Research Findings

Minecraft Education is a tool that has a considerable amount of research behind it in regards to teaching and learning. An indicator for that is that in Google Scholar, over 32.000 articles appeared when searching the key word "Minecraft Education". Ranging from preschool and early stages of primary education as Ming (2020) analyzes in his article, to junior high school grades as Nkadimeng and Ankiewicz (2022) address in their article, and across diverse disciplines, Minecraft seems to have many affordances that support learners' 21st century skills such as collaboration (Andersen & Rustad, 2022) and creativity (Sariçam & Yildirim, 2021). As Andersen and Rustad highlight (2022), using games in the classroom such as Minecraft Education, alongside with achieving collaboration, helps with activating high-order skills and achieving learning goals. This was also investigated previously by Callaghan's (2016) research where it was found that the collective experiences of the students inside the game, the capacity to collaborate and the facilitation of the teacher contributed to them accomplishing their learning goals. Returning to Andersen and Rustad's (2022) research, student reports mentioned in the article refer to how Minecraft helped them with problem-solving, design thinking and creating links between projects inside the game and the real world. These student reports imply that complex skills such as self-regulation and metacognitive awareness are also be activated using Minecraft, which is also commented in this article. 

Some conclusions that have been derived from prior research are that, for example, Minecraft gamification approach can assist low-achieving students in learning probability concept effectively (Ming, 2020). Another one was that STEM activities with Minecraft increased students' interest in STEM fields and improved their scientific creativity (Sariçam & Yildirim, 2021). In the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) and social network analysis (SNA) as a research methodology, studies around Minecraft have contributed to the field, describing how to capture and analyze collaborative processes. In Andersen and Rustad's article (2022) for example it was found that when using Minecraft as an educational tool for learning subject-specific skills, there were two patterns of interaction identified, collaboration and mirroring. Mirroring highlights how individual and group-level characteristics, behaviors, or structures can reflect and reinforce each other within the context of Minecraft.

Having said the above, it can be concluded that Minecraft Education has a wide range of features that hold a great educational value and address learning from multiple perspectives.