Abstract: We will report on a comparative study of collaboration in the virtual sandbox game Minecraft. A group of five middle school students participated in six hours of Minecraft education edition game play under two conditions: 1) regular creative mode and 2) creative mode with the MakeCode programming interface. Discourse analysis will be used to compare group utterances under the two conditions. Moreover, interaction analysis will be used to closely examine how moments of game play with programming may reveal disparate patterns of collaboration than regular game play.
