They want to demonstrate the educational potential that video games and the Internet have in the education of the 21st century. Two adolescents Gamers, Knowdi (14 years old) and Mr. Squirilla (15 years), Cumeco students, Santa Cruz, have recreated the Pacific War in Minecraft. This project develops technological, research with the Internet research and team organization, linking subjects such as the history of war; the animals and plants of Antofagasta and Calama; Mythology; Naval construction; the geography of the coast and the Atacama desert; the mathematics applied to measurement and scales; Architecture at the time of war.
For Adrian Guevara Roca (aka Knowdi) and Santiago Zapata Álvarez (Mr. Ardilla) was revealing, exciting and significant recreating the Pacific War in Minecraft. In Knowdi’s words “when building block by block the Pacific War you realize how big and complex the war was, and incidentally, because you are recreating the story as you learn it.” For Mr. Ardilla, this process “was much better than reading a book or seeing a documentary: we were reliving war.”
Immersive learning Mr. Ardilla reflected that when making this map you understand that the leaves that print in a school book about the war are few, in the face of the enormous information available on the Internet.
“In Cumeco, we learned that the Internet is like immersing yourself in the sea of knowledge: the deeper you immerse yourself, the more things you learn. You just need to ask good questions.”
On the other hand, Knowdi complemented that any questions that they had resolved with the Internet.
“For example, we find the original planes of the war ships to build them in Minecraft. Also, with Googlemaps we geolocalizes the Treasury of Abaroa in Calama, just as we measure the distances between Antofasgasta and Calama. With YouTube and the AI we learned about the war, which they think in Bolivia, in Peru and Chile. And when we built this map we had to investigate the fauna From the region.
UPDATE The director of Cumeco, Jonathan Roca Figueroa, said that today’s students are probably the most sophisticated generation that has ever existed.
“Knowdi and Mr. Ardilla are demonstrating that they are able to understand the world from the colossal cloud of data that surrounds them. When using the Internet they learn by themselves skills and knowledge, which allow them to develop academic projects, and solve problems among students.”
He said that the educational models inherited from the industrial revolution are insufficient for a knowledge -based society, since the same environment has changed and much.
“For example, the educational model of learning based on projects debuted in 1997, but today the schools are still structured in compartmentalized subjects. Think of the computers that were popularized in 1980, but the notebooks and pencils still prevail in schools. On the Internet that was globalized in 1990, but the heavy books continue to fill the backpacks and knowledge of the students in the classroom,” he says Roca, and adds that video games, Internet and technologies should not be absent in the education of the 21st century students.
