Startup Receives Federal Grant to Expand Minecraft Student Reach - Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

Minecraft just received another education boost. An ed tech startup that encourages students to build their own mods for the popular online virtual world game has received a second grant from the National Science Foundation that will enable it to continue development of its coding environment for novice programmers. ThoughtSTEM received its initial NSF funding in 2015 to test the use of its Minecraft extension, LearnToMod, for teaching rural middle school students how to program. During that phase, the company said it taught computer science (CS) concepts to "over 50,000 students," who produced 1.5 million Minecraft mods. A mod is a customization to the block-oriented game that allows the player to add new characters, change the look of objects and modify the environment, among other activities. https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/08/25/startup-receives-new-nsf-grant-to-expand-minecraft-student-reach.aspx