers five laptops with video cards, which play the full version of the online game, plus six iPads loaded with Minecraft’s pocket edition.

Letteriello is planning future educational projects using Minecraft and other digital tools. One possibility: a virtual opportunity to explore Ancient Greece and Rome. Her goal is that students will find their library experience as seamless as exercising their curiosity.

“I want them to use [the library presence in Minecraft] the same as they would the actual library, take a book home and teleport into another world,” she says. “I want them to feel the gaming world is just another part of the library.”

Mattituck resident Pam Kaminsky’s 13-year-old son, Collin, is “obsessed” with the Minecraft library, she says. He and his 16-year-old brother, Owen, are also impressed with Grohoski’s expertise with the game. “[Collin] says, ‘The librarian is talking to me about my program? Wow,’” says Kaminsky. “It’s like he has a new connection with the librarians.”

“Now the kids walk in and ask if Elizabeth is here,” says Letteriello. “She has a cult following.”

Children sign up to play on Fridays, when they can interact with others in the virtual branch. “We have waiting lists that you can’t imagine,” says Letteriello. “And Elizabeth continues to build. It’s taking on a life of its own.”

Illustration by David Plunkert.

Lately, there’s been more drama than usual in our library. At the moment, one of my students is swapping some diamonds—yes, diamonds—for a hefty amount of railway ties. Another is secretly plotting to swipe an unsuspecting classmate’s body armor. And a group of friends can’t believe their luck: they’ve just stumbled across a trove of valuable chests in an abandoned mineshaft.

Welcome to our Minecraft club. Every Friday afternoon, 28 middle school and high school kids get together in our library’s computer lab to feast on candy and play one of the world’s hottest video games.

What exactly is Minecraft? It’s a game in which players use three-dimensional blocks to build their own unique world. Minecraft began as the brainchild of Swedish programmer Markus “Notch” Persson, and an early version of it was originally released in 2009. Nowadays, the game is available in an iOS, Android, and an Xbox 360 version that’s published by Mojang, a Stockholm-based video game developer. According to the Swedish company, more than nine million people have purchased Minecraft, and as I write this sentence, 9,610 fans have bought it within the past 24 hours. Think of the game, as Wired magazine said, as “a virtual version of Lego” that has “no instructions, no levels, no mission structure, no story, no lives, no points, no clear goal.” So what does Minecraft have to offer? Well, as it turns out, plenty.

For starters, kids can construct whatever they want—anything from an inconspicuous igloo to the starship Enterprise. But more than that, the game lets players exert an enormous amount of control over the worlds they’ve created. For instance, skilled players can get extremely creative with the materials at hand, which commonly include wood, stone, and metal, transforming or (in Minecraft-speak) “crafting” them into tools, weapons, food, supplies, and even magical potions. When you set up a server for Minecraft, you can tweak its settings, but for the most part, the worlds are huge—about eight times larger than Earth—with various biomes, including deserts, snowfields, and jungles. Players create their own shelters and explore the world. They also lug around a variety of objects—including torches, weapons, armor, mining tools, and prepared food—to keep themselves well fed and safe from other players and predators (more on that later). It’s easy to move around in Minecraft: just press the “W,” “A,” “S,” or “D” keys. Need to suddenly leap into the air? No sweat. That’s where the space bar comes in handy, and by simply left- or right-clicking, players can effortlessly interact with their environment.

I confess: I wasn’t always wild about Minecraft. Like other technology that I’d put off trying, the game intimidated me. It seemed like Minecraft was solely for supergeeks and hardcore gamers. And while it’s true that I’m still a little intimidated by Minecraft, the game is accessible, fun, and, ultimately, an excellent learning tool for both nerds and non-nerds. In January, my colleague Chris Buckley and I launched a Minecraft club at the Hamden Hall Country Day School, a private pre-K–12 school in Connecticut. Chris is our school’s help desk technician, and he’s also a lot of other things, including an ethical hacker, a maker, a sharer, and (lucky me!) a server builder.

Screen Shot of the Minecraft club’s creations.

The world of Minecraft offers some lovely sunrises, but things get really interesting when night falls. That’s when the spiders, zombies, skeletons, and other assorted monsters come out. To avoid being killed by these menaces, players must make fires, create weapons, and construct shelters, which are typically multistory wood or stone structures with storage chests, a crafting table, pets, farms, and farm animals. Sometimes our kids really outdo themselves, and their home bases have also included towers, castles, pyramids, and even a spaceship.

