Ingame homework - I have never seen my students so motivated

In my earlier post I was describing my XP based grading system and how it can motivate students. Today I went a step further and gave my computer science class homework that's very different from normal homework: Its all ingame

But first things first...
A few weeks ago I was planning my lessons and I thought it would be important to teach my students the basic elements of computers: logic gates in circuits.

I was reading a few teacher resource articles but they all seemed very complex and I knew I had to think about a way to make this fun or my students will become bored pretty quickly with this material.

I immediately thought about Minecraft. Minecraft is a sandbox game where you can run around in a endlessly big and blocky world, chop trees, build houses, craft tools, gather resources and make logic gates. I knew that many of my students had already bought this 20€ game and I thought this would be a nice experiment.


They loved the idea of them learning things in a game so I set up a server with a huge flat area that was surrounded by high castle walls with a 20x20 "property" for every student and started teaching them some basics about Minecraft.

The castle with some of the students properties

Of course I couldn't force students to buy this game and I would have had a hard time explaining to the headmistress why the school should buy students a game, so I figured out a way how to teach them about logic gates with Minecraft without putting someone at a disadvantage when he or she doesn't want to buy the game.

To my surprise by the next lesson every student owned a copy of Minecraft because those who didn't own the game before thought the game and the Idea of teaching ingame was awesome.

So today I gave them the first ingame homework. They have a week to build a simple logic gate with pressure plates and AND-gates that performs a specific task.

Next week I'll go in the castle, visiting the property of every student and check if they did the homework and if so they will be rewarded with XP of course.

There will be at least 5 of these ingame homework's and probably more if the students like the concept.

If everyone in class does all logic-gate ingame-homework's I promised them to take them all on a boss-fight against the Ender Dragon in class or 30 XP for each student - they said they want the boss-fight