Microsoft, is trying to “schoolify” Minecraft, the wildly popular world-building game. The latest idea, Litcraft, lets kids build models of fictional islands, reports Alison Flood and Sian Cain in The Guardian. Treasure Island is the first. While regular Minecraft is rife with literary creations – the whole of George RR Martin’s sprawling setting for Game of Thrones, Westeros, has been created in its entirety, as have several different Hogwarts – Litcraft is not all fun and g

Microsoft is trying to “schoolify” Minecraft without “suckifying” it, writes Anya Kamenetz in NPR. Minecraft, which lets players build a 3-D world out of “blocks,” has sold more than 121 million copies since 2009, writes Kamenetz. Microsoft bought the game in 2014, then bought TeacherGaming’s classroom version, MinecraftEdu. Microsoft’s Minecraft: Education Edition now has 150,000 teacher and student users in schools around the globe, she reports. “Teachers are using Minecraf