What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?

Minecraft is a movie and a very popular video game with iconic block graphics that characters can "mine" for building material and gems. It's also what cognitive scientist Charley Wu https://hmc-lab.com/people/charley_wu/index.md and his team utilized to study how people learned as they played. Their unique study focused on both individual and social learning — and they found a clear answer to which players were most successful. (Hint: Get you a player who can do both.) Their results were published recently in the journal Nature Communications https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58365-6. Want to hear more about new science research? Let us know by emailing [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:16Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:22Emily Kwong?

  Hey, Shortwavers. Emily Kwong here.

• 0:23Regina Barber?

  And Regina Barber. We're here with our biweekly science news roundup, featuring the host of all things considered and fellow gamer.

• 0:31Emily Kwong?

  Pimball wizard.

• 0:33Regina Barber?

  Wanasars.

• 0:33Speaker 03

  Hi, y'all. I'm so excited to be here. I hear that we were talking about how scientists use the video game Minecraft to study how humans learn.

• 0:41Regina Barber?

  That's why we invited you.

• 0:42Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 0:42Emily Kwong?

  Yes, yes. And then we're going to feed you a classic Roman pasta dish with some science on the side.

• 0:47Speaker 03

  Love it.

• 0:48Regina Barber?

  Then we're going to get a little serious with a possible reason why more and more young people are getting colorectal cancer.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  Truly a range of options today.

• 0:55Emily Kwong?

  Yes, all of that on this episode of Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 1:07Speaker 00

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• 1:46Speaker 00

  This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.

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• 2:14Emily Kwong?

  All right, Juana, our queen, where would you like to begin? We've got to start with the video game news, right? Yes, definitely. It is now a very popular movie based, of course, on a video game that is especially popular among kids.

• 2:24Regina Barber?

  Yeah, it's got very blocky graphics, calming music, and one of the goals of the game is to collect resources around this expansive landscape, mining, building materials, gems, and food.

• 2:34Emily Kwong?

  Right, I'm familiar with this one, but I want to know, what can it tell us about the learning process? Yeah, it can tell us a lot about social learning, so learning in groups. A study in the journal Nature Communications tried to bridge this gap between studying how we learn individually and how we learn socially by watching over 100 participants with specific goals in crafted Minecraft environments.

• 2:55Regina Barber?

  Specifically, the lead researcher of the study, Charlie Wu, said he was curious about the argument that human success is not only because of individual brains.

• 3:03Speaker 05

  But rather, it's the power of our ability to learn socially and culturally from one another.

• 3:07Emily Kwong?

  We're stronger together, Juana. Yes. And in the past, these two modes of learning, on your own or mimicking another person, were mostly studied in isolation. It was either one or the other. But I take it that is not the case in this study? No, no. So in this study, researchers created a few scenarios where it would be more or less advantageous for Minecraft players to mimic other players, to, for example, mine around the spot where they saw other players on their screen gathering gems.

• 3:34Regina Barber?

  In some scenarios, the rewards were clustered, which altered how much players had to interact with each other and learn socially. And what the researchers found is that the most successful players were the most adaptive, like switching between individual mining and using social learning when the situation called for it.

• 3:51Emily Kwong?

  So Charlie and his team, they analyzed all of these scenarios, and they created a computer model that was able to take in what each player saw on their screen and predicted, to a pretty good degree of accuracy, how individual learning works in conjunction with social learning. Okay, but what does he mean by that?

• 4:08Regina Barber?

  It means that individual learning and social learning are informing each other. And like, that flexibility between switching between both of them is like the key to being really successful. And that's actually new. And using Minecraft to find that is also unique.

• 4:21Speaker 06

  That looks really different. From traditional psychology experiments. And it tells us something about the dynamics of social learning that we miss when we put people into really simple environments where they're choosing either to gather information firsthand or to copy someone else.

• 4:40Emily Kwong?

  This is Natalia Velez, another cognitive scientist who didn't work on the study. And she pointed out something else that's cool about it. Video games are incredibly popular among kids. It's where they often meet up and build social connections they may not otherwise have. And it's important that research keeps up with these like modern social interactions.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  Very interesting. I also point out video games quite popular with me.

• 5:00Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, same, same. With the three in this room, also popular.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  All right, moving on to the next one, a story I'm very invested in, maybe because I'm hungry. It is about pasta. What are we talking about here?

