‘MineGage’ to develop a suite of plug and play applications and immersive Minecraft worlds to expand the potential of Minecraft in Education.
New Start-up MineGage, announced today that it is raising funds on Kickstarter to complete the development of a suite of applications and lesson resources to help parents and educators use Minecraft for learning. The company has set a goal to raise $25’000 to complete development of its software and first set of in-game curriculum worlds. Minegage will save educators and parents valuable time and help them get the most educational value from Minecraft while making students more excited to learn.
Minegage belives that learning and fun should not be at odds with eachother, and that the best approach is to make fun games more rigorous and assessible.
Their “Re-inspire a passion for learning” campaign shares how they can make fun game-based learning rigorous yet simple for educators and parents who have no experience. Tens of millions of children play Minecraft, but less than 1% of the maps and games built in Minecraft are educational. This means that teachers and parents have to create it all from scratch. MineGage aims to change that with tools and a database of professionally built game-based learning worlds and lesson plans that can be searched for quickly and installed without needing any Minecraft or programming experience.
MineGage worlds are game-based to excite and inspire students, but rigorously layered with learning, data-capture points and assessments. These data-points and assessments are then made visible on the website allowing real-time learning to be captured. Giving educators and parents a deeper insight into how kids are thinking, where further learning can take place is a powerful tool to put into educators hands.
MineGage worlds are all directly connected to curriculum based lesson plans that can be easily searched through to find the best lessons. Each is also developed to meet the standards of the Australian, Canadian, the UK, and the US Common Core curriculum. There are currently lessons in development for Math, History, Language Arts and Social studies for Grades 5 – 9 and many more planned for other subjects and grades.
Founder Garrett Zimmer, or PBJellyGames – as 13’000 kids affectionately know him, had this to say:
“Educators today are getting more and more time strapped. With Minecraft especially, they need game-based lesson worlds that are plug and play, directly tied to what they need to teach, provide valuable learning data. And that’s where we come in. We custom design lessons for the subject matter that needs to be taught, and then build it into an immersive game to be downloaded. Kids play it, and the back end tracks and makes the learning visible and actionable for educators. We take the HARD-work out of it, so parents and teachers can focus on individual learning.”
As the first immersive and curriculum connected Game-based learning module of it’s kind, MineGage is proud to showcase the immersive world of Elizabethan London – circa 1600. By means of quests, exploration, adventures, and creative challenges, students can learn curriculum directly from characters such as William Shakespeare, the Pilgrims of the Mayflower as they set off from England to Colonize the Americas, even partake in and experience the Great Fire of London. The potential in these immersive worlds, to tie learning and fun together again, goes beyond anything else available on the market today. Combined with the fact that Millions of children are already inspired by Minecraft and it’s a model tool for education.