Students of Northern Ireland secondary schools will get access to educational version of Mojang’s popular world building game ‘Minecraft’ for free.
As part of a joint initiative put together by the annual CultureTech festival and the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure, copies of the MinecraftEdu educational version of Mojang’s game will be offered to 200 schools across the region as well as 30 libraries and community organizations. An estimated 50,000 children are expected to benefit from the initiative.
MinecraftEdu will help students to learn about a variety of important subjects such as art, history, architecture and sustainable living.
“The level of engagement is the first thing you notice ,” said Mark Nagurski, chief executive of CultureTECH.
“This is work that the kids really want to do and if you’re able to harness that enthusiasm, energy and creativity you end up with a pretty significant learning opportunity.
“The other exciting thing for us is the scalability and ‘sharability’ that Minecraft offers. If someone creates an engaging way of teaching, say, ancient history, using Minecraft, that can immediately be shared with all the other teachers using the game. You can already see that [happening] with things like Computercraft and we hope this project will add significantly to that resource.”
MinecraftEdu is currently being used by over 3,000 teachers across hundreds of schools all around the world.
