Teachers Designing Lessons with a Digital Sandbox Game: The Case of Minecraft Education Edition

David Bar-El1 and Kathryn Ringland2

1
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
2
University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

davidbarel@u.northwestern.edu
kringlan@ucsc.edu

Abstract: While studies have indicated that teachers are increasingly accepting digital games as a teaching
tool, the curricular design work of teachers toward integrating digital games into their teaching has remained
relatively understudied. This study explores the learning activity designs of teachers who used the sandbox
game Minecraft Education Edition. Taking a grounded theory approach, we analyzed 159 publicly available
lesson plans designed by 16 teachers. Through qualitative coding, we identified seven design dimensions that
described variations across the lesson plans. We illustrated how teachers combine these design dimensions to
arrange the socio-technical learning environment, scripting interactions between themselves, students, the
game, and external media. These findings reveal the various design possibilities that teachers have when
teaching with a sandbox digital game and highlight the important role that teachers play in designing game-
based learning activities. Suggestions for future research and implications for the design of professional
development for game-based teaching are discussed.

Keywords: game-based learning, games-based teaching, teachers as designers, Minecraft, lesson planning with
digital games

1. Introduction
Over the last decade, accumulating studies have documented increases in K–12 teachers’ openness to and use
of digital games in their teaching (Fishman et al., 2014; Millstone, 2012; Takeuchi & Vaala, 2014). While the
scholarship on game-based learning has continued to grow, most studies have focused on educational game
design and the effects of games on student outcomes (Klopfer, Osterweil & Salen, 2009; Reid, 2012; Clark,
Tanner-smith & Killingsworth, 2016). This focus has backgrounded the important role that teachers play in
adopting and designing educational activities with digital games (Egenfeldt-nielsen, 2007; Ketelhut & Schifter,
2011; Hanghøj & Brund, 2010).

The literature on teachers’ adoption of game-based learning has mostly examined the attitudes, beliefs, and
school context that may affect teachers’ use of games (Donnelly, Mcgarr & Reilly, 2011; Bourgonjon et al.,
2013). While important, this line of inquiry often ignores teachers’ actual use of games. A 2013 survey of K-8
teachers in the United States found that almost three-quarters of participants reported using digital games for
classroom instruction (Takeuchi & Vaala, 2014). Hence, a noteworthy gap exists between the sizable
scholarship on teachers’ attitudes and beliefs regarding game-based learning and the relative dearth of studies
on teachers’ use of games (Marklund & Taylor, 2016), especially teachers’ work to design learning activities
with commercial games (Van Eck, 2009).

We focus on teachers as agents in the integration of digital game-based learning as part of an ongoing shift in
the field. Researchers are considering the learning environment of digital game-based learning, a context that
includes games, learners, and teachers (Egenfeldt-nielsen, 2007; Marklund, 2014; Hanghøj & Brund, 2010).
When provided with digital games and curricular materials, teachers’ implementation has been shown to
affect student learning (Wilson et al., 2018). However, outside of academic interventions, teachers often go
through several phases to enact game-based learning on their volition. They need to choose games, learn
about them, design learning activities, and then facilitate these activities in the classroom (Becker, 2007; Van
Eck, 2009.; Hanghøj & Brund, 2010; Alklind Taylor, 2014).

In this study, we focus on the third phase of enacting game-based learning, seeking to understand the learning
activities teachers design when using a sandbox game. Centering on the learning environment, we build on
prior research, which posits that game-based learning happens through interactions in a socio-technical
context. Teachers design scripted interactions, prescribing group structures, tasks, and learning goals (Arnseth
& Silseth, 2018). Players in “naturalistic” scenarios interact on screen and in the room via gameplay, gesture,
and discursive actions (Stevens, Satwicz & McCarthy, 2008). Comparatively, in the classroom, the socio-
technical context will often involve numerous human actors alongside digital and non-digital materials.
Therefore, designing digital game-based learning activities requires teachers to arrange a complex
environment where students and teachers interact, with the game and other media toward meaning making
and a set of educational goals (Hanghøj et al., 2014).

In this paper, we explore the work that teachers undertake when designing learning activities using immersive
digital games (Stieler-hunt & Jones, 2019). Specifically, we examine 159 lessons designed for K–12 classrooms
by teachers using the sandbox game Minecraft Education Edition. Positioning teachers as designers and digital
games as tools for dialogic teaching and learning (Arnseth & Silseth, 2018), we qualitatively analyze lesson
plans to identify how lessons vary in their arrangements of the socio-technical environment. This work
contributes to the field of digital game-based learning in two ways. First, it provides an account of teachers’
use of a popular digital game to design learning activities. Second, we share a taxonomy of design dimensions
and demonstrate how it serves in understanding and describing teachers’ arrangements of the game-based
learning environment.

