Secondary Schools In Northern Ireland Get Minecraft For Free

In a project organised by the annual CultureTECH festival, secondary schools in Northern Ireland will be given Minecraft for free. The project is being funded by the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure and will see the game be supplied to 200 schools. It will also be given to 30 libraries and community organisations. These establishments will receive the educational version of the game MinecraftEdu. 

Minecraft represents a creative playground which players can design and build architectural wonders, mixing resource management within the gameplay. Chief executive of CultureTECH had this to say about the game: 

“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.”

This move shows that games can and should be used to better education for young people, advancing learning with new methods that create interesting new ways for students to learn and be creative. Companies such as CultureTECH and TeacherGaming who have created the educational version of Minecraft are helping push games into new areas besides that of entertainment.