In a multiplayer server like ours, the operator (Chris and I are our server’s ops) can set it to any of the following difficulty levels: peaceful, easy, normal, and hard. In the peaceful setting, players can’t fight with one another and don’t have to eat, and there aren’t any monsters. I’d recommend that librarians start their servers on peaceful. That way new players can get the hang of building things and forming allegiances without having to worry about surviving a hostile attack.

Minecraft also features several game modes. If you’re a newbie like I was, you’ll want to check out the creative and survival modes. The creative mode is a lot like the peaceful setting: it’s perfect for exploring and building, because there are no gnarly creatures, no player-versus-player, or “PVP,” fighting, and no need to consume calories. It’s a perfect starting place for you and your kids, but you probably won’t want to stay there for very long.

Although some of our students prefer this tranquil state, most of them relish the opportunity to fight—and that’s one of the reasons our server is now set on survival. In this more-challenging mode, every time players slay a monster, they accumulate experience points, or xp, which enable them to enchant materials (how about a pickax that breaks rocks faster?) or create magical potions, which can temporarily grant players invisibility, Herculean strength, or lightning-quick reflexes. If you want your kids to be able to set up communities, trade (and fight) with one another, and battle monsters, survival is the way to go.

During my first few weeks with Minecraft, I logged on whenever I could, and my students gave me lessons in building structures and crafting. One of them helped me build my house and another showed me how to plant crops. Sometimes I’d log in and discover that they’d left me gifts of food or gold. Because I’m an op, I can make things a little easier for myself, but I try not to take any shortcuts, because I want to learn how to play the game. Still, it helps to have a partner who’s an experienced Minecrafter, who can advise you on the finer points of administering a server. If I didn’t have Chris, I’d most likely recruit one or two of our most trustworthy students to help me run things.

When we first started our server and began meeting, the students treated it as a virtual society: they claimed land, built cities, appointed a leader for each city, began trading, and took on various societal roles. It was fascinating to watch. Our students completely governed themselves, and they had a strong sense of right and wrong. For example, damaging or stealing materials from other players (a practice known as “griefing”) was firmly discouraged and met with swift punishment.

In addition to society building, one of my favorite things is to develop challenges for our students. It’s a great way to spend our weekly meeting time together. One week we created an obstacle course—complete with lava and water pits—that requires players to clear difficult jumps and walk a tightrope. Some of our kids created a coliseum where players can practice fighting monsters or one another to sharpen their combat skills. I also created a scavenger hunt with clues hidden throughout the server that led to a secret chest of diamonds. Each one of these activities involves a ton of planning, communicating, and delegating, with players jumping in to help one another.

In the few short months that I’ve run our club, I’ve learned some important lessons. One is that middle school and high school kids don’t always get along well. After repeated instances of griefing, stealing, and fighting, we duplicated our original server so that each group would have its own. Now there’s far less bickering. I’ve also learned that one way to avoid inappropriate language, cheating, and poor gamesmanship is to keep an eye on the server logs, which include everything that’s said on the server as well as many of the actions. By monitoring the logs, we can make sure that students are acting appropriately, and we can temporarily ban those who aren’t. We’ve also learned to limit the hours the server is open. Now, it’s off during the school day, and it shuts down again in the late evening. Since we’re a school, we need to make sure that our students aren’t playing Minecraft when they should be studying or sleeping.

One challenge we haven’t found an elegant solution for is in creating student accounts. Players each need their own account to participate, and at $26.95 apiece, they’re expensive. MinecraftEdu, a small group of educators and programmers, offers educational discounts, but even those are almost $20. Many of my students already had their own accounts, but those who didn’t ended up shelling out their own money—even though I offered to purchase accounts for them with my programming budget.

Minecraft is a social activity that’s fun for kids to play with one another (and in many cases, make new friends), but the game also offers a host of learning opportunities. Most strikingly, it requires kids to collaborate. Unlike some of the assignments we educators create to force kids to work together, Minecraft requires an organic type of collaboration that’s managed by the students themselves, not by their teachers. Minecraft also fosters communication skills, as players type, guide their fellow players around, and even create message boards.

Since there’s practically no limit to what players can do with Minecraft, it encourages creativity big-time. As players grapple to solve myriad problems—everything from the complex (how to create a lever system that lifts players into an arena) to the simple (how to get an ocelot to follow you home)—they are developing communication, analytical, and social skills that apply to nearly every area of their lives. Perhaps not surprisingly, Minecraft can also be used to teach everything from science to writing to math. The possibilities are endless. For some great examples of lessons, activities, and tutorials to use in the classroom, visit MinecraftEdu.

