Microsoft has made a dozen interactive lessons available at no cost inside Minecraft’s Marketplace, the company announced on March 24. The move comes as approximately 570 million students worldwide are unable to attend school due to coronavirus-related closures. The educational worlds require no separate subscription or additional payment. Players need only the standard Bedrock edition of the game, which runs on Windows, Xbox, iPad, and Android devices.
The content is free until the end of June. Microsoft developed the lessons in six weeks with assistance from educators in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia.
These teachers already use Minecraft: Education Edition in their classrooms and understand the platform’s capabilities. Rather than presenting traditional textbook material, the interactive worlds let players shrink down and explore inside a giant model of the human eye, navigate a full-scale International Space Station, solve logic puzzles using Redstone circuits — the game’s equivalent of electrical wiring — or compete to construct the tallest wind-and-nuclear power plant. Each world includes teacher-written prompts that appear on screen, encouraging students to record observations or answer short quizzes.
Helen Chiang, studio head of Minecraft, stated in a company blog post that the initiative aims “to give families a guilt-free way to turn game time into learning time while normal lessons are suspended.” Minecraft: Education Edition launched in 2016 and is used in over 100 countries. Previously, it required a school subscription, which created a barrier for individual families.
Microsoft has dropped that requirement for three months, from now through June. Poland took a further step on March 25, when its Ministry of Digital Affairs launched Grarantanna, a national learning portal featuring its own Minecraft server along with quizzes on Polish history, geography webinars, and coding challenges. This represents a government using a private company’s product as a public-health tool.
Minecraft already has 126 million monthly active players, most of whom are children familiar with the game’s movement, building, and exploration mechanics. Adding educational content builds on existing user behavior.
The risk is that students treat the lessons as just another game; the potential reward is learning that occurs without conscious effort. Microsoft assembled the 12 worlds in six weeks. The lessons remain free until June, by which time schools may have reopened or may remain closed.
Either way, the company has demonstrated the ability to respond quickly to changing circumstances.
