If a child you know, within the next few weeks, is all of a sudden seems a lot more excited to get up and go to school in the morning, this might be why. Minecraft, a game they are likely borderline addicted to at home is now available for schools via Minecraft Education Edition, where within the interactive virtual world, students can be taught lessons in everything from science to math to the arts.
“With the release we introduced classroom mode which is an app that teachers can use to see where all the players are in the game," Minecraft Education director Deirdre Quarnstrom explains. "They can chat with them, they can grant resources to them, they can also control some basic features in the game like whether they want to allow fire damage for example, which they may want to do if they were building a volcano. They might not want to use it if they were doing an arts or humanities lesson.”
Now for teachers, what is the big draw? And is there a concern that students will focus too much on the gameplay and not absorb enough of the lesson being taught?
Back in the summer, Steve Isaacs was one of the teachers who was chosen to start testing Education Edition as his Basking Ridge, New Jersey middle school.
“Certainly there were times when kids will be excited that they’re playing Minecraft in class, but when they understand the learning objectives and what the goal of their project is they’re far more engaged and excited to be using Minecraft to achieve those outcomes than they would be something else," Isaacs says.
Minecraft Education Edition is out now and costs schools $5 per student.
If you’d like to get it into a school in your neighborhood, you can check out education.minecraft.net.