Microsoft Acquires Minecraft’s Modified Version For Schools

When Microsoft acquired the creator of the game Minecraft in 2014, the giant software company instantly got a cachet bump with children, picking up a blockbuster game app for a generation of kids who didn’t depend on its products the way their parents did.

Now Microsoft hopes Minecraft can help it in classrooms, another area where its once-mighty grip has been shaken by companies such as Google and Apple.

Last week, Microsoft announced that it had acquired MinecraftEdu, a modified version of Minecraft tailored for use in schools. Over the last several years, MinecraftEdu has attracted a strong following and is used in over 7,000 classrooms in more than 40 countries.

The modifications to the game were created by a startup, TeacherGaming, that Microsoft is not acquiring. Microsoft declined to say how much it was paying for MinecraftEdu.

While Minecraft is known as a game, it is more akin to a digital sandbox, inside which players can construct anything they want, much of it out of block-shaped materials. The creative, rather than destructive, possibilities of Minecraft have caught the eyes of educators, who see it as a supplemental learning tool for everything from anatomy and earth science to math and literature.

In the Santa Ana Unified School District in Orange County, Calif., for example, elementary school students in social science classes have met up inside the game and re-created the features of local historical sites they have studied, such as the Mission of San Juan Capistrano. Students in science classes there have used it to demonstrate their understanding of building circuits.

Super popular

Most of Minecraft’s appeal is as entertainment, though. There are more than 100 million registered Minecraft players. It is the top paid app, years after the game was introduced, on the two dominant mobile app stores from Apple and Google, and is the best-selling PC game of all time, according to Microsoft. More than 160 million people have watched over 5 billion hours of Minecraft videos on YouTube.

In short, Minecraft continues to be a huge success a year and a half after Microsoft bought Mojang, the Swedish creator of the game, for $2 billion. But it has not yet buttressed other Microsoft businesses the way company executives had hoped.

Some believed, for example, that making Minecraft available for Microsoft’s smartphones could give the struggling devices a lift. They are still struggling.

“Now that we’re a little way down the road from the acquisition, it still isn’t clear to me what the synergies are between Microsoft’s core business and Minecraft,” said Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research.
“To be sure, Minecraft itself continues to be a very successful and popular franchise,” Dawson said, “but I’m not seeing any evidence that Microsoft is somehow benefiting beyond the performance of Minecraft itself as a stand-alone entity.”

The competition

Classrooms could be a test of whether Microsoft can use Minecraft to achieve broader company objectives.
Throughout school districts in the United States, computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system are facing more competition than ever from competing devices, including iPads from Apple and Chromebooks running a Google operating system.

Microsoft offers productivity tools — like Office 365 Education, which includes PowerPoint and OneNote, a digital notebook system — free to teachers and students. And some teachers say they are excited about using Microsoft apps such as Skype, the video conferencing platform, as educational tools with their students.

But Google has made strong inroads in schools, reporting recently that its free software program for classrooms, called Google Apps for Education, was now used by more than 50 million students, teachers and administrators worldwide. In such a competitive landscape, the positioning of Minecraft for the classroom as Minecraft: Education Edition may help Microsoft gain more visibility in schools.

“Obviously, we want to increase the connection Microsoft has to students and teachers,” said Anthony Salcito, vice president for worldwide education at Microsoft. Of products like Skype and OneNote, he added: “Many of these offerings are underused by education.”

Joel Levin, a former computer teacher in New York who co-founded TeacherGaming, the startup that created MinecraftEdu, said the emphasis on creation was what made Minecraft a compelling tool for learning.

“I think it wouldn’t work as well as it does in classrooms if it wasn’t so fun to play,” Levin said. “The term ‘chocolate-covered broccoli’ is often applied to bad learning games. It’s fun, so kids are engaged. That gets them in their seats.”