Nowadays you probably see the cultural phenomenon of building blocks Minecraft in the classroom while decorating computers and consoles at home. MinecraftEdua special education-focused build of the game, has long been used to help teachers find a place for the game in the classroom, thanks to a library of free lessons and activities, as well as a cloud-based solution for hosting secure servers.
While MinecraftEdu has the official backing of developer Mojang, new owner Microsoft — who dropped a cool $2.5 billion for the developer last year — hopes to further capitalize on its success by launching a new site that aims to nurture a community of educators. promote with lesson plans and other learning tips based on Minecraft. While the site is a bit sparse at the moment, the company hopes like-minded educators will fill the site with content soon.
To help things along, Microsoft has provided a few examples of how the game is currently being used in schools:
Elementary students in Seattle learn basic math skills by calculating perimeter, area, and volume Minecraft during a math program on Saturday. Los Angeles high school students learn about major world religions as part of their humanities class. They visit sacred sites in their city, research international sites, and then build them in Minecraft.”
Alfriston College students in New Zealand are teaming up with the Auckland War Memorial Museum to learn the history of the New Zealand people who served in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign by recreating the landscape in Minecraft, block by block. High school students learn the building blocks of computer science online Minecraft coding camp.”
Other educational initiatives include the use that of Minecraft a crazy physics system for learning physics, the modding system for learning programming through an add-on called LearnToMod, and there’s even an add-on called qCraft that aims to teach kids about quantum computing. The game has proven so successful as a learning tool that a recently launched program in Northern Ireland will feature it Minecraft free to more than 200 schools and 30 libraries and community organizations in the country.
Despite launching all the way back in 2011, that of Minecraft popularity shows no signs of slowing down. Recently, Microsoft announced that the game has sold a whopping 70 million worldwide, while Google also revealed that it is the most uploaded game of all time on YouTube, with over 42 million videos in circulation. In a few days, Minecon – Mojang’s annual conference for all things Minecraft—will take place in London, where Microsoft plans to hold several panel sessions on the role of play in schools.