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Microsoft announced it will be releasing an educational version of Minecraft, the popular online sandbox building game the company acquired in 2014. Minecraft: Education Edition will be released as a free trial this summer to existing Minecraft users, according to Mojang, the Microsoft subsidiary acquired for $2.5 billion in September 2014.

The new title builds on MinecraftEdu, “a version of Minecraft built for the classroom [which] has been used in over 40 countries,” Mojang said in a statement. Microsoft acquired MinecraftEdu this week, the statement said. Terms of that deal were not disclosed.

As with the public game, the updated classroom edition of Minecraft will continue to teach “essential life-skills like tree-punching and good Creeper-defense,” per Mojang, but will also feature purpose-built “lessons”*to help educators instruct students in areas ranging from basic problem-solving to history, art, and STEM disciplines.
Lessons include “Redstone Lodge,” a Minecraft: Education Edition mod, which “gives the full range of electrical engineering principles, logic gates, and even music composition within Minecraft” and the bomb-shelter building mod “Anderson Shelters,” which promises to teach both World War II history and physics.

Last year, Microsoft introduced Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition Beta as the first version of the game with Redmond’s stamp on it, as part of the rollout of the software giant’s latest PC operating system. But the rollout of a Minecraft version specifically tailored for the classroom has been cooking for even longer.


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