Mind Craft: The Game that Builds up Kids Brain Cells

Microsoft’s popular video game Minecraft helps kids learn everything from programming, science and math to art, languages and history. It turns out that Minecraft builds up brain cells instead of dissolving them. Minecraft isn’t about bloody broadswords and burning rubber. It has no complex story lines or gorgeously rendered images of alien soldiers. Instead, it’s filled with people, animals, trees and buildings that look as if they were built from digital Legos. 

Swedish developer Mojang released Minecraft in 2009. Since then, the game has attracted more than 100 million registered users. So far, more than 70 million copies have been sold for Windows PCs and Apple Mac computers, Xbox and PlayStation game consoles, and mobile devices running Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems. Microsoft was so impressed it bought Mojang in 2014 for $2.5 billion.

Minecraft offers two basic ways to play. In survival mode, you mine raw materials like trees and coal, and then craft shelter and light so you withstand the mobs’ nightly onslaught. Creative mode lets you build without limits so you can devise architectural whimsies like flying castles or interactive constructions such as booby traps for capturing the bad guys. 

Minecraft has lots of ways for people to create some pretty sophisticated machines and scenarios. One of the first is with “redstone,” a material that carries electrical signals that activate all sorts of  like opening a door when a character steps on a pressure-sensitive plate or triggering a piston to push a pumpkin onto an assembly line when it grows big enough. Most impressively, logic circuits built of redstone can form a working computer inside the Minecraft world.

Kids pick up more advanced computer skills through Minecraft’s “command blocks” — code that changes the rules of the game. That can be anything, from altering the weather to generating an invincible flying squid. Today, educators use Minecraft to help teach everything from science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) to language, history and art. But it’s the kids who showed the way, turning Minecraft into a constructive tool by publishing tutorials, sharing designs and code, and helping each other online. 

“Minecraft caught everybody off guard,” says Johan Kruger, a programmer known in the Minecraft world as Dragnoz. His YouTube tutorials are watched by more than 129,000 subscribers. “Before anybody knew its power or that it could be educational, the kids already took over and owned the world.”