• 5:10Emily Kwong?

  Cacio e pepe.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Yum.

• 5:12Emily Kwong?

  So that dish, it's so good. It's that symphonic combination of pasta, black pepper, and pecorino romano cheese. It's a personal favorite of Giacomo Bartolucci and Ivan Di Terlizzi, both physicists living abroad who miss the comfort food of Rome and were throwing these big dinner parties for other scientists. Go physics.

• 5:32Speaker 07

  But the problem with cacio e pepe is actually that it's very, very difficult to cook for a lot of people. This was probably like the very beginning of the problem because it's difficult because you have protein aggregation.

• 5:45Emily Kwong?

  Ivan is talking about how if a home cook is not careful, he can cause proteins in the cheese to clump together, which makes for like a stringy sauce that coats the pasta unevenly.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  You're really talking about the stuff of my kitchen nightmares here.

• 5:57Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, same.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  So how did they go about figuring out the secret to making a perfect cacio e pepe?

• 6:04Emily Kwong?

  With starch. For generations, Italian grandmothers have known this. They have added cornstarch or potato starch to the water to prevent the cheese from clumping. And it created this creamy, stable sauce that uniformly coated the pasta. Giacomo called it grandma knowledge.

• 6:19Emily Kwong?

  Grandma had somehow, you know, always a scientific attitude, right? So they were doing scientific methods. So Giacomo and Yvonne, along with a whole team of scientists, decided to investigate the best way to add cheese to hot water. And they published their results in the journal Physics of Fluids.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Truly news you can use. What did they find?

• 6:39Regina Barber?

  So there is a critical threshold of starch above which the sauce does not separate, and that's 1%. So if you go below 1% starch concentrations relative like to the mass of the cheese, you get cheese clumps. And the ideal ratio is 2.5%.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  I am going to need a recipe. Emily, help me. What does that mean?

• 6:58Emily Kwong?

  When you're in your home kitchen, Wana, if you're adding, let's say, 160 grams of pecorino cheese, first dissolve four grams of starch into your pasta water, and you will have a delicious sauce by the end.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Guess I'm headed to the grocery store next.

• 7:13Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  OK, we've got to make a hard pivot here. Next up, more young people are developing colorectal cancer, and some new research may help us understand why. Emily, tell us more.

• 7:22Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, so colorectal cancer is cancer that originates in the colon or the rectum. Many people think of it as something older adults get. But our colleague Will Stone has reported that in the last two decades, cases have doubled in people under 55. And researchers don't know why. So this recent study from the journal Nature suggests that this rise in young people with colorectal cancer could be related to a harmful bacteria called colybackton. That is produced by some strains of E. coli in people's colons and rectums.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Wait, so do a lot of people just have E. coli just hanging out in their guts?

• 7:58Emily Kwong?

  Some people do, yeah. And not all E. coli produces colybackton. But when it does, that colybackton can damage DNA and cause cancer mutations. So they were curious about what the link was.

• 8:10Regina Barber?

  And in this study, the researchers looked at samples from almost 1,000 patients around the world. And the researchers saw that the coli bacitin left behind DNA mutations that were over three times more common in early onset cases than when people were diagnosed after age 70. And they looked at the timing of these mutations and think they happened in the first 10 years of a person's life.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting. So when people are pretty young, which I guess then would put people on track potentially to develop colon cancer in their 20s or their 30s instead of later in life, like we might think.

• 8:39Regina Barber?

  Potentially, yeah. The study doesn't prove that coli bacitin is the sole cause, but it's a strong association. And that knowledge is power. With this lead, researchers can ask the big questions, like why those changes are happening, what other factors might be important. And if there are aspects of our environment, our lifestyle, or diet, they may cause these microbes to behave differently.

• 9:01Emily Kwong?

  Juana, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah. Also, have a great vacation that you're heading on shortly.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Thank you so much. I guess I'll be listening to Short Wave.

• 9:07Emily Kwong?

  That's right.

• 9:10Emily Kwong?

  You can hear more of Juana on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you.

• 9:19Regina Barber?

  This episode was produced by Erica Ryan and Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Patrick Jaren Watanen.

• 9:26Emily Kwong?

  Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keely and Becky Brown were the audio engineers. I'm Emily Kwong.

• 9:32Regina Barber?

  And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.