The small Finnish town of Joensuu is located more than 200 miles northeast of Helsinki, barely an hour’s drive from the Russian border. Most of the city’s life revolves around the university there, one of Finland’s largest, with more than fifteen thousand students. In the autumn of 2010, Santeri Koivisto was attending a teacher-training program there. He was almost twenty-five years old and had bigger plans for his career than becoming just another teacher in town.
One of his ideas was to combine two of his biggest interests, computer games and education. In academic language, it’s called game-based learning, a relatively new branch of education theory. Koivisto was fascinated by the thought of trying to harness the powerful attraction that computer games have on children and using it in the classroom.
The idea wasn’t original. Many before Koivisto had tried to introduce games into schools to help increase students’ interest. The concept of “edutainment,” a cross between education and entertainment, was coined during the 1980s, when game developers realized that parents preferred to buy their children games that were educational as well as entertaining. In the nineties, boxes full of edutainment titles were sold, featuring popular animated characters that taught spelling, math, and history.
But Koivisto was far from impressed by what he’d seen so far. Messy math games and elementary vocabulary tests had nothing in common with the games that students played in their free time. It hardly felt worth the effort to investigate which of the existing games actually had an educational benefit. They were missing the most important thing of all—they were simply no fun.
In the winter of 2011, Koivisto read an article about Minecraft in the Finnish game magazine Pelit. He downloaded the game, installed it, and tried it out. Like so many others, he encountered a world where you could swiftly build pretty much anything. Just as typical, he couldn’t put his finger on what the objective was.
But for an aspiring teacher in search of a game to take into the classroom, the lack of a goal and instructions was not disadvantageous. Koivisto saw Minecraft’s potential and decided to experiment with the game as a learning tool. He just had to find a class where the kids, parents, and school leadership would approve.
Just a little later, while winter still had Finland in an iron grip, he got a chance to put his ideas into practice. Outside of his studies, Koivisto sometimes worked as a substitute teacher in nearby Kontiolahti. One day, he stood in front of a class of ten-year-olds and asked if any of them had heard of Minecraft. Almost every hand flew up. Koivisto remembers in particular that almost as many girls as boys knew of Minecraft—something that could not be said of most computer games.
What Minecraft could contribute to the classroom experience was less than obvious. Finding something that the students are fond of isn’t difficult, and neither is knowing what they need to learn. A teacher’s challenge is to combine the two, and Koivisto was convinced that games in the classroom would be a way to succeed.
He explains his reasoning when we meet with him during a visit in Stockholm. In short, it’s based on dissatisfaction with how most teachers run their classrooms today. “Most of them believe that students learn whatever the teacher writes on the whiteboard,” he says.
Koivisto disagrees, and with that, he takes a stand in a pivotal question about how effective educational methods actually work. He speaks about the antiquated belief that children’s brains absorb everything they are exposed to.
“Many teachers pile as much information as possible in front of their students and hope it goes in,” he says. Koivisto recommends discussion and experimentation instead, letting students proceed by trial and error until they get results. Children can only learn when their brains are active, such as when they are actively discussing a subject or when they are totally attentive, like they are when trying to succeed in a game. Many would disagree, but it’s clear that Minecraft fit very well into Koivisto’s vision of how education should function.
In the classroom, Koivisto watched as the ten-year-olds clicked around, concentrating on the Minecraft world that he had built for them. There was still no version of the game designed for teaching, and each lesson had to be improvised using the standard version of the game. In the back of his mind, Koivisto began sketching larger plans.
Around the same time, Joel Levin was walking down West Ninety-Third Street in New York, on his way to work. He was a teacher at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in Manhattan, a private school near the city’s most exclusive addresses on Central Park West. He taught computer skills to elementary school kids, and this spring, he wanted to try something new. After the winter break, he usually gave the students a new exercise using tools he found and liked on the Internet. The previous year, it had been Google Earth, and the lesson had been in geography. That wasn’t his main area of expertise, but by letting the pupils learn about how to find countries with the help of the Internet, he made sure they would get their computer skills honed in the process.
Levin had been playing Minecraft for a few months, often at home in his apartment in uptown Manhattan, where he lived with his wife and two daughters, one and four years old. His first attempt at the game had gone so-so. He’d connected to an unmoderated game server and found himself in a world full of gigantic penis constructions and smashed castles. You couldn’t even begin building before someone turned up and destroyed what you’d started or swiftly refashioned your creation into an impressive male organ of dirt and stone. It could have been worse, Levin reasoned. At least his kids hadn’t been there to see it.
