Effects Of Playing Minecraft On Cognitive Development

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Cognitive Development and Minecraft
In a few short years the game Minecraft has become the third most popular video game of all time and it’s quickly rising to the number one position. One cannot go into the average elementary classroom today and not hear constant chatter about this game from children of all ages and gender. As the popularity of this game reaches record breaking heights, more and more parents and educators are questioning the effects that playing Minecraft can have on cognitive development. Although some critiques only see this as another video game that is rotting children’s brains, there are others that can see the possibility of Minecraft being an educational tool with unlimited potential. This basic survival based game promotes cognitive development in children as earlier as the pre-operational stage and up through the formal operational stage by allowing them to practice skills that expand abilities in perception, attention, memory, thinking, and reasoning.
Markus Persson was the original creator of Minecraft in 2009 and then in 2011 he gave control to Jens Bergensten. The original audience for this game was largely adults, but with the help of the internet and videos uploaded to YouTube showing off what can be created in the game, it was not long until people of all ages were playing. It is currently available on almost every platform imaginable including computers, phones, tablets, and gaming consoles and its low price makes it easily accessible to everyone. In the game you use tools to collect materials which then can be used to build structures such as a house to protect you from zombies that come out at night in survival mode. Other than the basic objective of collecting food and shelter,...

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...llaborate with one another to reach a common goal. A teacher by the name of David Vreman has constructed a three-dimensional periodic table of the elements and it uses sign posts to highlight key properties of each element while demonstrating their uses (Short, 2012). It’s easy to see how Minecraft can be used in other subjects as well including foreign languages, history, art, or computer programming. Most importantly, Minecraft brings creativity back to learning which some researchers have shown is one of the hardest mental tasks to develop and having a strongly developed sense of creativity can benefit all realms of cognitive development.

Resources
Galotti, K. (2011). Cognitive development: Infancy through adolescence. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE.
Short, D. (2012). Teaching scientific concepts using a virtual world: Minecraft. Teaching Science, 58(3), 55-58.

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