Museums in Minecraft: what can we find there?

In May 2021, Mojang celebrated International Museum Day by launching new worlds and lessons in Minecraft Education. In addition to allowing players to visit virtual replicas of famous museums, some of these worlds invite players to create their own museums by selecting artifacts from a variety of choices.

Since the launch of Minecraft Education in November 2016, the number of lessons and worlds have grown significantly. Many public and academic organizations have collaborated with the game’s creators to provide educators and students with diverse and interactive virtual gamified learning opportunities.

Visit Famous Museums

For example, in the world that replicates the State History Museum in Washington, DC, players can explore the museum and its exhibits and can act as curators by creating their own exhibits. Three lessons are attached to this museum: the first one explores the states symbols outside the museum, the second one invites to assemble exhibitions about past eras, and the third one allows to create an exhibition about the modern era.

There is also a Minecraft replica of the Museum of Wales. That virtual visit first invites players to learn about the history, geography and culture of Wales. Then, it invites people to assemble their own exhibition in the museum, to use different virtual tools to do research, to gather information, and to create a Minecraft form to share with others. The activities in this lesson are separated into: research, planning, building, information creation, and exploration.

Another famous place that can be visited in Minecraft is the Pacific Science Center. This campus includes several exhibition halls and amphitheatres in which content is based on themes such as astronomy, health, physics, dinosaurs, and biology. During this visit, players learn how the museum space is organized to encourage curiosity and to link different ideas together. They are also invited to create their own exhibition.

Minecraft Museum Ecran Partage 1 — The State History Museum of Washington and the Pacific Science Center

Create Your Own Museum

The lesson entitled Create Your Own Museum offers a canvas in which players can create exhibitions, interactive galleries, and other presentations to showcase their learning, works of art, and content related to any other academic subject. The Minecraft museums created by players can be visited by other.

To create their own exhibit, players determine a theme, choose which artifacts to include, create signs, posters, and other visual aids to accompany their exhibit, and can record a virtual tour of their exhibit. It is an activity that allows to discover artifacts, to consolidate one’s learning in a virtual presentation, and to learn how to furnish a space while keeping in mind a guiding idea.

This lesson is divided into 8 mini lessons.

Other Visits in Minecraft

In addition to museums, Minecraft Education allows players to explore historical locations through interactive lessons. Among the themes proposed, we can find the World War I (5 lessons), Ancient Egypt (5 lessons), the Italian city of Florence (1 lesson), the city of Baghdad through history (1 lesson), and the city of Kyiv (1 lesson).

Each lesson comes with its own learning objectives, a description of the activities it offers, its common thread(s), and at least one external reference. Lessons are also classified on the Minecraft Education website by areas of learning, recommended age ranges, and the skills they focus on.