Just a few hours before I wrote this, I logged on to Minecraft and noticed that two of our ninth graders were playing it. One of the boys showed me a roller coaster he’d just finished creating. I hopped into one of the carts, pressed a button, and off I went—zipping through glassed-in underground tunnels, up steep hills, and through passageways lined with lava. This student, who struggles in some of his classes, had completed something remarkable, an engineering feat that a vast portion of the population could never equal. As I rode along, he tweaked the track here and there, making sure that everything ran smoothly. “This is amazing!!!!” I typed. I hope he’s proud. Minecraft is a game, but it’s not just a game. It gives students the opportunity not only to dream big, but also to build big. And if, along the way, you get to talk a little smack and be a little silly, then all the better.

Sarah Ludwig is the library department chair and academic technology coordinator at Hamden Hall Country Day School, a pre-K through grade 12 independent school in Hamden, CT.

What is Minecraft?

Survival vs. Creative

Multiplayer servers

Minecraft and Education

• Computing basics:  Use Minecraft to introduce basic computing skills such as logging in, creating a password, using a keyboard and mouse, following directions and typing.
• Models:  Minecraft allows educators to create structures for students to interact with. From a three-dimensional model of a cell to a replica of an historic building, anything is possible. A history class might recreate an ancient civilization and enact what it would have been like to live there. Students could interact with an instructor-built model, or they could work collaboratively to build one.
• Economy:  Many servers operate on a city planning model, where a village is laid out and users take different jobs. There are game models that introduce an economy into play.
• Mapping:  Minecraft maps exist on a Cartesian coordinate plane. You can access your coordinates by pressing the F3 key (or Function F3 on some computers). By collecting and charting coordinates from a variety of locations in the game, students could map their Minecraft landscape.
• Mechanisms:  Redstone circuits and mechanisms introduce technology into the game landscape and might attract students interested in engineering and teachers working with STEM curricula. Work with circuits and pistons to create a trap to keep zombies out of your house, or a train to carry you across the game’s landscape.
• Machinima:  In conjunction with screencasting software, Minecraft lends itself to machinima storytelling. You can change the point of view of the game from first person to third person with the F5 key. If you toggle your display so you can see your avatar from the front, you could act out a scene.
• Inspiration from books:  Create a replica of a favorite fictional building or town in Minecraft, or better yet, a whole map. Imagine Hogwarts or Middle Earth made of blocks.

Playing Around

Resources: How Educators & Authors Use Minecraft

Image of Disney World recreated in Minecraft by Danny Thompson Jr.

“Can you teleport me?” “How do I fly?” “I need a sword.” “What are you building?” These eclectic exclamations are the sounds of a room full of teens playing Minecraft (www.minecraft.net). We play every other Wednesday in Chicopee (MA) Public Library’s computer lab, often filling all ten computers, and are occasionally joined by teens playing from home. They play freely, building whatever suits their fancies. As I’ve watched these teens discover skills in the game, I’ve been thinking about Minecraft’s potential for both structured and unstructured activities.

What is Minecraft?

Minecraft (sample pictured) is an open-ended, creative game where players roam a landscape made of different kinds of blocks that can be used to build just about anything. Clicking blocks breaks them and adds them to your inventory. Then you can craft items and place blocks to build structures. Animals and monsters, or mobs, also made of blocks, roam the landscape and provide resources and adversaries. The simple graphics, reminiscent of video games from 20 years ago, create an immersive environment in their blocky aesthetic. The game has a broad appeal—it’s as interesting and appropriate for eight-year-olds as it is for their parents and anyone in between.

Developed by Swedish programmer Marcus Persson, also known as Notch, and his company Mojang, the full version of the game was released in November 2011 after several beta versions. The object of the game, in as much as there is a specific object, is to explore, create, and survive. An individual license for the game costs $26.95. With one license you can download the launcher as many times as you want and multiple users can play single-player games simultaneously. In order to play multiplayer games, each user must have their own license.

Survival vs. Creative

The different game play modes place more or less emphasis on the creative and survival aspects of the game. In Survival mode, you need to eat food to recharge your health points (a series of hearts) and contend with enemy monsters. In order to have access to many of the specialized blocks that are available, you have to go out and find them hidden in the game’s landscape, sometimes venturing into underground caverns and dangerous other dimensions.

