Minecraft in Science Class - Sheep and Mendelian Genetics Part I

If Minecraft were real!

Ok I named this post "part I" hopefully I do get around to adding a "part II". If all goes to plan part II should actually be a lesson plan.

I've been thinking of how to use Minecraft in science classes lately. One thing about Minecraft that I always thought would make a nice science lesson is the fact that you can breed coloured sheep. Genetics was always one of my favourite subjects in science, ever since I tried to give a presentation on Dobermann coat colour genetics in year 6 (My teacher didn't seem too impressed, but in hindsight, I think it was pretty epic that an 11 year old was talking about dominant and recessive traits, dihybrid crosses and probabilities, when nothing of the sort had been covered in class). However, I digress...back to Minecraft.

So with some time on my hands, and a current version of Minecraft installed I endeavoured to create a genetics lesson suitable for high school students...It didn't go as I planned...

My sheep pens

First I set up 20 sheep pens, with one sheep per pen, then connected to that were 10 sheep pens for the offspring of the first 20 sheep. Then I alternately coloured my 20 sheep, pink and blue. Minecraft works on the basis of Larmarkianism whereby dying the sheep changes its DNA, but we can get around that...It's a good conversation starter...Then, wheat in hand, I fed the first two sheep, they bred in the cute love-heart filled way of Minecraft "love mode" and a pink lamb was born. Quickly I ushered the pink lamb away from its parents and into its pen in the next column of pens. The process was repeated 9 more times. The results, 2 blue lambs and 8 pink lambs. I thought, ohh have I discovered something here? Is it coded into the game that pink is more likely to occur?

I tried again with an additional 20 pens (I couldn't bring myself to slaughter the first trial e-sheep) and the corresponding 10 baby pens and tried with white and pink, the result was 3 white and 7 pink. What about black and pink? 4 black, 6 pink. "Wow" I thought, "What is with these Minecraft programmers and pink sheep?! This is cool!". Then I bred an additional 3 lambs from white and pink parents...all white...wait, what...NOOooooooo!

I went to Google to find out once and for all, how are the colours of Minecraft lambs decided...the answer...simple, 50% chance it will be the colour of parent sheep 1 (there are no males or females in Minecraft animals), and 50 % chance it will be the colour of the parent sheep 2.

So my data was nothing more than a chance occurrence of random number generation. It can work for small groups and small numbers of offspring, but any ideas of saying "pink is dominant to blue" would ultimately be false. Sure it could lead to some interesting discussion, and in that way, I think it could still be a good way to spend a lesson or two. But I felt pretty dejected that my hopes of having students discover that Minecraft programmers had coded in some preferences for more pink (or other colour) had been dashed.

Minecraft sheep do have one genetics feature that does seem to work, and that is that not all colours have a 50/50 chance of giving a lamb of the same colour as the parents, there are some colour combinations that show the phenomena of "incomplete dominance" for example, if you breed a red sheep with a yellow sheep, you will always get an orange sheep. Again, a nice feature to spark conversation...but wasn't exactly what I was looking for.

The biggest thing I have learnt from this so far is that if I want to use a game as part of a lesson, I have to be willing to give up some control over exactly where the lesson goes. I can't script this, because I don't know what each of the kids will discover. That probably makes for a better lesson, as it should create lots of opportunities for genetics related discussion, as well as random number generation, statistics and probability. The next major thing that I have learned is that if I'm going to use a game, like Minecraft, I have to be willing for it (the game) to not always be 100% correct. Angry Birds doesn't use realistic to earth gravity, and Minecraft doesn't use realistic genetics, but they can both be useful for creating fun and engaging science lessons that spark deeper discussion topics than if they were created perfectly.

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First image from: http://www.modern-radio.com/board/112794-new-thread-for-cuteness/0 with no artist or author noted. If you are the image owner, please let me know so I can credit you directly or take the image down if you so wish.

Second image is a screenshot from Minecraft.  All credit to the creators of Minecraft "Mojang".