Minecraft: Education Edition is a New Type of Minecraft for Schools

Minecraft. Yep, still the biggest IP in gaming history.

Part of what makes Minecraft so great is the versatility. At once, it’s a sandbox game, an adventure game, a MMORPG, a building game, and an educative game. Indeed, Minecraft has been slowly creeping (DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?) into schools, as a useful tool for teachers to inject some fun and creativity into their lessons. Minecraft can be used to teach kids about teamwork, about history and the sciences, about famous works of art and architecture… in fact, it was such a useful educational tool that someone created a very popular mod, called MinecraftEdu, which was basically just a way to help teachers using Minecraft keep track of their students and make sure everyone stayed on task.

Well, it proved so popular that Microsoft bought it, and now happy to announce that they are turning the mod into a fully-fledged, independent title: Minecraft: Education Edition.

So, for the casual player, you might be wondering--what’s the difference between Minecraft: Education Edition and your standard, run-of-the-mill Minecraft game? Well, here’s a list from the FAQ:
 

• Enhanced maps with coordinates for students and teachers to find their way around the Minecraft world together.
• Student Portfolio feature, where students can take photos and selfies to show their work and learning.
• Enhanced multiplayer, where a classroom of up to 40 students can work together toward a greater world in Minecraft.
• Login and personalization, where students have personalized avatars and feel more engaged in the game and teachers can know who each player is.
• World import and export, where teachers and students can create and save their worlds in the game.

 
Additionally, the education version is easy to mass-install, and includes a library of pre-made lessons to both give educators ideas and maybe an easy out on a lazy day. Additionally, you need to be a educator to purchase Minecraft: Education Edition. If you aren’t, you’re stuck with plain ol’ Minecraft, plebeian.

Now, this is just straight-up a good thing, in my humble opinion. Seeing games pop up more in classrooms and using them to help educate our children will be a great step towards the public consciousness seeing gaming as a positive in people’s lives, rather than a distraction. Plus, with the American education system quickly draining the pipe, injecting some new life via gamification might, at the very least, stall our inevitable downfall.

Plus, it makes me really wish I was still in elementary school. I would have eaten this up as a kid.