MinecraftEdu – how a small Finnish company brought Minecraft to schools

I have a Masters in Education and a background in teaching. In 2010 I started a tutoring company and in January 2011, invited some students and teachers to try Minecraft. Everyone was very excited and asked for materials to help continue working with it. After that, went to a local science festival to test using Minecraft in classes. Then I go in contact with Mojang, the creators of Minecraft, and got some licenses, T-shirts, etc. When I asked Mojang if we could be the Minecraft education reseller and training provider in Finland they said yes. This was in April 2011. Around the same time Joel Levin launched a teacher blog called The Minecraft Teacher, which instantly became popular and a big focus for the teaching community. We spoke to him and decided on a joint venture. In February 2012 we met Joel for the first time after 6 months of doing business over Skype!

I started TeacherGaming with a very different perspective to the one I have now. Originally I was just going to conferences, giving keynotes, conducting training and making learning material. Now we work much more directly with schools and most of the business we get comes from software licenses. Today our average growth per month is 13%. As of October 2013 we were in 2000 schools all over the world – nearly 40 countries. Most of our customers are from the US, then Canada and Australia, then UK, then Sweden.

Yes. I don’t think edugames developers are doomed, but… the design and creation process should be for fun and entertainment. If you start with ‘what kind of maths should we teach with this game’ I don’t have a good feeling about it. Games built for fun and entertainment translate well into the classroom. With Minecraft you can switch things off and on to allow students to concentrate on, for example, building. Schools tend to focus on a combo of survival/building within Minecraft. Some schools spend hundreds of hours creating maps. Very few teachers can do that – they don’t have time. So MinecraftEdu helps schools use Minecraft in ‘vanilla’ form so students can get going very quickly. We’ve found that a textbook/Minecraft blended learning model works best.

At the beginning we heard a lot of stories of kids pitching the idea to teachers. Some parents also brought Minecraft into schools. The majority of recommendations today come from peer recommendations between teachers and at conferences.

1% of teachers are very tech savvy (in terms of games). Most are not. We worry about the 99%. More and more teachers coming to TeacherGaming who know nothing about games based learning. We strongly recommend running a private server – and we’ve tried to make it very easy and automated. Teachers can now get their server running within five clicks (four on Mac). There are over 2,000 schools worldwide running their own MinecraftEdu servers and also some museums, libraries, etc. We are also working on ComputerCraftEdu (currently in Beta). It’s a mod for MinecraftEdu. We are trying to embed things in the routine teachers have already established so, rather than adding new stuff, we create shortcuts. For example, digging is a huge thing in Minecraft, and can get too time consuming and labour intensive. Now there is an option of programming your own robots to mine things for you.

Go and ask students if they know about a game that could be used in school, then try it out yourself. Think of the teacher as a facilitator who encourages students to teach themselves through the game. Remember that most of the learning happens when you talk about the stuff happening in the game. At Teacher Gaming we like to work with sandbox games, which work well with the pedagogies used in schools. Any educational game needs to have business/revenue potential as well.

Because of our success with MinecraftEdu we have a good number of indie game developers waiting for TeacherGaming to push their games into schools. Kerbal Space Program from Squad, is our next big focus.

We are also busy figuring out a proper product pipeline, taking on more staff and going for Finnish government funding.