Minecraft accolades. Social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the MineCon convention played large roles in popularizing the game. It has also been used in educational environments ("Minecraft Education Edition"), especially in the realm of computing systems, as virtual computers and hardware devices have been built in it. By late 2018, over 154 million copies had been sold across all platforms, making it the second best-selling video game of all time, behind "Tetris". In September 2014, Microsoft announced a deal to buy Mojang and the "Minecraft" intellectual property for , with the acquisition completed two months later. Spin-off games, such as "",
Minecraft mods project. "Minecraft" mods are credited for being a gateway for children to pick up coding and programming. Several educational projects have been created to further encourage students to learn coding through "Minecraft", including LearnToMod, ComputerCraftEdu, and Minecraft: Pi Edition, all of which are offered free to teachers. Programming classes utilizing "Minecraft" were also started by the University of California, which aims to teach children aged 8–18 how to program applications. In 2011, "MinecraftEdu" formed to sell a version of Minecraft to schools that enabled the teaching of a wider variety of subjects including language, history and art. In January 2016,