Meeting up in Minecraft: opportunities for collaboration and creativity when playing an immersive, virtual world game

This thesis explores the themes of technology, talk, playfulness and creative learning. The study investigated how children in the primary classroom talk when they use an immersive gaming environment. While creativity, play and talk have been linked with technology on an individual basis, the ways in which all of these themes interact is less well documented. The research began from this observation and sought to explore how technology might facilitate the development of a dialogic environment that supports creative interaction between pupils. Groups of children from two case study schools were engaged in an immersive environment, created using the Minecraft (Mojang, 2009) gaming world, and their talk was evaluated using multimodal socio-cultural discourse analysis.This demonstrated that, while playing the game, the research participants talked at length and with excitement. The talk patterns were tangled and intertwined, with the dialogue being difficult to transcribe and analyse. The talk showed that the immersive gaming environment gave a virtual space where children could test out their spoken ideas within a small group situation, using informal language devices. They could also virtually represent their suggestions within the Minecraft World. It created an appealing focus for the conversation and encouraged children to be active participants, enacting and evaluating their decisions through collaboration and the co-construction of knowledge. The research indicated that the value of an immersive game environment lies in the emphasis that it places on sharing, agreeing and testing ideas in a creative way