Ross Glen School Grade 5 students Reid Davis and Kyron MacKenzie Burrows are seen using the popular video game Minecraft to design a building in the Southeast Hill community.--NEWS PHOTO BRENDAN MILLER
bmiller@medicinehatnews.com
Grade 3-7 students attending 11 Medicine Hat Public School Division schools are spending hours of in-class time playing a well-known video game to solve real-world problems.
How?
Through an innovative collaboration with the City of Medicine Hat, students have been tasked to design a functional structure that serves the surrounding community in a scaled version of a neighbourhood in Medicine Hat, then meticulously recreate it in Minecraft.
In this year’s Medicine Hat Future Builders challenge, students are provided a plot of land in the Southeast Hill community and need to use critical thinking, problem solving and community engagement skills to design a building, such as a coffee shop or apartments, that will serve the surrounding neighbourhood.
However, students must contend with local zoning bylaws within the virtual Minecraft world to make sure their structures follow zoning rules that include low- and medium-density residential, mixed-use and community services.
Additionally, students are asked to calculate the perimeter and area of their structure by using all three X,Y and Z co-ordinates to measure the object in a virtual 3D space.
“This has everything in terms of curriculum and learning benefits and how it fits in a ton of connections that fit into our program,” explains Dave VanLeeuwen, education technology lead teacher. “But then on top of that, I keep on telling teachers, the soft skills that come along with this manipulating of 3D space and placing things in 3D space, and then also the problem solving skills.”
More than 30 local classrooms launched projects in March and have until the end of May to submit projects to Shawn Champagne, senior planner for the city, for an evaluation and a chance for a prize.
“He was really into the idea of, ‘Let’s work with the kids on zoning,’ which is fantastic. They learn a little bit about how cities work and zoning requirements, but that also brings in a bunch of really neat math concepts, like the percentage of land that’s being covered by the buildings, or the scale in terms of how many floors you have for height,” explains VanLeeuwen.
Students participating in the project are typically provided an hour or two each week during science or technology class to work on their civic projects, however VanLeeuwen says students are more than enthusiastic to play Minecraft during school hours.
“For a lot of kids, they’re continuing it at home. They’re so excited about the project and working on it that they’re taking it home with them on their Chromebooks and they’re doing work there as well. It’s not assigned homework, it’s homework they want to do,” says VanLeeuwen.
Grade 5 student Reid Davis at Ross Glen School is working on his project during his free time at home and says he is building a mixed-use building with houses on top and a shop on the main floor.
“I kind of just came up with it (the idea) myself, because my grandma and grandpa used to live near there.”
Grade 4 student Merritt Haland is designing a virtual sports recreation centre to address the lack of access to sports facilities in the community.
“It’s really fun to play video games in school, because I like playing video games myself,” says Haland, who explains his choice to design a recreational facility. “I really like sports and thought that in that area there’s not many sports places; the closest place to play hockey is the Moose. So I thought I could build a sports recreation centre there, so then people who live there could play sports.”
Minecraft is a video game that allows the user to craft tools, items and build structures and machines with a grid of “mining blocks.” Since its release in 2011 Minecraft has become the best-selling video game of all time and recorded nearly 170 million monthly active players in 2024.
