Minecraft - especially <i>modded</i>[1] Minecraft - is not just good for education; I believe it gives first-hand experience in on of the most important lessons for the future, which is the value of <i>automation</i>. In a future where &quot;humans need not apply&quot;[2], knowing how to automate tasks is one of the best skills you can have.<p>In modded Minecraft, some of the fancier equipment has very high resource costs. Most people figure out very quickly that <i>manually</i> mining for several thousand iron blocks and hundreds of diamonds is a waste of time, so they learn to instead invest in the automated quarry robots. Later on, when their chests are overflowing, the Applied Energitics[3] &quot;(literal) storage area network&quot; becomes a priority. Some of the more recent mods require things like &quot;8x compressed cobblestone&quot; (9:1 compression, requires 9^8 = 43,046,721 cobblestone) which are so expensive they are not actually possible to make without automation.<p>Learning to say &quot;lets build a machine to do that&quot; when faced with a repetitive task may be one of the few jobs that exists in the future, and I&#x27;ve seen quite a few youtube videos where people of all ages discovered the lesson on their own by playing Minecraft.<p>[1] An archetypal example might be Jadedcat&#x27;s &quot;Agrarian Skies&quot; modpacks ( <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ftb.gamepedia.com&#x2F;Agrarian_Skies:_Hardcore_Quest" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ftb.gamepedia.com&#x2F;Agrarian_Skies:_Hardcore_Quest</a> ), which are empty &quot;skyblock&quot; maps where you start with a minimum set of items (e.g. a dirt block and a sapling) and grow those into silly amounts of automation that can build just about anything in the game.<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU</a><p>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ae-mod.info&#x2F;About-Applied-Energistics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ae-mod.info&#x2F;About-Applied-Energistics&#x2F;</a><p>&#x2F;* and if you want to take this to a silly and frustrating extreme, try <i>GregTech</i> *&#x2F;