Microsoft bringing Minecraft: Education Edition into classrooms

If you haven’t heard of the game “Minecraft,” there’s a good chance you’ve been living under a rock. The game has been purchased over 22 million times on mobile devices, and that’s to say nothing of its computer version, which is where the game started.

The game’s overwhelming popularity and the fact that it’s education-based spin-off “MinecraftEdu” is being used by teachers to help students learn in over 40 countries is what has spurred Microsoft to announce it plans to buy the academic version from Teacher Gaming LLC.

The original Minecraft is already under Microsoft’s umbrella, thanks to a $2.5 billion deal last fall with Majong. The game itself is a virtual building-block-shaped world where users can build anything and everything the mind can conceive, whether that means creating an avatar of themselves, or building houses, streets, vending machines or just about anything else you can imagine.

MinecraftEdu on the other hand currently boasts a user base of over 5,500 teachers and counting who’ve chosen to incorporate the simulation game into the classroom. It still hosts the same virtual world kids are used to playing around in, but also gives teachers the ability to host an entire classroom on a locally-connected server. Teacher Gaming LLC’s main objective in growing the project is to turn Minecraft and other commercial games into games suitable for a learning environment.

Now that it’s clear Minecraft has become a valuable tool in teaching children (who are so frequently accused of spending too much time playing in virtual worlds rather than the real one outdoors), Microsoft has stepped in to try and take things to the next level.

Watch this video to get an idea of how “MinecraftEdu” is already being incorporated into classrooms:

Simply titled “Minecraft: Education Edition,” the software giant’s updated version of the game will come with a few new features that will make learning in the classroom easier including learning portfolios for students, enhanced multiplayer modes that eliminate the need for teachers to create servers, separate logins for students and a simplified process for loading and saving worlds.

The enhanced multiplayer mode mentioned above will be hosted on cloud servers and schools would pay a licensing fee for the right to use the game. Schools that were already connected to the “MinecraftEdu” version would receive the first year of Microsoft’s game for free. The idea for Microsoft is to capitalize on a thriving educational gaming opportunities both now and in the future. What it means for teachers is that they can now focus on putting together lesson plans with the help of the online Minecraft education community and seeing how they can get the most out of a tool that is obviously doing a great job engaging students.

Outside of the classroom, those that play Minecraft simply for fun can still enjoy everything it has to offer of course. They just won’t have a teacher present to give them structured lessons. Either way it’s clear that teachers have caught onto the fact they now have so much to digital noise to compete with in order to keep students on the right track in the classroom. As the instructor in the promo video says, ‘Kids have to think its fun, otherwise what’s the point’?