But he did have them with him later, when he’d found better servers to play on. His four-year-old daughter, Ellie, soon developed her own Minecraft habits. She navigated the game herself, but turned it over to dad for more complicated building, which he completed according to her instructions. The monsters were scary, so she asked him to turn them off in “the world game,” as she called Minecraft.
One of his daughter’s first solo projects in Minecraft was to build a tree house.
“You need to remember that we live in New York City. As long as she lives here, she will probably never build a real one,” says Joel Levin.
The thought of using Minecraft in school had taken root in Joel’s mind at the same time that Santeri Koivisto was making his plans in Finland. Levin’s ambitions were initially humble. If nothing else, he thought, Minecraft could teach the students to use a mouse and keyboard. The blocky and relatively simple Minecraft world would be a suitable first step into a 3-D environment. If they wanted to build more complicated constructions, they would need to get out onto the web and learn more. During the first week, maybe he would give them the task of building their own stone pickaxes.
He brought the game to school on a chilly day early in the spring semester. His intention was to experiment with Minecraft for a couple of weeks, to see what it contributed to his classes and if the students learned anything. Minecraft remained a component of computer class for the rest of the year. The earliest lessons were no more complicated than giving the children the task of building something according to his instructions. Once they had learned to navigate and complete the simplest kind of building, the task was to go online and find information about how a certain material or tool could be made.
During another class, Levin built a golden pyramid that the kids could only get into if they helped solve a puzzle. Inside the golden pyramid were tiny, pixel-built ancient treasures. The first students to solve the puzzles and get to the treasures of course wanted to pick them up and escape with their loot. But Levin, noticeably proud, recounts the discussion that sprang up in the classroom. If you were to find antique objects in real life, he asked his students, would you just take them? Without having been there, it’s impossible to say if it was really the kids’ own idea, but Joel Levin says that, after some deliberation, his students finally arrived at the decision to build a museum, safeguarding the treasures instead of committing digital grave robbery.
Levin was worried that parents would think he was wasting their children’s time playing unnecessary games in school. He was careful to limit Minecraft to being strictly a part of the curriculum, and even wrote a letter to the parents asking them not to buy their own copies of the game for home, at least not yet. Minecraft would be something that the kids did during class.
“In the beginning, I needed an excuse to use the game. It’s not that way anymore.”
Back to Karelia. Santeri Koivisto didn’t really know where his experiment would lead, but the school principal had been positive about him trying out the new game in class. In contrast, to his colleagues at the university he was basically a laughing stock. Most of them thought it was a terrible idea, and even his adviser recommended he abandon the project. And yet, his students liked their new tool. The only thing left for Koivisto to do now was convince everyone else. After unveiling his plans at the annual Joensuu science fair, Sci-Fest, a discussion began online about introducing Minecraft into the schools. One of those who discovered what was happening in Finland was Joel Levin in New York. Another was Carl Manneh in Stockholm.
Most people who are sure they’ve had a stroke of genius are terribly disappointed when they find out that someone else has already discovered the same thing. That’s exactly what happened to Santeri Koivisto when the teacher at the private school in Manhattan e-mailed him and enthusiastically described what he’d been doing in his own classroom. Once Koivisto’s disappointment over not being unique had passed, the two of them proceeded to talk about the possibilities of collaboration.
They immediately agreed on a few points. Minecraft must be adapted to teachers’ classroom needs in order to work well in schools. The world the students scampered around in had to be controllable, the monsters would have to be taken out, and they needed a way for teachers to supervise specific tasks, or else the project would never amount to more than unusually entertaining lessons for those kids who were already devoted gamers. The game needed to be rewritten and that wouldn’t be possible without help from Mojang. This would turn out to be easier than they imagined. Once they got in touch, Carl Manneh immediately jumped onboard, asked them to start planning, and drafted up a reseller license agreement, the first and only one that exists for Minecraft. Carl’s only condition was that the new version of Minecraft wouldn’t just be about education, because then it wouldn’t be fun.