In Creative mode, you can fly, literally by double tapping the space bar, but figuratively as well, because you have instant access to every kind of block and most items in the game. This allows you to focus on the design and creation of structures immediately. Hostile mobs can’t damage you in Creative mode, and you don’t need to eat at regular intervals to maintain your health. The satisfying challenge of Survival mode makes for a better adventure game experience, while the free-form chaos of Creative mode lends itself well to art projects and tasks where building is the priority.

Multiplayer servers

While you can experience the game on your own in a single-player world, the multi-player experience is superior because it opens up the opportunities of cooperation and community and is more fun. A world begins to take shape with common goals, or sometimes conflicting ones that require discussion and compromise to resolve.

For the technologically minded, hosting your own server is free and relatively easy. But for those of us who are still a little wary of networking specifics, there are a few other options. You may already be acquainted with students who have the networking knowledge you lack. Getting a lesson in setting up a Minecraft server from an experienced teen player could be a valuable learning opportunity for both parties. You can pay for hosting by a third party company, such as Minecraft Box (minecraftbox.com), Servercraft
(servercraft.co), or Redstone Host (redstonehost.com). These services usually charge between $7 and $15 a month for a basic server for 1–15 players, but may cost up to $50 per month to support up to 100 players. Or, in a school or library setting, you can purchase MinecraftEdu’s (minecraftedu.com) suite of teaching tools for a one-time fee. Included in this bundle is a point-and-click interface for hosting your own server. Be aware, however, that only MinecraftEdu users can connect to a server hosted with MinecraftEdu’s server tool.

Minecraft and Education

MinecraftEdu is a group of teachers working to make Minecraft more accessible for learning environments by providing discounts and institutional orders, as well as tools to make it easier to use the game in the classroom. In addition to the server tool, MinecraftEdu comes with a tutorial world that teaches players how to navigate the game’s controls and introduces many features of the world. The power to write notes and determine student privileges, including where they can and cannot build, are ideal for introducing specific learning goals in the game. The ability to save and access various maps would be helpful for anyone running multiple Minecraft groups. MinecraftEdu is still in beta, but it promises to make playing Minecraft in classrooms and libraries easier and more conducive to learning.

The breadth of things educators are doing with Minecraft is staggering and the potential is there to do even more. Some things you might do with it in classrooms include:

Computing basics: Use Minecraft to introduce basic computing skills such as logging in, creating a password, using a keyboard and mouse, following directions and typing.

Models: Minecraft allows educators to create structures for students to interact with. From a three-dimensional model of a cell to a replica of an historic building, anything is possible. A history class might recreate an ancient civilization and enact what it would have been like to live there. Students could interact with an instructor-built model, or they could work collaboratively to build one.

Economy: Many servers operate on a city planning model, where a village is laid out and users take different jobs. There are game models that introduce an economy into play.

Mapping: Minecraft maps exist on a Cartesian coordinate plane. You can access your coordinates by pressing the F3 key (or Function F3 on some computers). By collecting and charting coordinates from a variety of locations in the game, students could map their Minecraft landscape.

Mechanisms: Redstone circuits and mechanisms introduce technology into the game landscape and might attract students interested in engineering and teachers working with STEM curricula. Work with circuits and pistons to create a trap to keep zombies out of your house, or a train to carry you across the game’s landscape.

Machinima: In conjunction with screencasting software, Minecraft lends itself to machinima storytelling. You can change the point of view of the game from first person to third person with the F5 key. If you toggle your display so you can see your avatar from the front, you could act out a scene.

Inspiration from books: Create a replica of a favorite fictional building or town in Minecraft, or better yet, a whole map. Imagine Hogwarts or Middle Earth made of blocks.

Playing Around

In the largely unstructured setting of my public library Minecraft group, teens have discovered the game’s potential at their own pace. We had a few weeks where several people tried their hands at making pixel art, representing 8 bit characters using colored wool blocks. We now have a landscape full of video game characters.

Claiming territory and creating personal structures has been another popular activity. In our server world, we have a variety of buildings. From the complexities of redstone circuits to the peculiarities of hanging vines on stone walls, the teens have learned a lot about the game’s mechanics in building on their own.

Minecraft is versatile and fun. Played simply as an adventure game it is a satisfying activity for kids of all ages. When it comes to using it for educational or other structured activities, it has a growing number of possibilities to explore. Try it for yourself at www.minecraft.net.

How Educators & Authors Use Minecraft

Joel Levin, The Minecraft Teacher: www.minecraftteacher.net.

Andre Chercka, Digital Game Based Learning: www.gamebased.tumblr.com.

Massively Minecraft Network: a community for educators, parents, researchers, and volunteers: www.minecraft.jokaydia.com (requires sign up).