Minecraft has become the best selling videogame of all time. But how? Minecraft is called a „Sandbox game”, meaning that it has no set goal: the ultimate goal of the video game is to enhance creativity. The innovative dynamic of the application is what makes it unique and revolutionary, allowing such deep layers of complexity to the game.
That’s the reason that brought Italian schools to embrace the gamified approach, via Minecraft Education, within their educational programme, almost a decade ago. The most relevant progress in this direction is fairly recent. Didacta (the Italian fair dedicated to schooling) represented a huge turning point because Indire – National Institute for Documentation, Innovation and Educational Research – and Giunti Scuola, in collaboration with Microsoft Italy have presented the book “A scuola con Minecraft. Designing a world in cubes”, on the 19th March 2021, written by Andrea Benassi. The author gives the best reason of why Minecraft represented a huge shift from traditional learning: „Using Minecraft, students didn’t answer questions as they used to do during an examination, but rather explaining problems and proposing solutions.”
The production of this book was crucial to share Mineclass, an experiment conceived in 2018 by Indire together with Microsoft Italy to launch a training program for teachers so they could integrate the use of Minecraft into traditional educational programs. Therefore, it is imporant to notice that the demand for digital training for teachers started with students.
But the digital divide that separates Italy from other European countries cannot be ignored. Francesco Del Sole, Director of Education at Microsoft Italy , told Tecnica della Scuola that: “New technological trends such as Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and the Cloud open up infinite opportunities in all sectors of the market and in our everyday lives, but to truly reap the benefits, having the right skills becomes crucial. Unfortunately, Italy is one of the countries with the strongest skills mismatch, or the gap between the skills required by the job market and those actually available. It is our will to proceed alongside the MIUR to contribute in a concrete way to a School that allows the development of new learning methods, broadening horizons and offering students the opportunity to acquire those skills that make them competitive professionals in the global market and able to help our country grow”.