Building together in Minecraft Education

If you put a group of students into the same Minecraft world and give them something to solve, it doesn’t take long for conversations to begin.

Who’s building this bit? Where should that go? Has anyone got the materials? Let’s try this. Hang on – I know how to fix that.

When everyone is talking and thinking towards the same end, you don’t automatically get cooperation. What you’re more likely to get is collaboration.

More Than Multiplayer:

Collaboration isn’t just about working together. It’s about using each other’s knowledge, experience and strengths to reach a common goal. Multiple players, yes, but all working together and learning from each other.

Perhaps they’re designing a sustainable community, rebuilding a habitat, solving a problem, or creating something too large for one player to tackle alone.

Suddenly, there are decisions to make.

Someone has an idea. Someone else challenges it. Tasks get divided up. Plans change. One student knows how to make something work and shows everybody else.

Working it out Together:

This is something researchers have seen too.

A 2023 Irish study followed 173 primary-school students using Minecraft Education for a project in which they reimagined their local community as a more sustainable place.

Collaboration emerged as one of the strongest themes. Students described assigning roles, making group decisions, solving problems together, and learning to listen to ideas that weren’t their own.

Teachers involved in the same national initiative noticed something similar. Students weren’t just dividing up the workload; they were constantly discussing what they were doing, planning who would tackle each part, and teaching one another when somebody knew how to solve a problem.

That last part is important. In Minecraft, expertise moves around.

The student who knows the most about the subject isn’t necessarily the student who knows how to use Redstone. Someone who has never played Minecraft before may spot the best solution to the problem. One learner might understand the science; another might work out how to represent it.

Everyone has something to contribute.

Collaboration Includes Disagreement:

Working together doesn’t always mean agreeing. In fact, some of the most useful collaboration starts with: No, I think we should do it differently.

A 2024 study looking specifically at collaboration in Minecraft Education identified three recurring forms: co-constructing knowledge, peer teaching, and conflict management. Students had to develop plans, adapt those plans, and negotiate the challenges of sharing the same digital space.

These are  important life lessons. Learning how to explain an idea, listen to other people, change your mind, compromise, or persuade your team that your solution really will work? The value of these skills reaches far beyond Minecraft.

One World, Shared Ownership:

There’s another reason we love collaborative Minecraft projects: everyone can see the result growing around them.

Within five minutes an idea somebody mentions can become a wall, a machine, a garden, a bridge, or an entire town. The group can walk around it, spot problems, and change things.

Research into using Minecraft for mathematics has found that subject-specific activities on the platform can trigger collaborative learning processes alongside the curriculum itself.

Minecraft Education doesn’t replace the conversation between learners. It gives them something worth having a conversation about. The blocks are the visible part. The real building is what happens between the students.

For more information about how collaboration can work in your classroom, click here to explore Mojang’s blog article.

Research:

Slattery, E.J., Butler, D., O’Leary, M. & Marshall, K. (2023). Primary School Students’ Experiences using Minecraft Education during a National Project-Based Initiative: An Irish Study. TechTrends.

Andersen, R. & Rustad, M.B. (2022). Using Minecraft as an educational tool for supporting collaboration as a 21st century skill. Computers and Education Open, 3, 100094.

Hughes, J., Morrison, L., Ulrich, T. & Robb, J. (2024). Minecrafters: An educational model for developing collaboration. Proceedings of the International Conference on Networked Learning.