The Minecraft code needed to be chopped up and reconfigured into a version where the teacher could control what happened in the game. Santeri Koivisto convinced Aleksi Postari, an IT student in his twenties, to spend his summer modifying the game. The custom mod he developed was given the academic-sounding name MinecraftEdu. The retail agreement with Mojang gave Koivisto a few euros for each copy sold and he began traveling around to schools, introducing MinecraftEdu to teachers and training those who wanted to try it for themselves. Santeri and Aleksi handled the transactions with their newly founded company, TeacherGaming, and brought on Joel Levin as a partner. At that point, the two Finnish students had never met the teacher from Manhattan in person. TeacherGaming board meetings were held via Skype or on a chat forum. None of them had met Carl either, or anyone else at Mojang.
Initially, Santeri Koivisto had no idea what his experiment with Minecraft in schools would lead to. Maybe he could add a couple of conclusions to his thesis or maybe just make a little money, he thought.
“Now I wake up in the morning and I’ve sold fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of licenses. You realize that, yes, it might turn into something big,” he says, and smiles a little awkwardly.
MinecraftEdu was an unusual success among educational games. In just the few first months after starting out, TeacherGaming sold Minecraft to enough schools to reach more than 100,000 students. At first it was just Finnish schools, but now there are teachers in Great Britain, the United States, Australia, and China using the game. By meeting with teachers in Minecraft, Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin are able to hold courses where they demonstrate the possibilities that the game has to offer.
It isn’t easy to explain why so many teachers have adopted Minecraft. The question of whether computer games contribute anything to instruction is even more difficult to answer. For the uninitiated, it sounds strange—playing games is something children do in their free time, isn’t it? Hundreds of teachers the world over disagree, instead finding games a valuable learning tool for their students.
To find an explanation, we need to consider Minecraft’s open-ended design, which lets teachers quickly build up the surroundings they need for particular lessons. Some of the first experiments in Finnish schools tried to show how deserts are created when trees are chopped down, a process that isn’t very difficult to simulate in Minecraft. Other teachers have experimented with building models of molecules with Minecraft blocks. Obviously, the same thing can be achieved using other tools, but if kids feel more at home in Minecraft than with plastic models, why not meet them on home ground?
We find a similar example in the shabby, gray concrete giants of the Swedish government’s housing projects in Stockholm’s suburbs. Many of these properties, developed in the sixties and seventies, are now badly in need of renovation. Politicians argue over the best way to finance the task and about how the areas should look when finished. And there’s at least as much squabbling about how the tenants in these areas will be able have their say in the design of their buildings, parks, and streets. Through an initiative of the company Svensk Byggtjänst, property owners in Fisksätra, Nacka, and Södertälje, south of Stockholm, have used Minecraft to help them solve these problems. The project was introduced under the name “My neighborhood.” A Minecraft server was created, accessible to anyone. With the help of Mojang, Svensk Byggtjänst contacted experienced Minecraft builders, who began to construct a typical Swedish mass-produced suburb inside the game. Everything in it is made of the typical Minecraft blocks, which makes it easy to hack away pieces and put them somewhere else. Thus, one part of the neighborhood can get a makeover or one building can be torn down and replaced with another.
With the blocky suburb in place, Svensk Byggtjänst invited young people and put them in front of computers with a server connection. The participants were set free to build or tear down as they pleased, or to “visualize ideas,” as the sponsors prefer to call it. Since then, several similar seminars have taken place. The construction company Telge-Hovsjö was one of the first to take heed of this odd way of city planning and other projects, and plan to be the first company in the world to use sketches and drawings done in Minecraft in their formal construction documents for a future project.
Joel Levin loves examples like these. He thinks of Minecraft as a Trojan horse. The game lets him sneak education into an environment where the students feel at home. Similar to the way Minecraft makes it more fun to plan cities, it helps Levin get students to show an interest in subjects they would ordinarily tire of after a couple of minutes. In academic language, this is called “gamification”: the use of the motivation techniques and reward structures that are built into all good games to enliven tasks that would otherwise be insufferably boring.
Carl Manneh is quick to bring up both MinecraftEdu and the construction project in Fisksätra when he talks about Minecraft. He is clearly proud to be a part of what Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin are doing. There are probably several reasons for this. Before he entered the Internet business, Carl worked as a substitute teacher, so he knows how difficult it can be to motivate bored students to care about what happens on the whiteboard in front of them. If MinecraftEdu is successful, it would be a huge step in making Mojang’s enormous success about more than just entertainment. Creating the year’s most talked-about and lucrative Internet company is one thing. Changing everyday life for students and teachers in classrooms around the world is something entirely different. Much more important, some would say. Maybe a small part of Carl agrees.