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August 29, 2022

Minecraft empowers students to solve climate issues, builds skills for green careers

During the pandemic, educators and students at John Dewey High School in Brooklyn established a Minecraft Club to foster school community. Students participated in global Minecraft sustainability challenges that dovetailed with existing schoolwide efforts to protect the local environment. When the New York City Department of Education codified Minecraft in sustainability curricula, it prioritized student-directed learning—and started building career pathways in the future green economy.

New York City Department of Education
The New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) is the largest school system in the United States, with more than 1.1 million students across over 1,800 separate schools. One of these schools, John Dewey High School, serves 2,200 students from all over the district who are admitted based on academic achievement, regardless of background or socioeconomic status.

Consistently ranked in “best of” high school lists and as an educational innovator, a large part of its success is creating a sense of community. When asked what makes John Dewey so special, principal Heather Adelle speaks to the school’s diversity and how it’s celebrated. “Every student is valued, their voices are heard,” she says. “There is real collaboration that happens between staff and students, with grassroots programs and after school clubs that gives everyone a sense of ownership.”

When the pandemic hit, John Dewey High School educators immediately recognized the opportunity to use Minecraft: Education Edition to connect students learning from home with fun, educational activities—and continue that sense of community. But Minecraft also launched a new, district-wide approach to Educators across the district are now teaching students about sustainability and the environment, creating a radical shift in empowered learning that builds pathways to new, green-economy careers.

It all begins when a chemistry teacher launches the Minecraft Club.

Minecraft is a game-based learning platform that supports creative problem solving, collaboration, and critical thinking in an immersive digital environment. It’s a great way to engage students in their own learning across school subjects. Chemistry teacher Mashfiq Ahmed recalls getting hooked on building survival worlds in Minecraft when he was in high school, inspiring a love of both gaming and science. So in March 2020, when he got a notification that Minecraft: Education Edition was free to all students, he immediately resolved to start a Minecraft Club the next school year.

Initially, his goal was simple: give students a place to relax, have a good time, and connect with other students, first remotely, then in person. Popularity exploded; the club kept growing. Then, students started doing more. They participated in global design competitions, fundraised for a local charity by making Minecraft keychains and even created an in-game virtual community center to host class social events like winter parties and a Thanksgiving feast. During the challenges of remote learning, Minecraft enabled his students to work together and create a space in which everyone felt welcome.
Ahmed is also using Minecraft more in his classroom; it provides pre-built Minecraft worlds and standards-aligned lessons for chemistry, with unique blocks for each of the different elements. Students can even do lab experiments with in-game chemistry tools. “It's really cool to see students explore that and tinker around with creating atoms in Minecraft,” he says. “I don't think any student was expecting that when they walked into my classroom.”

However, Ahmed is also clear that the benefits of Minecraft go far beyond classroom activities and social connection. He notes that he observes greater communication and social skills, better collaborative thinking, designing and planning, and a deeper understanding of the engineering process. It’s even helping students get an edge when they apply to college and get internships.

But most of all, it puts students at the center of their own learning, engaging them in ways that conventional, one-way instruction in a classroom can never do.

John Dewey starts using Minecraft to explore the local environment.

One of John Dewey’s chief differentiators is that it places a huge emphasis on linking students with the local community and the natural environment. For example, the school has a vibrant gardening club, hydroponic vertical gardening system that makes a classroom smell like fresh basil, and a robust composting program supported by NYCDOE Sustainability department. The school also works with the NYC Parks department and several local nonprofit organizations to conduct regular cleanups of nearby Coney Island Creek and learn about the local ecosystems. Nonprofit Billion Oyster Project uses its oyster reefs in the Coney Island Creek estuary to educate the public on oyster reefs and the importance of clean waterways, and students have become heavily involved in those restoration efforts.

Nancy Woods was drawn to the school for these reasons. Already the Assistant Principal for the STEM Academy, she eventually became the Assistant Principal at John Dewey too. She helps connect students and teachers to these types of stewardship projects and to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) activities like the robotics program and Minecraft: Education Edition.

When the school decided to do a cleanup of the Coney Island Creek, Woods, Adelle, and other colleagues immediately saw an opportunity to create a STEM collaborative and connect to an existing project the Minecraft Club students were working on: a sustainable urban design challenge. After all, what could spark student interest more than actually pulling on waders and getting into the creek to look for oyster species and testing water quality? When you add Minecraft to the equation, students can recreate the estuary environment, and even come up with creative solutions to environmental problems like pollution that threaten the oyster reefs. These types of activities connect students to their environment in powerful ways that are far more compelling than simply learning from a book or presentation.

NYCDOE formalizes Minecraft and sustainability projects across the school district.

After seeing the success of John Dewey’s Minecraft program, the NYCDOE’s department of sustainability wanted to expand this model out across all five boroughs of New York. As part of NYDCOE’s facility management organization, the department spearheads many school infrastructure projects, like energy efficiency, energy management, waste reduction, and more.

But the department also actively works with colleagues in teaching and learning by partnering with actual schools and developing sustainability curricula. “Doing sustainability for a public school organization presents endless opportunities to work from the ground up, within each of our schools and school communities to really embed sustainability into the sort of culture and practice of each of our schools,” says its director, Meredith McDermott.

The reason this approach works so well is because it actively engages the students to learn more, which leads to taking action. As McDermott notes, sustainability isn’t much without action—which is why the department’s driving principle ties education and action together.
One of the best examples of education and action can be found in NYCDOE’s innovative “Battle of the Boroughs” competition. Students across all five boroughs were challenged to work in teams and build their own green city solutions in Minecraft: Education Edition based on their empowered learning interests. Thousands of students across the district created videos documenting their Minecraft builds, and the finalist teams competed in a live esports ‘build battle’ streamed on Twitch which reached 300,000 viewers.

Based on the success of the competition, Microsoft selected NYCDOE to launch the Net Zero Challenge across all its schools, a Minecraft build challenge that invited students to design climate solutions to support the city’s carbon reduction programs. With many environmental and pollution issues readily apparent—like garbage, transportation, and overcrowding—New York offers many opportunities to connect with the local environment. “The idea is to try to get pollution down,” says Woods. “The students are solution setting in this build plate to see what they can build to help get New York City to Net Zero.”

Minecraft builds connections to jobs in the green economy.

Green jobs are the careers of the future—and for John Dewey, Minecraft is playing a pivotal role in helping students connect to those jobs. “We have embraced tools like Minecraft in the classroom that help build the skills needed for young people to thrive: to express their ideas, learn confidently, and explore issues that matter to them and their communities,” says Adelle. “My vision for the future of education, and of NYC, is optimistic.”

Woods is similarly enthusiastic. “Minecraft is used to engage students in envisioning and building a greener city,” she says. “Programs like Battle of the Boroughs and Net Zero Challenge give students a voice and a cause. This is so important as we prepare students for the future, and for jobs that our cities need: in renewable energy, climate resilience, green building, and sustainable transit.”

Salwa Omar, a senior and president of the Minecraft Club is a perfect example of a student who honed STEM and leadership skills with the game. Not only did her Minecraft experience give her a unique edge in college applications to top engineering schools, she also shifted her educational goals too. “Right now, I’m planning to major in mechanical engineering, but I’m thinking of doing a double major with environmental engineering because of the Minecraft climate challenges,” she says.

“Minecraft is used to engage students in envisioning and building a greener city. This is so important as we prepare students for the future, and for jobs that our cities need: in renewable energy, climate resilience, green building, and sustainable transit.”

Nancy Woods, Assistant Principal, John Dewey High School

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