Microsoft is launching a new Minecraft site for educators, claiming the game can help students learn a number of skills in the classroom.
The former indie phenomenon is hugely popular among children and was acquired by Microsoft when it purchased developer Mojang last year for $2.5 billion last year. Minecraft has since been an integral part of Microsoft’s HoloLens demos and now thinks the game has a role in school too.
When it goes live, education.minecraft.net will provide teachers around the world with a forum to share ideas on how the video game can be used as part of lessons.
“Students were solving complex problems through collaboration while learning about leadership and digital citizenship. Minecraft was helping them develop in many different ways.”
The company says primary schools in Seattle are already teaching basic maths skills by calculating perimeter, area and volume in Minecraft, while middle schools students are learning about various religions by recreating sites in the game.
Closer to home, pupils in Dundee are learning about city planning and engineering by designing how they think Dundee waterfront should look like. Microsoft says the game can also help students learn coding, collaboration, design and creative thinking skills.
Microsoft has already donated Office 365 subscriptions to non-profit organisations and has also released an education-focused version of OneNote.
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The concept of bringing Minecraft into school systems around the world for assisting teachers is laudable, accept that Minecraft is available on Microsoft Windows Operating system (OS) only, and unless the program is "fully" ported - meaning with all features and functionality - to Linux, Android and Apple iOS and Mac OS X, then the gesture is misguided at best, but most likely a sinister ploy by Microsoft to capture and "control" as much of the educational software market as possible.
A purely sad 1990s tactic.
Since this scenario is unlikely with Chromebooks/ Android, Apple OS and Linux operating a significant share of Educational software, particularly in European Union and in South America, the education market needs to deny such shenanigans by Microsoft of not catering to all critical OS software base, once and for all.