2. Context
Minecraft is a popular sandbox game with over 200 million purchases (The Verge, 2020). This study focused on
Minecraft Education Edition, a version of Minecraft dedicated specifically for classroom use. The virtual world
in Minecraft is malleable in that players can destroy and place blocks within the game. Certain items and
features exist uniquely in the education edition to support educational activities. Teachers who use Minecraft
Education Edition can download virtual worlds for their students from several sources, the biggest of which is
the Minecraft Education website. We chose to study Minecraft Education Edition for two reasons. First, the
malleability of the sandbox game allows teachers to generate their own lessons. Second, the active network of
teachers who use the game leaves a data trace for us as researchers to collect and study.

3. Research Questions
The central overarching question of this study is as follows:
When teachers create lesson plans with a sandbox game, what design variations do they produce, and how can
we understand and describe these varied lesson designs?

Our sub-questions are as follows:

1. What are the design dimensions along which teachers’ lesson plans vary?
2. How do teachers arrange the socio-technical environment for learning with Minecraft Education Edition?

4. Methods
To answer the research questions, we drew on a corpus of publicly available lesson plans designed by teachers
and uploaded them to the Minecraft Education Edition website 1 as of March 2020. In prior work (Bar-El &
Ringland, 2020), we reported a preliminary analysis of these data, including a quantitative analysis of 484 user-
generated lessons. This analysis showed that teachers designed lessons mostly for elementary and middle
school students, and lessons spanned a range of subjects from the humanities through social studies to STEM.
Moreover, looking at the teacher data, we identified a group of 16 “power users” who uploaded a large share
of the lesson corpus (32%).

4.1 Sample
We chose to narrow the analysis to the 16 “power users” for several reasons. First, these were teachers who
had developed several lessons each, with a range of 5 to 30, which we assumed meant that they had
developed a certain comfort with the game as a design tool. Second, the sample included 159 lessons, a
manageable sample to parse and analyze qualitatively.

1
https://education.minecraft.net/class-resources/lessons/
4.2 Data
The lesson plans comprised several data types. Textual lesson plan descriptions—these appeared in the
following order: learning objectives, guiding ideas, student activities, and performance expectations.
Information tags—selected by the teachers upon uploading the lesson. These included up to three age tags for
the target student age and up to three subject tags. Supplemental materials—these were additional teacher
uploaded resources, such as Minecraft world files, worksheets, and links to YouTube videos.

4.3 Procedure
We took a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006). After downloading all the lesson assets, we explored
and analyzed three lesson plans per teacher using Microsoft Excel. This included annotating the textual
descriptions from the website, summarizing supplemental materials, and playing through game worlds. We
summarized the profiles for each of the 16 teachers, pulling in images from lesson assets. To guide our
analytical process, we used heuristics such as “What kind of world builder is this teacher?” “What kinds of
media do they use?”, and “What are students expected to do in the lesson?”

For each teacher, we then looked through every lesson plan and noted patterns of similarity and dissimilarity.
Through writing individual analytical memos and conducting shared discussions (Creswell & Poth, 2016), we
noted patterns in the data and identified a set of candidate codes. These codes were condensed thematically
to represent dimensions along which we understood and explained the lesson designs. With candidate codes
in mind, we did a second pass through the lessons, color-coding and marking in the texts, materials, and game
worlds indications of the codes. Through this process, we refined the codes and removed those that were
either ambiguous or appeared less than 10 times in the data. It is noteworthy that the resulting dimensions (as
described below) were not exhaustive but rather the dominant themes that emerged during our iterative
coding process (Charmaz, 2006).

5. Results
To answer our research questions, we begin by presenting the dimension codes that emerged from our
analysis (RQ1). Then, we analyze example lessons as combinations of the dimension codes and describe how
they represent various socio-technical arrangements designed by teachers with the game (RQ2).

5.1 Dimension codes

Our coding process resulted in seven design dimension codes. Table 1 outlines each of the codes.
In the following sections, we describe each dimension code in further detail, provide instances of each code
across the corpus, and use examples to illustrate the codes in relation to the raw data.

