Yes, I Use Video Games in My STEM Class — Here’s What It Looks Like
The first time I noticed Marcus, he was hunched over my classroom computer during indoor recess, building something in Minecraft that looked like a cross between a roller coaster and a power plant. He had wires made of redstone dust running up and down walls, repeaters placed at exact intervals, and a piston system that opened a door only when you pressed a specific sequence of pressure plates. I asked him what it was. He shrugged and said, “It’s a password lock, but I’m trying to make it so it resets after three wrong tries.” Then he went back to it, not because he wanted to impress me, but because he genuinely wanted to solve the problem.
Marcus never turned in homework. In my class, he sat in the back, doodling pixel art in the margins of his worksheets. But he could explain how redstone signals worked, why signal strength faded after eight blocks, and how to use logic gates to create a binary adder. He didn’t know he was describing Boolean algebra. He just knew that if he placed torches a certain way, his contraption would work.
That was two years ago. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what video games do in a STEM classroom — not as a reward or a gimmick, but as an actual learning tool. And the honest answer is that it’s complicated. But it’s also one of the most interesting things I’ve done as a teacher.
It started with one afternoon. I had a lesson on circuits that wasn’t landing. The worksheets had diagrams of batteries and bulbs, and the kids were filling in blanks, but their eyes told me they didn’t see why it mattered. I pulled up a laptop and opened Minecraft. I didn’t have a plan. I just turned the projector on, placed a lever, some redstone dust, and a lamp, and pulled the lever. The lamp lit up. A few kids said “oh, that’s how it works” in a way they hadn’t when I drew it on the board.
So I made a station. I put a laptop in the corner with a Minecraft world I’d set up. The task was simple: build a door that opens from both the inside and the outside. In the game, that’s a basic XOR gate problem. Some kids finished it in ten minutes. Others spent three days on it. But the ones who spent three days were the ones I needed to watch more closely, because they were doing something that looked a lot like scientific thinking: forming a hypothesis, testing it, watching it fail, adjusting, and trying again. The kids who gave up early were the ones who expected to get it right immediately, and I realized that was a bigger issue than any lesson plan.
The biggest shift happened when I started using Kerbal Space Program with my eighth graders. That’s the game where you build rockets and try to get little green aliens into orbit. It has actual orbital mechanics under the hood, which means students learn about gravity, velocity, and fuel consumption without reading a physics textbook first. I remember a girl named Amaya who was convinced she couldn’t do math. She was silent during our unit on ratios. But when her rocket kept crashing, she went back to the drawing board — literally — and started writing down numbers from the game’s telemetry. She measured how much fuel she needed to lift a certain weight. She calculated. She did math because the rocket wouldn’t fly otherwise. It wasn’t practice. It was survival.
There were moments that made me rethink my own assumptions. A kid named Jordan, who was always talking during class, spent forty minutes quietly designing a space station. When I asked him why, he said, “It’s like LEGOs but they have to actually work.” That’s not a bad definition of engineering.
But it’s not all success stories. One problem is that games are unevenly engaging. The boys in my class tended to gravitate toward the building and flying games, while the girls were more likely to play games like SimCity or Stardew Valley, which are less flashy but involve resource management and systems thinking. I had to be careful not to let the boys dominate the screens or the conversation. Another problem is that some students just don’t like video games, and that’s fine. For a few kids, being forced to play a game feels like being forced to do a worksheet, just with more colors.
There’s also the issue of time. A game-based lesson takes longer than a traditional one. My classes only meet for fifty minutes. I’ve learned to keep at least one traditional activity available for students who hit a wall. And I’ve had to be okay with the fact that some days, the game doesn’t teach anything. Sometimes the rocket explodes and the kids laugh and we move on.
The surprising part for me has been how much the games teach me about my students. When a kid is stuck in a game, I can see how they handle frustration. Some restart immediately. Some watch tutorials. Some read the in-game instructions. Some try the same thing over and over. I’ve started to use that information when I plan other lessons. If a student responds well to iterative trial and error in a game, I can design hands-on activities that let them do the same thing with physical materials.
For parents and teachers who are curious about trying this, I’d say start with something small. You don’t need a full gaming lab. One laptop in the corner can change the energy of a classroom. The important thing is to make the game optional for some assignment or exploration, not the only path. And when a student is playing, ask them to explain what they’re doing. Say, “Show me how you figured that out.” That question works better than “What does this have to do with the lesson?” because it values their process.
I’ve also learned to set boundaries. I tell my students that we use games to solve problems, not to escape them. That sounds like a line you’d put on a poster, but it actually matters. If a game becomes a reward for finishing work, then it stops being a learning tool. The kids will play it either way, but the learning happens when the game itself is the challenge.
Two years later, Marcus is in high school now. He told me he’s been taking an actual computer science class, and he said the logic unit was easy because he’d already learned it from redstone. I believed him. But I also know that not every student will have that kind of moment. Some will just build a roller coaster and learn about friction without knowing they’ve learned it. Some will get frustrated and flip the laptop lid closed.
That’s okay. The games are not a replacement for teaching. They’re a way to give kids a different entrance into ideas that can feel abstract. I don’t know where it will lead for most of them. I just know that when I walk by the corner laptop and see a kid leaning forward, muttering about why their rocket didn’t flip, they’re doing something that looks like the beginning of real problem-solving. And that’s enough for now.
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