2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Minecraft is a unique educational game, and researchers and educators have considered it potentially transformative for fostering learning and cognitive skills [1]. Since an early version of the game in 2009, millions of children worldwide have spent hundreds of thousands of cumulative years playing [2]. Gameplay can increase students’ motivation and engagement in learning, help them develop problem-solving skills, and provide unique opportunities for collaboration and leadership[1].

In this project, we developed the Lafayette Park World, a Minecraft Education game and programming environment, for youth to learn programming in a socio-cultural context. It mimics the real-world Lafayette Park, a historical site of the Women’s suffrage movement and a symbol of exercising First Amendment rights. In January and February 1917, women suffragists marched, every day, across Lafayette Park with their banners to take up positions in front of the White House to demand that President Woodrow Wilson help them in their campaign to get all American women voting rights [3]. The Lafayette Park Minecraft World integrates history, citizenship education, and computer science. It lets learners explore the Park virtually, compete to discover women’s suffrage protest signs and build architectures by programming on the Minecraft Education platform. We created it to teach computer programming through architecture design and construction while educating students about the women’s suffrage movement to increase awareness of gender equity and encourage civic engagement. Programming in this environment can be done either with blocks or in Python.

We chose to use Minecraft as the platform for developing this socio-cultural computing game because:

1) It is one of the most popular game platforms for children aged 6-14 [2].
2) It allows us to create a virtual world that reflects reality: the players’ identities and the event’s socio-cultural context.
3) Its education version allows players to program with blocks or in Python within its virtual worlds.

Faculty and students of the Excellence in Computing Innovation and Education (ExCITE) team designed the Lafayette Park World together, and one of the students implemented it. We developed the following components of it:

1) A virtual landscape mimicking the Lafayette Park, the White House, and their surroundings, with characters representing the women suffragists.
2) A game in which players can compete to discover women’s suffrage protest signs scattered around the landscape.
3) An area in the landscape for users to construct architectures by compiling example source code or developing their own code.

We invited high school students to play the game and refined it according to their feedback. We also developed the following supporting materials:
1) A lesson plan for using it in K-12 classrooms or higher education outreach activities.
2) Source code for creating architecture examples in the Lafayette Park World.
3) Video clips on how to play the game and how to use the examples’ source code.

We plan to evaluate the effectiveness of the Lafayette Park World in engaging K-12 students and increasing their interest in computing by offering workshops and collecting feedback by the time of draft paper submission. We will also use their feedback to further refine the Lafayette Park World, add more navigation instructions, and develop more coding examples.