Code Definition
World Builder Does the lesson include a world built by the teacher (Yes / No)?
NPCs Does the world include NPCs (Yes / No)? If yes, what do they do?
Single or Multiplayer Do students play individually or in groups?
Students as Builders Are students expected to build (Yes / No)? If so, what?
External Media Do students use or interact with media outside of the game (Yes / No)? If yes,
what kinds of content (images, videos, worksheets, etc.)?
Documentation Are students asked to document their work explicitly (Yes / No)? If yes, using
what tools (in-game items, building representations, presentation, etc.)?
Game World to Real Does the lesson ask students to compare and contrast the game world and the
World Connection real world?
Table 1. Codes reflecting dimensions of teacher generated lessons with Minecraft Education Edition

5.1.1 World builder

A central affordance and practice of Minecraft and other editor games is world building (Abend & Beil, 2015).
Eleven of the 16 power users were world builders. That is, their lesson plans included world files that they had
produced either individually or collaboratively. Of the 159 lesson plans, 100 included worlds built by the
teachers. Figure 1 shows two worlds built by different teachers. One world includes interactive quizzes about
the human heart (Figure 1 left), while the second comprises a large urban environment used in multiple
lessons about city planning and sustainability (Figure 1 right). Of the teachers whom we did not categorize as
world builders, three had uploaded worlds to accompany their lesson plans; however, these were worlds built
by their students as they completed lessons. For example, one teacher uploaded eight lesson plans that
included worlds built by his students throughout a months-long curriculum.

Figure 1. A world with two interactive quizzes about the human heart (left) and a world containing a large city
as a context for sustainable urban planning and construction (right)

5.1.2 NPCs
Non-playable characters (NPCs) are entities that users can place in the game. Users can modify NPCs to include
dialogue bubbles, execute in-game commands, and direct them to URLs outside of the game. Of the 100
worlds built by teachers, 71 included NPCs. Nine of the 16 teachers used NPCs in their lessons. The seven who
did not were the five who did not build worlds and two others who did not include NPCs in their built worlds.

NPCs functioned primarily in four different roles. The first role is to provide context to the environment and
the narrative. For example, in the lessons about sustainable urban planning, several NPCs stand in a municipal
building and represent stakeholders from whom students learn about the professional process of city planning
(Figure 2 left). The second role is instructional. The NPC provides instructions on how to perform a particular
task. For example, in one lesson, students must plant a garden within a 10-by-10 grid and write the fraction of
the ratio of flowers to the 10 spots. The NPC, aptly named Archimedes, provides the student with clear
instructions regarding the task (Figure 2, right).

Figure 2. NPCs as stakeholders in the city planning process (left) and an NPC providing instructions to students
about representing fractions using plants in a 10-by-10 garden grid (right)

The third role is informational; the NPC directs students to external resources via URLs. These resources could
themselves serve several functions (see the section below on external media). The fourth role is to build
interactivity in the game worlds. Teachers programmed NPCs to execute commands that teleport students to
given locations or provide them with in-game items. It is noteworthy that while we did not code for students’
use of NPC, several lesson plans asked students to place NPCs in their Minecraft worlds.
5.1.3 Single or multiplayer
Minecraft Education Edition is playable individually or as a multiplayer game with up to 30 players. Examining
the textual information in the lesson plans, we saw that of the 159 lessons, 37 (23%) excluded explicit
mentions of single-or multi-player gameplay. Among the lessons that mentioned single player or multiplayer
gameplay, single player was coded 11 times (7%), multiplayer was coded 83 times (52%), and a code for both
multiplayer and single player was coded 26 times (16%). Multiplayer configurations included working in pairs,
in teams of 3–6, and as an entire classroom.

5.1.4 Students as builders

Building through placing and removing blocks is arguably the core mechanic of Minecraft (Duncan, 2011). All
16 teachers created lessons that asked students to build, which was the case in 101 of the 159 lessons. The five
teachers who did not upload their own worlds with the lesson plan had the students build their own world as
part of their activity in the game. In lessons that included teacher-designed worlds, students were usually
asked to engage in building specific areas of the world toward a particular goal (e.g., building a castle), or as
part of a process (e.g., building a row of blocks to represent the blood circulation cycle).

5.1.5 External media

Another dimension that varied across lessons was the use of supplemental materials outside of the Minecraft
world files. Fifty-three percent (53%) of lesson plans included external media. These were either tangible
media, such as printed worksheets, or graph paper for sketching designs or digital media, such as YouTube
videos, images, or Wiki entries. That most lessons included external materials shows that teachers arrange the
learning environment around the digital game rather than solely within the game.

