The aim of this article is to highlight the experiences of 11-12-year-old students at a Norwegian primary school regarding their use of Minecraft in mathematics classes and explore the consequences for their motivation. The present research was carried out as a single case study. This implies an in-depth investigation of a contemporary phenomenon, an intervention, studied in its real-life context, the classroom. The object of the intervention in the participating class in 2015 and the spring of 2016 was to use Minecraft as an attempt to restore motivation for mathematics. The teacher found his students were motivated to work with Minecraft, but a question emerged about students' motivation to perform the given tasks. This study suggests that formative interventions in which the researcher is present in a school context implicates the possibilities for the study of externalisation processes. These processes provide an opportunity to obtain an understanding of what happens when a popular digital game from youth culture is applied to tasks in mathematics to achieve pedagogical goals.
In the field of education, researchers have focused on the importance of achieving a common understanding of school development and change of practice in collaborations with practitioners. In an attempt to contribute to this research, a formative Change Laboratory intervention is suggested as an interface between the researcher's world and the practitioner's world to facilitate collaboration between the two.The case study, conducted in one mathematics class in a primary school with 27 students and two teachers, was informed by the following research question: How does initial collaboration between a researcher and practitioners create a meeting place, and what implications can be drawn from this?The teachers' motive for joining the intervention was to expand their practice of using the digital game Minecraft. The collaboration lasted 1.5 years.The findings show that e-mail correspondence seems to play a crucial role in the continuation and expansion of dialogue towards achieving an object-oriented activity.
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