Inaugural National Schools' Minecraft Finals

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It was an absolute joy to bring the first Minecraft: Education Edition Scottish Championship to Abertay University's School of Informatics and Design this week. I will be forever grateful to Prof. Gregor White for throwing open the doors and welcoming the young people into the heart of the school - and for handing out the prizes at the end of the day too - making for a very memorable experience for all our young people.

On the day, teams from three local authorities were present for both Primary and Secondary finals. The brief was to design a sustainable school of the future and resulted in some fantastic submissions. The judging process was particularly challenging as we found ourselves splitting hairs to finally declare the winners.

What has been quite disappointing is the slow uptake around the country for Minecraft Education Edition. Education Scotland cannot provide this as a national app and the ongoing mismatch of DPIA/GDPR risk appetites/educational benefits within our schools sees many councils opting not to deploy the platform.

This is to the detriment of learning opportunities.
  1. Minecraft is beloved by kids across the nation
  2. Minecraft is a beautiful tool for authentic IDL approaches




For an exploration of the benefits Minecraft offers our learners, who better to ask than Chris van der Kuyl, the Dundee games mogul who brought Minecraft to the console? Here he is back in September last year proclaiming, 

“Not only do I think a creative game like Minecraft has a space in school, I think it is going to become the centre of the learning experience for many kids of today, including children who haven’t even gone to school yet.”

Worthy of mention too is the work done by Derek Robertson nearly a decade ago around the use of Minecraft in the Scottish classroom and it was great to be able to have Derek join us for part of the day to see the activity.

Lastly, a huge thanks to colleagues from Dundee, Aberdeenshire and Edinburgh councils for pulling together to make this event happen. A hat-tip to Dean and Aspire2Be - the Welsh outfit put in a pile of work to ensure the event took place, with Dean helping run regional competitions as well as the big final. And also, my thanks to Louise Foreman at Education Scotland for joining us for the day, and helping ensure the judging was impartial.

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