Abstract:

The Covid-19 pandemic represented a moment of crisis for education, especially in those countries where schools had no established experience with distance learning, including Italy. Italian schools arrived substantially unprepared to deal with the health emergency, showing not only a substantial structural delay but also a widespread lack of digital skills among students and teachers and a difficulty in re-designing teaching activities for distance (Ranieri et al., 2020). In most cases, Italian teachers have approached “Didattica a Distanza” (Distance Learning) by transposing typical in-presence classroom practices to distance, and data from national and international surveys show a reduction in active teaching and laboratory practices compared to the pre-Covid period. These practice-oriented activities requiring teacher-student interaction and significant use of laboratory tools were particularly affected by the discontinuation of in-presence teaching. Only a minority of teachers made use of it, however, the very teachers who were most likely to use distance laboratory teaching noted higher levels of satisfaction (INDIRE, 2022).

The health emergency was also in many cases an accelerator of change and a watershed that allowed for experimentation with new solutions and rethinking established teaching modes by reprogramming them for distance. Where possible, laboratory activities have been replaced with online workshops and dedicated teaching solutions for remote laboratory activity. Research has repeatedly shown that student learning outcomes in virtual labs are equal and sometimes better than in traditional labs, and this is because they provide a more collaborative learning environment than in-presence labs (Gamage et al., 2020).

In this paper, we present the experience of immersive laboratory teaching through the use of the popular Minecraft videogame conducted as part of the MineClass research and training project (2018-2021) which involved more than 2,200 students belonging to primary and secondary schools. Following up on the long-standing reflection in INDIRE on technology, video games and immersive teaching, the research team designed three editions of the course investigating the possible enabling conditions - training, support, materials, prior experience, teaching-organizational context - to implement meaningful and sustainable learning experiences in the classroom and at a distance that integrate the use of video games and support the development of social, problem solving and metareflection dimensions in students. The results show an increase in motivation, social dimensions and development of complex skills related to conducting project work and provide significant insights for rethinking a school of the "new normal" that fully values what was good about the pandemic experience that was nevertheless lived and learned.

References:
[1] Gamage, K. A. A., Wijesuriya, D. I., Ekanayake, S. Y., Rennie, A. E. W., Lambert, C. G., & Gunawardhana, N. (2020). Online delivery of teaching and laboratory practices: Continuity of university programs during Covid-19 pandemic. Education Sciences, 10(10), 291. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci10100291
[2] Ranieri, M., Gaggioli, C., & Borges, M. K. (2020). La didattica alla prova del Covid-19 in Italia: uno studio sulla Scuola Primaria. Práxis Educativa, 15, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.5212/PraxEduc.v.15.16307.079

Keywords:

Distance Learning, Game-based Learning, Minecraft, 21st Century Skills.