Abstract
As excitement for Minecraft continues to grow, we consider its potential to function as an engaging environment for practicing and studying spatial reasoning. To support this exposition, we describe a glimpse of our current analysis of spatial reasoning skills in Minecraft. Twenty university students participated in a laboratory study that asked them to recreate three existing buildings in Minecraft. Screen captures of user actions, together with eye tracking data, helped us identify ways that students utilize perspective taking, constructing mental representations, building and place-marking, and error checking. These findings provide an initial impetus for further studies of the types of spatial skills that students may exhibit while playing Minecraft. It also introduces questions about how the design of Minecraft activities may promote, or inhibit, the use of certain spatial skills.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Dye, M.W.G., Green, C.S., Bavelier, D.: Increasing speed of processing with action video games. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 18(6), 321–326 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01660.x
Green, C.S., Bavelier, D.: Action-video-game experience alters the spatial resolution of vision. Psychol. Sci. 18(1), 88–94 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01853.x
Hegarty, M., Waller, D.: A dissociation between mental rotation and perspective-taking spatial abilities. Intelligence 32(2), 175–191 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2003.12.001
Just, M.A., Carpenter, P.A.: Eye fixations and cognitive processes. Cogn. Psychol. 8(4), 441–480 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(76)90015-3
Newcombe, N.S., Shipley, T.F.: Thinking about spatial thinking: new typology, new assessments. In: Gero, J. (ed.) Studying Visual and Spatial Reasoning for Design Creativity, pp. 179–192. Springer, Dordrecht (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9297-4_10
Nguyen, A., Rank, S.: Spatial involvement in training mental rotation with minecraft. In: Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts, New York, NY, USA, pp. 245–252 (2016)
Ramey, K.E., Uttal, D.: Making sense of space: distributed spatial sensemaking in a middle school summer engineering camp. J. Learn. Sci. 26(2), 277–319 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2016.1277226
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Andrus, B., Bar-El, D., Msall, C., Uttal, D., Worsley, M. (2020). Minecraft as a Generative Platform for Analyzing and Practicing Spatial Reasoning. In: Å Ä·ilters, J., Newcombe, N., Uttal, D. (eds) Spatial Cognition XII. Spatial Cognition 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12162. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57983-8_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57983-8_22
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-57982-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-57983-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)