Even among its early adopters, few could have imagined the powerhouse phenomenon Minecraft would become, eventually leading to its developer, Mojang AB, being bought for $2 billion by Microsoft Corp. While plenty of players can zone out for hours on the game as they build their own worlds, Minecraft has also been praised for fostering creativity and analytical thinking in children and teens that they would not get from many other games.

Apparently Northern Ireland takes this praise a bit more seriously, and has decided to hand out free Minecraft keys to all students in secondary schools. The new project is headed by CultureTECH, an annual festival funded by the Northern Ireland government through its Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure.

“The level of engagement is the first thing you notice ,” said Mark Nagurski, the 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.”

He added, “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.”

The games going out to the country’s secondary schools are part of the MinecraftEdu program, which Mojang calls a “school-ready remix” of the original Minecraft game. MinecraftEdu is essentially the same game, but it has several features and tweaks to give it better functionality for the classroom.

For example, MinecraftEdu gives teachers greater control over their students’ game experience, and teachers can build entire lessons within Minecraft and lead their students through them like a virtual tour guide. These lessons can include anything from passive field trips to interactive projects that allow students to take control.

MinecraftEdu uses cloud servers to host teachers’ and students’ creations so they can be easily accessed and shared from anywhere.

Image credit: Mojang AB (c)