Minecraft in Support of Teaching Sustainable Spatial Planning in Secondary Education Lessons Learned from the Marker Wadden-Project M. Opmeer, E. Dias, B. de Vogel, L. Tangerman and H. J. Scholten Spatial Information Laboratory (SPINlab), School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands Keywords: Digital Game-Based Learning, Sustainable Patial Planning, Minecraft, Expectations, Experiences. Abstract: In this article, we have assessed the educational affordances of Minecraft to teach school children about sustainable spatial planning. Specifically, we carefully examined the expectations and experiences of the learners and the teachers of this digital game as an educational tool for spatial planning purposes. The results of this explorative study confirm the educational potential of Minecraft. However, connection problems and digital vandalism (‘griefing’) by other players may seriously hinder the learning process. Moreover, it is advised to start with traditional design materials (e.g., paper and pencil) before working in Minecraft, as learners may find it restricting to be able to build with rectangular blocks only. 1 INTRODUCTION A lively debate exists on the affordances of digital game-based learning for education. Since the beginning of this century, a large body of research has emerged on the positive and negative aspects of using digital games for educational purposes (All et al., 2016; Arnab and Clarke, 2017; Bouvier et al., 2013; Boyle et al., 2016; Brom et al., 2016; De Grove and Van Looy, 2011; Favier and van der Schee, 2014). Although the employed research strategies variate profoundly, there is academic evidence that the employment of digital games may result in higher learning outcomes (Dankbaar and Saase, 2015; Girard et al., 2013). However, a large set of factors influence the effectiveness of these media during the whole learning process. As such, these aspects have to be taken into account carefully when using game technology in an educational context (Hamari et al., 2016; Perttula et al., 2017; Proulx et al., 2017). This paper focusses on the teachers' and learners' attitudes towards Minecraft as an educational tool for creating sustainable spatial plans in secondary education. In 2015, the Spatial Information Laboratory (SPINlab) of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam partnered with the Dutch Road Authority (Rijkswaterstaat) to teach school children about the complexity of designing sustainable landscape plans. We aimed to assess whether Minecraft was an appropriate digital game to engage young learners with this topic in an appealing and challenging way. Accordingly, we aimed to answer the following research question: Is Minecraft an appropriate tool for teaching the fundamentals of sustainable spatial planning in secondary education? We tried to answer this question with the outcomes of a pre- and postquestionnaire and by interviewing the involved teachers. 2 BACKGROUND 2.1 Project Description From 2015 onwards, SPINlab has investigated how Minecraft can help to teach sustainable spatial planning in high-school education. We chose Minecraft because of its unique 3D representation of the physical world, the possibility to implement official spatial data of the Kadaster (Dutch Ordnance Survey) to reconstruct 316 Opmeer, M., Dias, E., Vogel, B., Tangerman, L. and Scholten, H. Minecraft in Support of Teaching Sustainable Spatial Planning in Secondary Education - Lessons Learned from the Marker Wadden-Project. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2018) - Volume 1, pages 316-321 ISBN: 978-989-758-291-2 Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved