Microsoft's Minecraft: Education Edition gives students the chance to explore places in the real world including the pyramids of Giza and ancient Pompeii. The school version of the video game includes an improved mapping feature, in-game camera and scrapbook to record the places players have been, and teacher resources. On January 19, Tuesday the Bill Gates co-founded company announced it had purchased MinecraftEdu, the educational version of the game developed for teachers and classrooms.
Microsoft noted it is only tweaking the sandbox game and is not developing a 100 percent educational product. It is a video game that can teach students in a school classroom.
The OS giant is also launching a new website that allows teachers to submit Minecraft worlds and lesson plans. A few example posts have been made. They include big molecules to explore, Minecraft bricks to show Brutalist architecture (1950s to 1970s), and a discussion on Japanese poetry, according to The Verge.
The new worlds will not involve solving puzzles. Instead, Minecraft will give students a chance to explore historical and scientific environments to better understand classroom lessons.
Microsoft hopes the Minecraft community will build new worlds and new lesson plans. Education Edition expands the game's user-made content sharing feature, and prevents the need for busy teachers to build entire Minecraft worlds.
The school version of Minecraft will cost $5 per student and be linked to their Microsoft accounts. It will launch this summer.
Education Edition is part of Microsoft's MinecraftEdu Minecraft mod, which it recently purchased. After setting up its system for school distribution and home computer setup, in-game tools could be rolled out.
Microsoft announced that it has not purchased the startup TeacherGaming. That is the company that developed MinecraftEdu, according to USA Today.
Minecraft is an open world video game created by Markus "Notch" Persson of Sweden and released in November 2011. In 2014 Microsoft bought Persson's company Mojang and Minecraft for $2.5 billion.
The popular video game has over 100 million registered players worldwide. Millions of people have viewed over 5 billion hours of Minecraft YouTube video content, while online maps contain up to 921.6 quadrillion (1,000 to the power of 5) blocks.