The interactive virtual muscle and heart: using Minecraft Education Edition to teach skeletal muscle and cardiovascular physiology

Video games have been used more frequently in educational settings in recent years. Research investigating the efficacy of games with an educational focus is predominantly utilized in primary and secondary school settings, but educational games with sufficient complexity could have utility in tertiary education. Minecraft Education Edition (MEE) is an immersive, three-dimensional (3-D) game where players/students have freedom to use and manipulate a variety of blocks, akin to “virtual Lego.” The ope world and creative nature of MEE fosters collaborative play, and the freedom to build structures, switches, and other mechanisms allows educators to create functional and interactive models of physiological systems. This article describes how MEE was used to teach skeletal muscle and cardiac physiology to second-year university students through creation of custom-made interactive worlds. Explorations of the virtual skeletal muscle and heart were run as an on-campus activity. In the first teaching activity, a virtual 3-D interactive model was created in MEE where students activated distinct processes of skeletal muscle excitation, excitation-contraction (EC) coupling, and contraction. In the second teaching activity, a 3-D interactive model of the heart was created in MEE where students controlled each part of the cardiac cycle. Both activities were followed by a custom-made “escape room”-style quiz, followed by an in-class discussion aimed to highlight any limitations of the models. This article explores how these virtual models were created, providing a detailed description of the learning activities, and discusses the benefits, limitations, and relevant education theories of using Minecraft Education Edition in physiology teaching. NEW & NOTEWORTHY This is the first published work exemplifying the use of Minecraft Education Edition (MEE) in tertiary-level physiology education. We describe two separate interactive teaching activities for skeletal muscle and cardiac physiology using MEE. Recommendations are provided so that educators can adapt the use of MEE virtual worlds to their own curriculum design.