Virtual CoastCraft game lets students explore coastal erosion in Minecraft

A new educational game called CoastCraft has been launched within Minecraft Education to help children ages 9 to 14 engage with climate change, coastal processes, and flood resilience in an interactive virtual environment. CoastCraft is aligned to the England school curriculum, and presents rising sea levels, flooding, and community trade-offs in a coastal landscape modeled after the town of Bude in Cornwall. The game encourages players to explore environmental solutions, such as sand dunes, buffer zones, or managed retreat, and to see their consequences in real time.

The development of CoastCraft was realized through a partnership among Minecraft Education, Cornwall Council, and the UK’s Environment Agency under its £200 million Flood and Coastal Innovation Programme. The initiative builds on earlier virtual flood education games such as Rivercraft and Rivercraft 2, already available via Minecraft Education, which focus on river flooding and nature-based flood solutions.

Caroline Douglass, Executive Director for Flood and Coastal Risk Management at the Environment Agency, commented that CoastCraft uses creativity to let young people experiment with solutions to real-world challenges. She emphasized that England’s coastline is in flux, and that climate change is raising the urgency of coastal adaptation. The game offers a platform for students to tangibly engage with these topics.

Emma Hardy, Floods Minister and former teacher, said that the game makes coastal processes and climate change more tangible to young people, bringing risks like erosion and sea level rise into the context of communities. She noted the UK government has committed £7.9 billion in capital funding over 10 years (to 2035/36) to improve protections for about 840,000 properties from flood or coastal threat, naming it the largest such investment in history.

Cornwall Council’s cabinet member for environment and climate change underlined that Bude’s coastline served as the basis of the virtual landscape. Students from Sir James Smith School in Camelford and Windmill Hill Academy in Launceston participated in testing and shaping CoastCraft alongside Cornwall’s climate adaptation team.

The Environment Agency has previously invested in flood and coastal defense. Between 2015 and 2021, it invested £2.6 billion to improve flood and erosion protections, of which about £1.2 billion was allocated to protecting roughly 200,000 homes against coastal flooding or erosion. The new £7.9 billion commitment underscores an ongoing scaling up of adaptation efforts.

CoastCraft aims to inspire the next generation of environmental stewards by bridging gamified learning and real-world coastal challenges. Its intention is not only to teach but also to empower young people with insight into the complexity of coastal systems, adaptation tradeoffs, and climate change impacts. Given the long-time scales and uncertainties inherent in coastal dynamics, providing a safe virtual space to experiment with responses may cultivate deeper literacy in environmental resilience.