Short Wave - What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

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 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. Want to hear more about new science research? Let us know by emailing [e-mail] 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.See 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

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwaver's Emily Kwong here. And Regina Barber. We're here with our biweekly science news roundup featuring the host of all things considered and fellow gamer. Pimball wizard. Wanisars. 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. That's why we invited you. Thanks. Yes, yes. And then we're going to feed you a classic Roman pasta dish. with some science on the side. Love it. Then we're going to get a little serious with a possible reason why more and more young people are getting colorectal cancer. Truly a range of options today. Yes, all of that on this episode of shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. All right? Wana, our queen, where would you like to begin? We've got to start with the video game news, right? Yes, definitely. Yes. It is now a very popular movie based, of course, on a video game that is especially popular among kids. Yeah, it's got very blocky graphics, calming music, and one of the goals of the game is to collect resources around this expansive lands. Mining, building materials, gems, and food. 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. Specifically, the lead researcher of the study, Charlie Wu, said he was curious about the argument that human success is. is not only because of individual brains. But rather it's the power of our ability to learn socially and culturally from one another. 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.

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 this situation called for it. 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? 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. 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. This is Natalia Veles, 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. Very interesting. I also point out video games quite popular with me. Same, same. With the three in this room, also popular. 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? Caccio and Pepeu. Yum. 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 we're throwing these big dinner parties for other scientists. Go physics. But the problem with Cachepepe 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. Yvonne is talking about how if a home cook is not careful, he can cause proteins and the cheese to clump together, which makes for like a stringy sauce that coats the pasta unevenly. You're really talking about the stuff of my kitchen. nightmares here. Same. So how did they go about figuring out the secret to making a perfect

casheui pepe 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. Jacomo called it grandma knowledge. In Italian kitchens, grandma had somehow, you know, always a scientific attitude, right? So they, they were doing scientific methods. So Jacomo and Ewe and Ewe. on, along with a whole team of scientists, decided to investigate the best way to add cheese to hot water, and they publish their results in the journal, Physics of Fluids. Truly news you can use. What did they find?

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 to the mass of the cheese, you get cheese clumps. And the ideal ratio is 2.5%. I am going to need a recipe. Emily, help me. What does that mean? 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. Guess I'm headed to the grocery store next. Yeah, definitely. Okay, 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. Yeah, so colorectal cancer is cancer that originates in the colorectal cancer. 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 colibactin. That is produced by some strains of ecoli in people's colones and rectums. Wait, so do a lot of people just have? E. coli just hanging out in their guts? Some people do, yeah. And not all E. coli produces coliactin, but when it does, that coliactin can damage DNA and cause cancer mutations.

So they were curious about what the link was. And in this study, the researchers looked at samples from almost 1,000 patients around the world. And the researchers saw that the coliobactin 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 they looked at the timing of these mutations and think they happen in the first 10 years of a person's life. 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. Potentially, yeah. The study doesn't prove that coli-backton 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 they aspects of our environment, our lifestyle, or diet, they may cause these microbes to behave differently. Juana, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah. Also have a great vacation that you're heading on shortly. Thank you so much.

I guess I'll be listening to Shortways. That's right. You can hear more of Wana on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast, about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Erica Ryan and Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Patrick Jaron Watanananan. Tyler Jones, check the facts. Jimmy Keeley and Becky Brown were the audio engineers.

I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.