At the recent Rocky View School Board Meeting, a couple of kids from A.E Bowers Elementary School showed how video games aren't useless and can be used for learning. 

Minecraft, the most popular game in the world with over 140 million people playing each month, is taking teaching to a different level. 

Cheryl Procee, who teaches grade one French immersion at A.E. Bowers Elementary School in Airdrie, talks about how combining her student's passion to play the game with learning the curriculum is a win-win scenario. 

“So, I work with grade one students; six-year-olds who have a lot of passion for video games. After hearing them speak about Minecraft over and over and over again, and how they use it in their personal time, I thought how can we incorporate this into the classroom?” says Procee. 

Procee went on to say that the students already demonstrated they have incredible capabilities within the game and they weren't actually aware of just how many skills they were using in terms of problem-solving, math, and science. 

“Minecraft lends itself really well into cross-curricular outcomes, so it really doesn’t apply itself only to science, math or social studies.” 

At the recent RVS Board Meeting, the kids did a presentation on what Airdrie looked like a long time ago. They went into Minecraft and created some of the oldest buildings in Airdrie to see what the city would look like back in the early 1900s. They built the railway by the canal where the students made sure to note the reason the railway is by the canal is because they would use the water to cool off the engine. 

But of course, Minecraft isn’t just about building. When you look deeper into Minecraft, you realize you use a lot of math and science. 

“There is a lot of math involved, so how we can use measurement shapes and counting to do the actual construction? In terms of science, there is a lot of planning and building things. Grade one science curriculum has a lot of focus on building things, so how we can use different materials to build different things,” says Procee. “There are those other pieces such as group work, problem-solving, technology coding.” 

Minecraft also sparks interest in the students, so they want to come to school and learn. 

“There was definitely a lot of excitement and a lot of motivation. They were able to apply so much of their learning and understanding of social studies, math and science into the project.” 

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