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2. Invited Keynote paper

While planning Edutainment 2019 and CoTH, the organizing committee were aware of the importance of making Cali the world centre of serious games and health technologies for a few days. The event reunited around 100 participants from 10 countries with several profiles: we had undergraduate and graduate students, a group of students from a public high school (for whom we designed two training sessions), and excellent authors, artists, entrepreneurs, and professors from Latin America, North America, Asia and Europe; also, we had the local press and one International Game Developers Association (IGDA) representative. Although there were a lot of chances for networking, we wanted to show the world what we were able to do in Colombia. For that reason, we not only invited five keynotes from overseas to bring knowledge from the world to Colombia, but also four keynotes from Colombia so people from all over the world could take Colombian knowledge back home. In this section, one Colombian author discusses his experiences with Minecraft as an educational tool.

Introduction and justification to virtual immersive learning environments supported by the MinecraftEdu platform in Piloto University of Colombia

Fernando Alonso Gómez Carrillo¹ Universidad Piloto de Colombia

Abstract:

The current document presents, in a contextualized manner, the use of digital games in learning environments and the difficulties that many educational institutions have faced when trying to adapt this kind of tools. In this case, it’s presented a new concept for learning environments that emerged with the Minecraft platform: the Voxel classroom and its application as immersive learning environment. The document justifies the use of these tools in the Piloto University in Colombia, emphasizing their open structure and advantages as the “Game of life” or “Virtual lego” and pointing its flexibility and adaptability for different kind of subjects or courses. The use of Minecraft in many real-world architectural projects is illustrated, for instance “Block by Block” by United Nations and the course “Design I” belonging to the Building Architecture program of Piloto University. At the end, an inventory of basic game resources is presented in addition to a general evaluation of partial results.

Keywords: Minecraft, immersive learning, games, gamification, virtual worlds, courses.

Introduction

Since it was created, the Virtual Education Department of the Universidad Piloto de Colombia develops a training process to teachers that seeks to facilitate the adoption and application of information and communication technologies for online learning, relying mainly on learning platforms (LMS) and synchronous tools (videoconferencing). However, as a result of the recent appearance of new educational technologies, this support unit presents to the institution the resources to develop a new line of teacher training in immersive educational environments supported by the Minecraft platform, understanding that an immersive virtual learning environment is a 3D digital scenario, with a structure and organization intentionally defined for the achievement of learning purposes organized into didactic units or components of a course, contributing to the development of the learning goals proposed by an educational program (Gómez, 2012). This new line of training, will make it easier for teachers to adopt this immersive learning platform and incorporate it into their subjects, but first doing a reflective exercise to justify and contextualize its use. This is how the Universidad Piloto, becomes one of the first institutions in Latin America that explores learning in immersive platforms as a sustainable alternative to support learning-teaching processes in various areas of knowledge.

The complexity of using digital games in an educational environment

“One of the main goals of education must be to enlarge the windows through which we appreciate the world”.

Arnold H. Glasow

Improving teaching and making it a pleasant experience for the student is a common requirement for teachers. Then, it´s not rare to find in every education or e-learning congress a mention to game-based learning, virtual simulators and innovative tools as means to achieve this much desired goal. As Piaget (Bringuier, 1980) would say: “Childhood is the creative phase par excellence...” (p.115), and it seems that many modern teachers and students yearn to recover the child that exists in each person and articulate it with teaching-learning processes. In this perspective, it can be said that many of the methodological related questions that educators have, can be answered with the application of immersive and playful tools with a pedagogical sense. Some of these questions are the following:

• How to make learning truly meaningful and centered on the learner?

• How can we simulate complex real-life environments without boring or demotivating the student who is facing them?

• How to facilitate flexibility, collaborative work and interdisciplinarity?

• How can we mediate our traditional pedagogical strategies in a more effective, enjoyable and attractive way?

• How to keep students motivated?

However, reaching a consistent and viable application of these tools within an educational institution is a complex task. Following the production of playful environments and simulators with a pedagogical sense, to date there are multiple investigations showing their benefits and contributions to learning, but despite having many reasons to use them the institutions have not found an adequate formula to achieve the continuity and transcendence of these resources in the curriculum of their careers or programs. Thus, a large part of the experiences with immersive environments and videogames with a pedagogical sense have been localized and somehow limited to contexts of certain topics and teachers, and do not succeed in impacting the development of academic programs on a large scale.

