Crafty lessons

GETTING boys of 12 or 13 to sit quietly and write essays about architecture, heritage or history, or indeed almost anything, is a tall order, even in a part of the world that is famously obsessed with the past. But instilling such knowledge has become easier for Darren Currie, a teacher at Saint Joseph’s, a Catholic school in a poorish part of Northern Ireland’s second city. His classroom resounds with happy giggles as teams of lads help, or occasionally sabotage, each other in the (virtual) modelling of famous landmarks.

On a recent damp Friday, their assigned subjects, suggested by a newspaper competition, were the Victorian City Hall and shipyard cranes of Belfast, plus two from their own vicinity: the Derry Guildhall and the Mussenden Temple, an 18th-century folly built by a rich eccentric bishop.

All this feverish electronic activity reflects the fact that Northern Ireland’s squabbling masters have done at least one clever thing, egged on by a Derry-based digital-arts project called CultureTech. The province is the world’s only place where every secondary school has been provided with Minecraft, a game in which residents of a blocky landscape extract minerals, construct shelters and avoid exploding zombies. Launched in 2011 by a Swedish studio, the game was bought last year by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. Derry put itself on the map as a Minecraft hub when, at CultureTech’s annual festival in September, a star player called Joseph Garrett (alias Stampy Cat) made an appearance, to the delight of local youngsters and the utter bewilderment of their parents.

The eager young constructors, whose city was once better-known for blowing up buildings than building them, are not alone in learning through the game. Across the world, about 10,000 educational outfits use Minecraft to impart anything from maths to engineering, says Mikael Uusi-Makela of TeacherGaming, a Finnish-based team whose software enables Mr Currie to watch or indeed freeze his pupils’ screens as they play.

In other places, Minecraft is usually brought in by a few tech-evangelist pedagogues; the challenge in Northern Ireland is to convince all teachers, including ones who are sceptical or nervous. But Deirdre Quarnstrom, an education officer with Microsoft, said that on a visit to Derry she was pleasantly surprised to see how quickly teachers learned, sometimes from their own pupils.

For explaining contentious episodes, like the 17th-century plantation of Ulster by settlers loyal to the Crown, the game is a boon: the planters’ struggle to feed and fortify themselves can be vividly reconstructed, albeit in a world where zombies rather than displaced Gaels are the main threat. “This has re-energised me,” says Mr Currie, who has been teaching for 20 years.