Minecraft Worlds with Indigenous Youth for Decolonializing Engineering Curriculum

Game-based learning environments such as Minecraft are increasingly used in STEM education, yet are often treated as neutral spaces rather than places structured by cultural protocols and power relations. This study examines how Indigenous youth (ages 12–17) represent land, water, and community when invited to extend skeletal Minecraft worlds of their home communities. Guided by a decolonizing framework that co-considers Indigenous ecological ethics, critical game design, and culturally revitalizing pedagogy, we conducted community-based design research through co-designed workshops and a mobile lab. Data included gameplay recordings, in-game maps, chat transcripts, and fieldnotes, analyzed collaboratively with community partners. Youth transformed sparse environments into relational ecologies, prioritizing living beings, movement paths, water dynamics, and culturally significant gathering spaces over infrastructure grids. At the same time, platform constraints limited the expression of some cultural practices. We argue that these youth-created worlds function as challenges and learning objects against standard engineering designs which surface alternative spatial protocols for engineering education, offering analytic resources and design prompts for decolonizing water- and resource-related engineering curricula.