In addition, forming teams of specialists for the production of playful virtual environments or virtual simulators is costly and requires times that the institution and teachers are often unwilling to sacrifice; the situation worsens because, in general, these resources are relegated to the level of support activities for courses, being difficult to adapt them to other contexts and uses. In other words, it’s not easy to justify large investments in the development of educational games or immersive tools within many educational institutions, a situation aggravated by the era of the internet, where “free” resources are always found.

For Smeaton 2012, the main reasons for the non-application of immersive and playful environments in educational institutions are the following:

• It is difficult for teachers to identify resources that could be relevant to the curriculum, just as it is difficult to measure how appropriate is their use in the classroom.

• It is difficult to persuade principals about the value of immersive and playful environments for education.

• Teachers lack time to familiarize themselves with games and integrate them effectively into the classroom.

• Games usually have a part of content that is irrelevant and can interfere with lesson time.

• Non-specialized resources, like games for learning environments, do not fit neatly into the traditional curriculum of educational institutions.

In conclusion, it can be said that talking about virtual immersive learning environments has somehow become a recurring theme for educators, but at the same time it has become a costly, difficult, and arguably almost utopian theme because of the complexities it implies for the institution.

However, it is also true that technology evolves by leaps and bounds: platforms become more efficient and levels of abstraction in software development evolve day by day; there is no end to human creativity. Therefore, it is necessary to highlight the recent appearance of new immersive environments capable of simulating or adapting easily to educational purposes, for example, it is already known the scopes that the SecondLife platform had in the educational fields, its benefits and limitations, but as we already said, until now it has not transcended beyond being a tool for promotion and support for some processes and academic activities. Now, in 2019, the Minecraft platform appears with the potential to become a transversal tool for an educational institution, where it will be able to dynamize courses, activities and academic programs through a variety of immersive learning environments prefabricated or developed by the teachers themselves or by specialized teams. Minecraft, unlike SecondLife, has almost infinite possibilities when it comes to simulating virtual learning environments, as we will see below.

History of the Minecraft and MinecraftEdu platform

Developed by the Swedish programmer Markus Alexej Persson “Notch”, fond of LEGO toys since childhood, Minecraft is a videogame or the first “Voxel world²” that allows the concurrent access of users to virtual worlds, where, as we will see later, all kinds of creative processes can be given free rein. Though Notch began programming Minecraft in 2009 as a personal project, in May 2013 (after multiple versions sold) the version containing the main and basic “architecture” and functionalities known today was launched (Redstone Update); since then, the game continues receiving updates. Moreover, Minecraft has versions for all operating systems: Windows, Mac, Linux, Xbox 360 and there is a version with limited functionality for Android platforms and IOS (Minecraft Pocket Edition), which over time is getting closer to the functionalities that has the version for desktop computers. As of May 2019, Minecraft in all its versions exceeded 176 million registered users, and in April of the same year, there were more than 30 million registered users just on the PC/Mac platform, making Minecraft one of the most popular “video games” in history.

Starting as a project spread in the Google group “Minecraft Teachers”, created by Joel Levin, one of the founders of this module for the Minecraft platform, in 2011 was developed the MinecraftEdu, a specialized version of Minecraft designed to give teachers more control and flexibility when using Minecraft for educational purposes. Levin (quoted in Smeaton, 2014), presents the MinecraftEDU platform as well:

The “MinecraftEDU” module was custom developed by teachers for teachers. It works right on top of the original Minecraft game and is designed for academic use. We have eliminated many barriers in such a way that any teacher benefits from this wonderful game (p.12).

The MincecraftEDU platform includes the functionalities of the commercial version of the game, adding basic tools for the teachers that will allow them, among other functionalities:

• Follow and accompany students into the virtual world.

• Define fixed learning paths (if necessary).

• Define activities.

• Control the functions that the student can use in the game and limit materials and construction areas, if necessary.

• Model worlds for courses.

This is how since 2014 the use of MinecraftEdu as an educational tool became popular in several countries, reaching at the end of 2015 more than 120 courses developed and published by various teachers. These courses can be downloaded and reused by other teachers in MinecraftEdu, and some even work without problems on the commercial platform of Minecraft (PC version, Mac and Xbox 360).

