When Jonathan Shell, Kentucky’s current Commissioner of Agriculture, walked into a Jefferson County classroom not long ago and saw students playing Minecraft, his first thought was that they were just wasting their time playing a popular video game. Turns out, it had a lot more to do with his area of expertise than he realized.

“I was like, ‘Really? Is this what we’re doing? We’ve just got kids playing on computers with these games?’ I knew what Minecraft was and my kids ain’t learning on Minecraft, just let me tell you,” said Shell. “So I went and talked to some of these kids ... and they said, ‘No, we’re building a farm,’ and they had a worksheet on their table where they had to build a farmhouse, they had to build a barn to put livestock in, they had to have a crop area where they had

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