Minecraft Our City, an Erasmus Project in Virtual World

Abstract

Virtual worlds (VWs) offer alternative learning environments for geoscience education and give students a feeling of “being there.” In fact, VWs are also immersive environments that enable situated learning and constructivist learning in accordance with the Vygotsky theory, because the learner is inside an “imaginary” world context. In this environment, many activities and experiences can take place as scaffolding, cooperative learning, peer-to-peer and peer evaluation, coaching, scientific inquiry. Therefore, VWs can be a new technology to motivate students and provide the educational opportunities to learn in a socially interactive learning community. In the literature already, some studies report experiences carried out to investigate the effectiveness of virtual worlds in education. In the world, there are virtual worlds used for education such as Opensim and Samsara. Minecraft (https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/) is a virtual world used by new generations specially.