Making Minecraft all their own
The students prepared to roleplay as everyday ancient Romans. There was a baker, a farmer, a miner â all playing an integral role in their bustling urban and rural center.
âWhen students have this idea of the ancient Romans, they think about senators, they think about Julius Caesar or the elites," says Assistant Professor of Classics Amy Oh, who had, for some time, been considering a new approach to her class The Romans in Their Environment. "I wanted to focus on the normal people, the people who did the work. They didnât get paid very much, but they were thriving, and they made up 99% of the population.â
In consultation with environmental studies major Kate Manor â24, Oh decided that the video game Minecraft could be the right tool for building an ancient world that all her students could be a part of. She learned that Skidmore had the licensing for the education version of the immensely popular game, which allows players to define their own objectives and create their own virtual worlds, and the idea was a go.
Students in the classics course The Romans in Their Environment use their research on ancient Rome to construct a fictional ancient Roman town, 'Skidrome,' in the video game Minecraft.
Her class redesign is just one of the many examples of Skidmore faculty using games and roleplay to bring Creative Thought Matters to their classroom and enhance students' learning experience.
After a traditional reading-, lecture-, and discussion-based first half of the semester, Oh entered the âsandboxâ game over spring break, choosing a world to inhabit and then clearing the way for a community to be built from scratch.
Her students developed backstories for the Romans they each represented, then met together on the Minecraft platform to start building â a process that involved researching Roman towns and urban planning and then mapping out the geography.
âOnce we built the town, âSkidrome,â we had a festival and we invited people from
the Skidmore community to come walk through with us via Zoom,â Oh says. âWe also had
them engage in some politics in the game. We had two administrative officials who
were going up for re-election, so we had to hold a debate and a vote, and an election
took place. We also had a natural disaster.
âWe did all this because the core of the course is for the students to think about
everyday Romans and how they interacted with the world around them.â
An aerial view of the finished Roman town constructed by students in Minecraft.
Beyond the benefits of immersion and collaboration, Oh believes the gameplay portion
of class provided her students with a âsense of libertyâ as well.
âOnce we got in the game, I got to know the students in a way that I wouldnât have
in a normal classroom, and I started hearing more from people I donât normally hear
from,â she says. âWhen we took it into a game mode and I asked them to become a character,
I got to see their creative side, I got to see the research they put into it. But
also in the game world, they became suddenly very free to be their true online self.
Itâs really interesting to get to know a whole other side of students.âAmy OhAssistant Professor of Classics
The open-endedness of game play is also an intriguing concept for teaching, Oh observes,
as it gives students more agency in designing their own experience. She says she has
learned a lot as an educator by incorporating Minecraft, and she can see the potential
for using it in courses across many different disciplines.
âWe have to meet the students where they are. They have this other mode of learning
that we havenât fully tapped into yet. We can do games in class, but this is a longer
commitment. Iâm excited about it.â