5.1.6 Documentation
Minecraft Education Edition contains several unique items for student documentation. Students can use a
camera that allows them to aim at and take photos of the Minecraft world. The portfolio or the book and quill
are items that afford the ability to compile images and to annotate them. Additionally, students can use items
such as signs, or even NPCs, to document their work. Fifty-four percent (54%) of the lessons included the
documentation code. These were instances where teachers specified the use of either in-game items or other
tools outside of the game to document and report on their work. Examples from outside the game tools
include written reflections, presentations, and video recordings of student gameplay.

5.1.7 Game world to real world connection

In Minecraft, players interact with a digital world that follows its own natural rules, mirroring the real world to
varying degrees. The game world comprises several biomes that narrowly represent the geographical diversity
on earth (e.g., plains, desert, and mountains). In 13 lessons, teachers explicitly asked students to draw
comparisons between the Minecraft world and the real world. For example, in one lesson, the teacher asked
the students to choose a real-world biome that had a Minecraft analog. The students then had to research
online and write down what vegetation and wildlife inhabit the chosen biome on earth, then explore the game
biome and write down observations of in-game vegetation and wildlife. Other examples were lessons that
asked students to simulate a process through gameplay and reflect on how it would take place in the real
world, such as devising safety plans for a fire escape, or planning and reshaping people’s homes.

5.2 Teacher arrangement of the socio-technical environment

Using this taxonomy of individual design dimensions along which the lesson plans varied, we examined how
lesson designs emerged from teachers’ combinations of these different dimensions. Specifically, we analyzed
the ways in which teachers arranged the socio-technical environment, scripting interactions between students,
the game, and external media. To illustrate these arrangements, we describe four lesson plan categories (i.e.,
stations, expeditions, individual builds, and team builds). The first two categories emphasize structured
interactions between students and the game environment, while the latter two categories emphasize
construction by individual or multiple students. While these are four possible configurations, this list is by no
means exhaustive.

5.2.1 Stations
In station lessons, students play in a teacher-built world and complete several in-game tasks. For example, in
one lesson, students follow a path and stop at five different stations. At each station, signs instruct students to
form a hypothesis about in-game phenomena, such as the speed of an item flowing downstream in streams of
varying widths. The lesson plan asks students to document their hypotheses and findings using in-game items,
thus practicing their hypothesis testing skills. In this lesson plan, we observed that the teacher has designed a
clear and constrained environment in which students perform various in-game tasks, which they then report
on. It is noteworthy that several lessons in the station category resemble drill-and-practice activities, relating
to prior research on the prevalence of quizzing as a use of digital games by teachers (Takeuchi & Vaala, 2014).
However, as is illustrated in the example above, teachers also arranged station lessons to create experiential
learning activities, where students took on identities such as a scientist formulating and testing hypotheses.

5.2.2 Expeditions
In expedition lessons, students either play in a teacher-designed world or start a new Minecraft world. The
students will often play individually and act as explorers tasked with collecting and cataloging in-game items.
Moreover, in these lessons, the teacher asks the students to compare and contrast the game world and the
real world. For example, in one lesson, students choose a real-world biome and research the animals and
vegetation that are native to it. They then find an equivalent biome in the Minecraft world and explore it. The
teacher provides a worksheet with tables where the students can write down their observations and a Venn
diagram to visualize the overlap and distinction between the game and real worlds. Here, we can see how the
teacher arranges activities for students to perform in the game and outside of the game using external media,
both digital (researching biomes online) and offline (writing observations). Moreover, we observed an explicit
call to reflect on the mapping between the game world and its phenomena and the real world.

5.2.4 Individual builds

Many lessons centered on student building as the main activity. In some lesson plans, students were tasked
with working individually on their devices with the option of pairing up with one peer. Two noteworthy
versions of individual build lessons included coding challenges and design prompts. In coding challenges, the
teacher built a dedicated Minecraft world with a set of building challenges to be completed using the in-game
coding interface and agent. In design prompts, teachers provided external media as inspiration for a design
challenge without necessarily providing a custom-built world.

5.2.5 Team builds

Teachers divided students into teams, and the lesson’s central activity was for the students to build virtual
representations and document them for classroom showcases and reflections. Here, as in the individual builds,
the two main design dimensions along which the lessons varied were whether the teacher provided a world or
not and whether they used external media.

Two examples of these lesson plans are structured team builds and building as a classroom. In structured team
builds, the teacher designed a dedicated world that set the stage for a construction process by the students.
For example, one teacher collaborated with colleagues to build an elaborate city environment (Figure 2, left).
The teacher used this world for five different lessons on urban planning and sustainable design. The teacher
used a lecture to frame the lesson, and students then researched the topic further using provided videos and
websites. Finally, a team of 2–4 students must build or renovate a section of the city following the lessons’
goals.

