Mining the Cli-Fi world: renegotiating the curriculum using Minecraft

‘The planet Earth is in chaos…. no pressure’ is the brief given to a Year 5/6 primary school group (across several classes), at the launch of a 10-week unit of project-based curriculum in the classroom. A group of teachers from the school were undertaking their own research into digital pedagogies and how they might be changing the way students learn and the implications of this for teacher and student practices. Additionally, the school had a focus on developing creative approaches to learning and had received a large grant from the state education department to develop a computer games curriculum. This unit was developed to bring all of these elements together, with 136 young people, five individual teachers and Kynan (co-author of this chapter) working together to negotiate the curriculum. This work became the focus of Kynan’s PhD study (Robinson 2017) and a key site in the research project, Serious Play (Beavis et al. 2011-2015).