In 2016, Microsoft acquired the MinecraftEdu version, rewriting it and converting it into Minecraft Education Edition, a new educational version that retains much of the philosophy of MineraftEdu with the particularity that has been specializing in curricula of american schools. Thus, by May 2019 there were more than 250 courses available on the portal of Minecraft Education Edition, with courses that implement the curriculum CSTA (Computer Science Curriculum Association) for learning algorithmic thinking (learning of computer programming). Notwithstanding that, this new version is based on Minecraft’s “Bedrock” platform, therefore does not allow the use of MODS (Plugins) or highly specialized content. For this reason, Piloto University has opted to continue with the JAVA version, which allows the implementation of specialized plugins for very specific and customized functionalities, making it easier to respond to visual and thematic needs of higher education teaching. With the implementation of a Minecraft “SPONGE” server, it was possible to carry out orientation and academic support functions similar to the functionalities of the “classroom mode” module of Minecraft Education Edition.

The Minecraft platform at the Universidad Piloto de Colombia

Although for the purposes of an educational institution, the fact of incorporating a tool with high levels of adoption facilitates its integration and articulation with all the members of the institution, and despite its popularity as a game, Minecraft as an educational platform has been little explored at the national level. In the context of the Universidad Piloto de Colombia, in 2015 a student of the Architecture program modeled his Design I project on the Minecraft tool, finding interesting results from the exercise where Minecraft enriched his perspective of the proposed solution, allowing him to optimize materials for the construction of the final model and also enriching his spatial notion of what he would finally shape in the model of the project. This first experience has given rise for the Faculty of Architecture and other academic programs to express their interest in broadening and deepening the use of this tool.

In 2016, within the framework of the microcurriculum of the Design I course, a group of first semester architecture students adopted the tool to develop volumetric and conceptualization exercises on the Minecraft platform. The Virtual Education Team supported this group of students by creating the “World of San Cayetano”, a virtual Minecraft world that approaches the land of the well-known hacienda that belongs to the Universidad Piloto and that is located near the municipality of La Calera, a few kilometers from Bogota; this with the purpose of make it easier for students to develop their Architectural Design projects, since the course proposes the same construction site as the one where the emblematic mansion is located.

Being a keynoter during Bogota´s Moodlemoot 2016 (Unipiloto virtual, 2016), dean Edgar Camacho, of the Architecture program of Piloto University, pointed that an immersive platform such as Minecraft can favor the learning of architectural design if the following aspects are taken into account :

• In any project and especially in those that have to do with design, the moment of the generation of ideas or concepts is key because in the middle of how schematic or abstract they may be, if they are correct and reflect what the author wants to synthesize in them, the development of the project will be facilitated until its final finish and later realization.

• The specialty of design (architectural, graphic, industrial and others) is that its objects are tangible things about which people form images; among the designs, the architectural one has more complexity in that the buildings are lived, unlike a graphic or a piece of furniture that can be perceived more as a whole.

• Some designers, being apt to be so, have some difficulty of imagination for buildings that do not yet exist, since from the mind you must have the ability to walk through them, to live them and, more importantly, to know what the designer proposes to the future user as sensations to inhabit the spaces of the building.

• Although the creation of proportion and volume in the spaces begins from the stage of formation of the concepts, expressed by means of sketches on the side of the designer, it does not count with the exact measure of the things. Hence, it is a propitious moment to acquire a tool that allows the designer to materialize those ideas or germinal concepts of a project as far as possible.

In addition to the above, , also during Moodlemoot 2016 (Unipiloto virtual, 2016), Adriana Gómez Ceballos, professor of the Architecture program, points out the following contributions from the use of the Minecraft platform as the most significant for the subject she is in charge of (Design I):

• It allows to apply all the concepts of basic design in architecture, mostly based on cubic forms.

• It allows working on the conical perspective and explain in a simple way the different vanishing points identifying in a virtual world the different elements of the perspective.

• To develop and understand examples of base planes, depressed planes and elevated planes.

• The construction of architectural objects for the theme of circularity and permanence.

• The development of famous constructions from the foundations and an almost infinite number of urban and architectural examples available on the web.

This is how the Minecraft platform opens a new door for educators to involve immersive and playful dynamics (or both) in their subjects; therefore, it is necessary to understand a little more about the benefits of immersive virtual learning environments and video games in order to measure the scope and impact of such a platform in educational settings. Finally, this document will understand the scope of the Minecraft platform through its particular “philosophy” of play.

Advantages of immersive educational environments for learning

In general, the department of Virtual Education of the Universidad Piloto de Colombia, proposes as part of its training proposal for most virtual courses, the convenience of establishing as a general objective the “derivation of solutions and answers”, favoring the development of original products by the students, turning them into authors of knowledge rather than a simple receptor of information. In this regard, Piaget (1973), relying on the psychological development of children, considers discovery to be the fundamental basis of learning: “To understand is to discover, or reconstruct by rediscovery, and such conditions must be complied with if in the future individuals are to be formed who are capable of production and creativity and not simply repetition” (p.20).

