Northwestern’s Marcelo Worsley Give MPES Colloquium Talk

“Spatial Reasoning in Minecraft

Marcelo Worsley
Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences and Computer Science
Northwestern University

Wednesday, February 27th
12:45PM-2PM
Annenberg 303

Minecraft is often touted as a game that affords important Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics learning opportunities. Proponents are quick to note the ways that Minecraft might promote spatial reasoning, a skillset that strongly correlates with STEM proficiency. Despite this claim, few papers have chronicled in-game practices that might evidence spatial reasoning, or how we might study its development. In this paper, we describe both quantitative and qualitative evidence for correlations between Minecraft game play and spatial reasoning. At a high level, we see that students with more prior experience with Minecraft score higher on a spatial reasoning pre-test. While we do not attribute differences in spatial reasoning to Minecraft, our qualitative analyses surface a number of in-game practices that align with spatial reasoning. We chronicle some of these behaviors to highlight a set of practices that may be beneficial for studying the development of spatial reasoning in game-based environments.