Microsoft Turns a
Minecraft Mod Into an Education Business
Microsoft
is getting serious about Minecraft in schools, and it means the end of one
notable offshoot of the game's freewheeling culture.
Teachers in thousands of schools in dozens of countries
use the video game Minecraft to teach subjects from math to English to computer programming through MinecraftEdu. They use
a modified version of the game first made in 2011 by an independent
group of teachers and computer programmers. Microsoft is validating
their work by turning MinecraftEdu into the centerpiece of its own business
plans for Minecraft as an educational tool. But MinecraftEdu's creators aren't
coming along for the ride.
Now Microsoft is buying the MinecraftEdu franchise.
Now Microsoft is buying the MinecraftEdu franchise.
Microsoft is as excited as the other giants of the
technology industry to gain a foothold in schools. Since Minecraft is that rare
product considered both potentially educational and fun, the company sees a big
opportunity here.
The move also marks the closing chapter on one of
Minecraft’s most notable user-made modifications. So-called mods are a huge
part of Minecraft’s appeal, and users have built new features for the
games that add trees, nuclear reactors, or in-game quantum computers. Mojang, the company that makes the game, welcomed
the grassroots movement. Since Microsoft bought Mojang for $2.5 billion in late
2014, modders have been looking for signs that Microsoft plans to reign in this
freewheeling culture in the name of more control and higher profits.
People have continued to make Minecraft mods unmolested
by Microsoft since the acquisition, and Microsoft's Dierdre
Quarnstrom, the head of Minecraft Education at Microsoft, had nothing but
positive things to say about TeacherGaming, the start-up that made
MinecraftEdu. "They've done an amazing job," she said. But it was
always unlikely that MinecraftEdu would continue to exist independently.
Joel Levin, a computer teacher at a private school in New
York City, began work on a modified version of the game in 2011 for use in his
own classroom (amazingly, none of the 120 seven- and eight-year-olds he
taught had heard of the game at that time). He then teamed
up with Santeri Koivisto, a Finnish entrepreneur, to start
a company called TeacherGaming that developed their customized version of the
game. It let teachers run a Minecraft for classrooms off their own servers
and gave them control to set parameters for their students. The two
men got Mojang to give them a licensing agreement so they could sell MinecraftEdu
to schools.
TeacherGaming charged $41 for teachers to set up the
server, then about $15 for each student license. 7,000 schools in about
40 countries now use MinecraftEdu. This was enough for a
tiny startup like TeacherGaming to turn a profit. It even began to
develop other products designed to bring video games into schools -- a
prescient move because both TeacherGaming and its fans realized immediately that the Microsoft
deal would change things.
“Obviously when Microsoft came in it wasn’t clear what
was going to be allowed,” Levin said in an interview. “We had been
working with this funky independent Swedish game studio
and suddenly we’re working with one of the world’s largest
corporations.”
Letting a 12-person startup continue to run the operation
of Minecraft in schools didn’t make sense for Microsoft or Mojang. Levin
and his colleagues would essentially sit around and wait to see what each new
edition of Minecraft would look like, then update their
version accordingly. Vu Bui, the chief operating officer at Mojang,
says that creating an educational version in-house would make it easier to add
features teachers needed. “Some of these were already in MinecraftEdu, but
because its isn’t part of the core game, it wasn’t the
easiest to implement,” he said.
Microsoft's new version, called Minecraft: Education
Edition, includes features like better maps and the ability
for teachers to share the worlds their students have built with one
another more easily. It also abandons the one-time fee that TeacherGaming
charged in favor of a $5 subscription per student per year. At the onset, it is
offering indefinite free trials. Microsoft is planning to promote the game
immediately, and will have a new version ready for sale by the time
the new school year starts this fall.
Neither side would discuss terms of the
deal announced Tuesday. When asked whether he tried to negotiate an
arrangement to continue to work on MinecraftEdu as part of Microsoft, Levin
said only that, “there were some twists and turns.” He says that the
deal leaves TeacherGaming with the resources to develop other lines
of business bringing video games into schools. It has already made a prototype
of its own game. But its main goal is to help modify other commercial video
games for educational uses, then distribute them in schools — a
strategy that has eluded many video game publishers.
The issue, says Levin, is that the companies that
make most well-known games generally don’t want to let little
start-ups muck around with their products. Given how little luck they’ve had
working with big companies, TeacherGaming is trying to find
smaller developers who are open to experimentation, says Levin. “Sort
of like what Mojang was like when we started working with them."
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Librarian
Khaitan & Co
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