It can be affirmed that immersive worlds applied in educational environments support these pedagogical approaches, bearing in mind that understanding is systematically constructed through the active participation of the student, who is able to literally “build knowledge” through the activities and products. Regarding this theme, Méndez (2014) says:

From the point of view of constructivist theory an individual builds knowledge through the interaction between human beings and the environment. When a person learns a new subject he establishes an assimilation relationship according to his knowledge. At the same time, this new information modifies the existing knowledge and through transformation, the individual adapts the new information to the previous knowledge (p.3).

In this regard, Figueroa (2015), says:

the inclusion of these new technologies constitutes a new model of learning that allows the student to empathize completely with the content and facilitates the methodology of Learning by doing; because it immerses the students in the scenario on which they are learning at the same time as it allows an interaction with it, which favors the assimilation in a more natural way of certain concepts and processes (p.1).

Additionally, immersive tools well used can lead the student to have more vivid, participative or significant experiences in the learning process than those proposed by traditional means such as writing, audio or video. Donati (2015), explains it in the following way:

The realistic conception of education is based on the following fundamental observation: in education, the human mind learns much more from the “testimony” -that is, from experiencing (feeling, touching, seeing) reality-which comes from the senses (seeing from practice in action, living a certain relationship with another person, a friend, a teacher) than from the conceptual definition that comes from the discourse and thought in the “I”. The child’s ego is formed in practice, first natural and then social, rather than in the use of a language and a culture (that is, it precedes the consciousness based on Karl Popper’s World 3) (p.315).

This is how it can be said that, in general, immersive technologies allow different experiences for the construction of learning that would be impossible to reproduce or finance in the real world. Below we will see a little more in detail what these “different experiences” are and that can be accessed in immersive virtual learning environments.

According to Serrano (2014) “One of the most useful aspects of immersive virtual spaces is the ability to transfer the public to other spaces that would otherwise be physically inaccessible, due to the different limitations of time, distance or security, among others (Jackson & Winn, 1999; Furness, Winn, &Yu, 1998; Youngblut, 1998). In other words, this type of space offers the possibility of generating localized learning, which is the capacity to implement learning in the time and space that the content develops, something unthinkable in traditional classes (Youngblut, 1998). In addition, if there is interaction, these spaces allow the user to manipulate features that in the real world would be impossible, such as physical laws, so that users can visualize their effects on the environment (Yacci, M., et al. 2010) (p. 7).

An example of localized learning using the Minecraft platform is the “Block by Block” (UN) project, where the same community that inhabits a city proposes urban changes, modeling those changes in a minecraft environment. These proposals become real projects with the support of the United Nations.

In addition, Serrano (2014) also says:

On the other hand, immersive technologies allow three different types of experiences in the construction of learning that would be impossible to reproduce in the real world: experiences in scale, transduction and reification. Scale experiences refer to the capacity of immersive spaces to change the scale in the environment to facilitate learning in users, for example being able to reproduce an atom to the solar system (p.8).

An example of learning using scale experiences on the Minecraft platform is the “Molecraft” (MinecraftEdu) course, which allows the students to transport themselves and appreciate giant versions of the main molecules that make up the course syllabus.

“On the other hand, the transduction experience refers to the possibility of presenting information that is impossible for humans to perceive as concepts of physics” (Serrano, 2014). An example of this is found in the plugin or module designed to learn principles of Quantum Physics in the Minecraft worlds: Qcraft. “Finally, reification refers to the ability to materialize concepts without physical presence, such as mathematics (A. Mikropoulos, T., Natsis, A. 2011)” (Serrano, 2014). In this sense, there are several courses on mathematics on the Minecraft Education Edition platform that exemplify the concept of reification.

Finally, referring to the learning of abstract and complex subjects, Serrano (2014) affirms about immersive and virtual learning spaces:

They help the visualization of abstract concepts through the concretion of concepts: one of the benefits of computer simulation is the ability to represent environments and processes that human beings are not normally able to observe (Limniou, M., et al. 2008). Humans have more facility to concretize information in symbols than in abstract processes (Byrne, 1996). Information contained in virtual spaces allows students to focus on presented content rather than on abstract systems of symbols that would otherwise have to be used (Jackson & Winn, 1999). In addition, abstract information can be presented through concrete forms and visual metaphors (Bryne; Jackson & Winn). In this way, using fewer abstract symbol systems, we can make learning construction more robust and direct (Furness, Winn, & Yu, 1998, part 2.II, Symbol Systems section) (p.9).

