Skidmore Students Use Minecraft to Study Ancient Rome
Assistant Professor of Classics Amy Oh discusses ancient Rome with students in her course The Romans in Their Environment before jumping into the video game Minecraft. Photo via Skidmore College.
SARATOGA SPRINGS — Skidmore College students in the classics course The Romans in Their Environment are using the video game Minecraft to build a fictional ancient Roman town. The students “live” inside the town as everyday Romans to better understand existence in the ancient world.
“When students have this idea of the ancient Romans, they think about senators, they think about Julius Caesar or the elites,” Assistant Professor of Classics Amy Oh told Skidmore’s Angela Valden. “I wanted to focus on the normal people, the people who did the work. They didn’t get paid very much, but they were thriving, and they made up 99% of the population.”
In consultation with environmental studies major Kate Manor, Oh decided that Minecraft could be the right tool for building an ancient world that all her students could be a part of. She learned that Skidmore had the licensing for the education version of the immensely popular game, which allows players to define their own objectives and create their own virtual worlds.
Her students developed backstories for the Romans they each represented, then met together on the Minecraft platform to start building — a process that involved researching Roman towns and urban planning and then mapping out the geography.
“Once we built the town, ‘Skidrome,’ we had a festival and we invited people from the Skidmore community to come walk through with us via Zoom,” Oh said. “We also had them engage in some politics in the game. We had two administrative officials who were going up for re-election, so we had to hold a debate and a vote, and an election took place. We also had a natural disaster. We did all this because the core of the course is for the students to think about everyday Romans and how they interacted with the world around them.”
Oh said she has learned a lot as an educator by incorporating Minecraft into her course, and she can see the potential for using it across many different disciplines.
“We have to meet the students where they are. They have this other mode of learning that we haven’t fully tapped into yet. We can do games in class, but this is a longer commitment. I’m excited about it,” she said.