In building as a classroom, all the students work together to build a specified world. For example, in one lesson
about ancient Lisbon under the Roman Empire, the teacher gave a lecture and provided a YouTube video with
a 3D model of the ancient city. Students were then required to recreate the ancient city in the game, with each
student building a particular section. Moreover, the teacher notes in her plan that every few minutes, she
would ask students to pause and document their process using the in-game camera, and at the end of the
lesson, they would provide a sign in the game with information about what area or object they had built and
its importance in ancient Lisbon and its society.

6. Discussion and Conclusion

In this study, we sought to understand the learning activity designs of teachers who adopt a digital game. We
leveraged a large corpus of lesson plans designed by teachers with the sandbox game Minecraft Education
Edition. Our qualitative analysis of 159 lesson plans from a sample of 16 power users yielded a taxonomy of
seven design dimensions, along which lessons with the game varied. Moreover, we categorized four lesson
types based on the teachers’ combinations of these design dimensions and demonstrated how these represent
variations in the arrangement of the socio-technical learning environment.

6.1 Connection to prior research

Recent studies have shown that K–12 teachers use games predominantly for drill and practice activities
(Takeuchi & Vaala, 2014.; Wang & Tahir, 2020), and indeed we observed that the teachers in the sample
designed drill and practice activities with Minecraft Education Edition. However, many lessons in the sample
reflected experiential, collaborative, and immersive learning. This range of lesson designs speaks to the
flexibility of the game and the important role that teachers play in choosing how to shape the game to serve
their teaching. Researchers have argued that Minecraft lends itself to a rich modding culture, as players modify
the game environment through crafting and building mechanics (Christiansen, 2014). In this study, we found
that teachers take on the role of modder and create varying gameplay experiences, such as multiple-choice
quizzes, individual or collaborative builds, and explorations of nature in the virtual world.

The design dimensions and their combinations illustrate the variability in teachers’ design choices and the
labor put toward shaping the game-based learning environment. Teachers design game worlds, collect or
produce external materials, and script activities both in and around the game (Arnseth & Silseth, 2018).
Moreover, the teachers positioned the game differently regarding the students within the activity. In team
building, the students used the Minecraft world as their own digital canvas to represent their learning, often
while leveraging external materials. In station lessons, the teacher used the game as a canvas, while the
students interacted with a relatively constrained gameplay space.

6.2 Implications
This study provides a snapshot account of teachers’ use of Minecraft Education Edition as a teaching medium.
Theoretically, this account contributes to the knowledge on teachers’ adaptation of digital games for teaching
and learning. Moreover, the lessons are evidence of the effort and time that teachers put into designing game-
based lessons and, often in this sample, building dedicated Minecraft worlds. By examining early adopters and
experienced users of the popular digital game, we hope to provide a language through which we can
understand teachers’ designs with Minecraft Education Edition. A practical goal of game-based learning
research is to inform the design of professional development (Stieler-hunt & Jones, 2019) and to support
teachers’ use of digital games at scale. Following this logic, we hope that our work informs researchers and
practitioners interested in the use of Minecraft Education Edition and other sandbox games for educational
use. The taxonomy of design dimensions and examples of their combinations may serve as inspiration based
on the practices of teachers who are expert adopters of the game.

6.3 Limitations
While this study sheds light on teachers’ lesson designs and the arrangement of the socio-technical learning
environment with a digital game, two limitations are noted. First, the teacher sample (n = 16) is both small and
unique; the teachers in the study were prolific users of Minecraft Education Edition and, therefore, do not
represent the general teacher population or even game using teachers more narrowly. Second, our analysis of
the prescribed learning activities is limited only to teachers’ lesson plans and does not extend to actual
classroom implementation. The emergent interaction in a live classroom is undoubtedly different from the
text-based description of teachers’ lesson plans and warrants further inquiry.
6.4 Directions for future research
Future research should focus on teachers’ design processes and on the classroom implementations of different
lesson designs. Scarce empirical work exists on teachers’ full design process, from choosing a digital game
through the development of game-based curricular materials to implementation. However, studies have
shown that teachers’ implementation of game-based curricula affects student learning (Wilson et al., 2018).
Furthermore, future research should map different lesson designs and socio-technical arrangements to
teacher experiences and student learning. By pursuing this line of research, the game-based learning field can
continue to articulate the practicalities of teaching with games, and to outline best practices (Egenfeldt-
nielsen, 2001; Marklund, 2014; Hanghøj & Brund, 2010).

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