An example of simplification of the learning of abstract themes in the MinecraftEdu platform is the MOD or Plugin for the learning of programming “ComputerCRAFT” that, as we will see later, simplifies programming by reducing it to commands in graphical mode; optionally, a traditional programming language (LUA language) can be used.

Advantages of ludic and immersive environments in education

Quoting Rodari, Triana (2016), shows how with the use of games teachers discover that classes do not need to be linear and that knowledge can be thought and expressed in many ways: through theater, literature, drawing, reading, cinema, music, sports, pedagogical outings, painting, video games, internet. By providing game scenarios, other ways of assuming and expressing what one wants to teach appear. In addition, it is known that recreational environments in an educational context have a motivating potential, since teachers can retake elements of the game that promote motivation in order to dynamize the activities, such as: uncertainty, tension, risk, competition and chance; in immersive spaces this potential is multiplied, being practically impossible for the students to divert their attention from the content, since in general it occupies all the space in which each one interacts (Serrano 2014 p. 10).

For Ebner and Hozniger (quoted in Smeaton, 2014), game-based learning is similar to problem-based learning, bearing in mind that scenarios or problems are framed in a dynamic of “playing” to learn. In addition, citing Motsching-Pitrik & Holzinger, Smeaton (2014) also highlights how game-based learning can be favorable for the creation of learning environments; In this sense, Minecraft and its philosophy of the “player doomed to be free” becomes the ideal tool for configuring immersive environments centered on the learner, where depending on the pedagogical intentions of the teacher, the student can autonomously modify in whole or in part the resources that make up the Minecraft worlds.

Finally, it can be said that one of the strongest and most interesting values that a game can help to form in a student is the ability to persist and face adversity. Indeed, a person who faces a game usually ends up trying again and again until he succeeds in overcoming the proposed challenge; this phenomenon does not occur so easily in other learning environments, where, for example, there is still no news of a book that is capable of somehow penalizing the reader for not following its rules properly. The paradox of a game is that the player will try again and again to dominate the game, depending on the attractiveness of the challenge. In this sense, it is possible that playing will help the students reinforce or form their ability to face adverse scenarios without becoming so easily demotivated.

The philosophy and application of the Minecraft platform

Cody Sumter (Wikipedia, 2019), a member of MIT Media Lab’s Human Dynamics group, commented, “Notch didn’t just build a game. He fooled 40 million people by teaching them how to use a CAD program” (p.18). Indeed, just as Minecraft can be taken as a game, it can also be assimilated as a simulation and a design tool (CAD), or even as a learning environment (Minecraft Education Edition). This versatility lies in the fact that Minecraft itself has no specific purpose and allows the protagonists to decide how they want to play and what they want to create within the virtual worlds, getting impressive results. A recent episode of The Culture Show: Lego-The Building Blocks of Architecture (BBC, 2014) speculates that, just as we can see the influence of children’s toys on the work of architects of the past and present, for example, Richard Rogers (Meccano-esque Lloyds Building), James Stirling (Lego No.1 Poultry Building), future designers will inevitably be influenced by the Minecraft style too.

The potential of collaborative creativity at Minecraft has already been proven in urban design projects. The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design created Blockholm, an interactive tool for re-imagining the city of Stockholm using Minecraft. The program allows users to reconstruct the city’s 100,000 building lots using information generated from current usage data. Even the United Nations is working with Mojang, using Minecraft to help communities in developing countries collaborate on the design of their cities and countries through the Block by Block initiative. Thus, one of Minecraft’s greatest strengths is to recreate a metaphor of life that is surprisingly close to real life, without forgetting what it really is: a metaphor. Indeed, perhaps the success of this game lies mainly in not having rules, unlike traditional games where generally there are schemes that guide the history of the game, but at the same time limit it. Instead, what Minecraft proposes are four arts that the protagonist should master in order to have a better performance in his “life”: survival, combat, construction and technology.

However, we must not lose sight of the fact that the objects and worlds created in Minecraft will not always be as realistic as those developed in other CAD design tools (Autocad, 3DMax, etc). Here it must be remembered that some call Minecraft “the virtual LEGO”, and as such it applies the philosophy of block construction and not construction based on design meshes like traditional design programs. This has both positive and negative aspects: among the positive are the incredible ease of use, the simplicity with which 3D spaces can be modeled, and the ability to integrate special blocks with user-defined functions or properties, such as textures, plugins or Mods.