Programming with Minecraft Bedrock Up: Modeling, Coding, and Computational Concepts

As society gradually digitizes, the need increases for computational literacy education or the inclusion of programming and computational thinking in school curricula and teaching practices. A challenge is to reach students with little or no experience in programming but who have played digital games like Minecraft (i.e., the sandbox game). Toward that end we have developed a new teaching method, which guides students from concrete to abstract programming activities stepwise: 1) block building and modeling, 2) high-level functions, and 3) general purpose programming. The method is based on a theoretical framework Action–Breakdown–Repair and is the result of the first iteration of a design-based research (DBR) process that aims to adapt Minecraft Education and its embedded block-based programming language MakeCode to teaching introductory computer science. We demonstrate the method and report the strengths and weaknesses of the first DBR iteration, including high engagement, different levels of abstraction, challenges of understanding computational concepts in working code, and the role of a shared referent in the game world to coordinate program understanding.