The lesson pack “Sustainability City” for Minecraft Education frames sustainability as a process integrating elements like urban planning, consumer behavior, and responsible resource management. It does not fucs only on environmental protection, but on enhancing economic modes of production and quality of life by reducing waste and using renewable energy.
The mod breaks down sustainability into six ‘pillars’ or lessons, exploring how individual choices may impact global developments.
- Sustainable Food Production
This lesson emphasizes aspects of food systems like local production, crop rotation to maintain soil quality, and composting. It explores the relationship between producers and consumers as well as e.g. the role of bees and natural pesticides. - Waste Management & Recycling
This lesson explores recycling plants and landfills, distinguishing between recyclable materials and waste, emphasizing principles like reducing, reusing, and recycling or “waste-to-energy” processes in which non-recyclable items are tentatively converted into electricity. - Energy Efficiency in Housing
This lesson investigates the notion of ‘green building’ and aims to demonstrate how homes can be more efficient using geothermal heating, gray water systems, natural lighting, and composting toilets. - Renewable Energy Generation
This lesson explores power generation from renewable sources like hydropower and wind turbines. It highlights clean electricity and infrastructure with the goal of powering an entire city without fossil fuels. - Responsible Forestry
This lesson presents a 40-year forest management cycle including concepts like sustainable logging, balancing the economic need for timber with environmental impact and biodiversity. - Water Management
The last lesson tracks water from residential use through treatment plants and back into the city’s water system. It investigates outflow reclamation and how biosolids can be used to create fertilizer.
The lesson plan is combined with an educational script. Students use NPCs (non-player characters) to navigate the lesson environments, absorb information and are then tasked with finding solutions to recurring problems in-game. For example, The lessons encourage students to apply knowledge by building their own sustainable structures, such as a 65×65 block sustainable farm or an eco-friendly home.
Sustainability City aims to encourage a sense of stewardship for the planet, framing action against the climate crisis and habitat loss as a ‘solvable’, organizational challenge. As such, it can be very immersive but inevitably risks overemphasizing the importance and possibility of organizational systems and downplays the social and cultural complexity of the issue at hand. Moreover, it still foregrounds individual responsibility rather than critiquing systems of exploitation and distraction by institutional and economic players that hamper real-world climate progress.