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"Why Minecraft? Every day, more and more teachers are using the world-building game Minecraft to engage and educate. The game is a true phenomenon and gamers young and old are using it in countless creative ways. Practitioners of Games Based Education have realized the potential and have embraced Minecraft in classrooms around the world. Now you can too! What is MinecraftEdu? MinecraftEdu is the collaboration of a small team of educators and programmers from the United States and Finland. We are working with Mojang AB of Sweden, the creators of Minecraft, to make the game affordable and accessible to schools everywhere. We have also created a suite of tools that make it easy to unlock the power of Minecraft in YOUR classroom."

"Menomonee Falls - Once every few weeks this past school year, kindergarten teacher Tiffany Fadin corralled her squirmy young charges at Valley View Elementary to get feedback about their recent math lessons. "What specific things did we do in this unit that helped you learn?" she asked recently. "What things did not help you learn?" Behind Fadin, data points flashed on a board, showing how many more students could add and subtract within five digits than in weeks prior. The exercise was deliberate, underscoring a major shift in Menomonee Falls that's training everyone to use data to make decisions, from teachers and custodians to kindergartners. The strategies employed over the past four years have attracted national - even international - attention to Menomonee Falls, including visitors from Sweden and researchers from the Carnegie Foundation. Other districts around the state and other educational institutions, such as the State University of New York, are taking notes. Armed with promising new outcome data, Menomonee Falls Superintendent Pat Greco said she believes what they're doing is working, and that the district is the case study for how K-12 systems can increase achievement and efficiency. And they're doing it by employing methods rooted not in education, but in the manufacturing and health care industries. "Teachers were reticent about posting student performance data. They were reticent to invite feedback from students," said Greco, who began engaging a small core of staff in the work in 2011. "Now, student performance is the highest it's ever been," Greco said."