Background: There is a growing interest in the complexity of socio- materiality-making activities in educational and everyday settings. Indeed, maker-centered learning is considered as a socio-materially embodied process in which artifacts and social and emotional dimensions are interconnected. The making process is also found in everyday life when children engage in specific applications – like Minecraft, where they perform activities in a virtual environment.

Purpose: Starting from analyzing some episodes recorded with a child aged seven, this paper aims to better understand the maker process in a virtual setting with implications for digital literacy and sustainable development education.

Design and methods: A socio-material approach is privileged to analyze the data collected. Specifically, we will explore the maker activity as a socio-materially embodied process.Sample: The research question will be answered with the support of a case study of one child playing Minecraft. Thinking-aloud modality, observation, notes, and pictures are collected. Then, the verbatim from the semi-structured interview is collected in the same session. The entire session is audio-recorded.

Results: The three dimensions that emerged are: Resources to make digital objects; Digital Objects became Social Objects; Making digital objects became ground for literacy. From this ana-lysis, we can retrace digital literacy in the Minecraft maker activity and some final considerations for teaching in STEM.

Conclusion: In conclusion, students’ informal activity in a Minecraft setting could become a potential green environment to ground digital literacy. However, this process needs to be scaffolded and amplified with an enriched level of abstract process, critical, and inquiry attitude. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group