Northern Ireland brings Minecraft to every post-primary school

While Turkey's Family and Social Policies Ministry looks to ban Minecraft in Turkey for being too violent for children, Northern Ireland is doing the exact opposite — integrating the game into its secondary schools with the help of CultureTECH and the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL).

Around 50,000 students, 214 schools and 30 libraries and community groups will have access to a special version of the popular creative-adventure sandbox game.

The version of Minecraft that will be hitting schools is called MinecraftEdu. This version has additions that are considered "more useful and appropriate for the classroom." Northern Ireland isn't the first to use Minecraft for educational purposes; over 5,000 teachers across 40 countries (including MIT and the UN) have used the game to teach art, history, computer coding, and even quantum physics.

Mark Nagurski, the chief executive of CultureTECHoffered his thoughts on why Minecraft is valuable as a teaching aid:

“The level of engagement is the first thing you notice. 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.”

Why can't America be as progressive in its thinking when it comes to education?