Minecraft Headed To Your Classroom, Again

The folks at Microsoft in charge of Minecraft's gaming universe have revealed their next step in total world domination. It's called Minecraft: Education Edition, and it brings a new version of Minecraft to the classroom. Sort of. What this program does is to put control of MinecraftEdu, a program that already exists, into the hands of Microsoft. They'll be calling it Minecraft: Education Edition. It's very similar, but now it'll be controlled by Microsoft.

According to Mojang's Owen Hill, "Of course, every Minecraft player learns essential life-skills like tree-punching and good Creeper-defence but, when used in the right way, Minecraft can help people around the world to learn lots more." Of course! For Microsoft to do this, it only makes sense for them to acquire the biggest build already doing this, and that's MinecraftEdu.

Upon acquiring MinecraftEdu, Microsoft will be changing the terms of service just a little bit. In addition to "building upon its proven success to create a new version of Minecraft that's dedicated to learning," Microsoft will be providing Minecraft: Education Edition to the world as a free trial this summer.

After that, all existing MinecraftEdu customers will be given the first year of Minecraft: Education Edition free of charge.

The new home of this system will be education.minecraft.net. Below you'll see a video made by Microsoft promoting this new name and ownership.