If your children love Minecraft, chances are they (and you) will know all about Stampy already.

He’s the face of a YouTube channel that posts daily family-friendly videos about Minecraft, and he’s hugely popular. 2.3m people subscribe to his channel, with its videos having been watched 845m times.

Exciting news today, though: the creator of Stampy – British gamer Joseph Garrett – has announced plans to launch a second channel together with Maker Studios – the company that helps him run his existing channel on YouTube.

“We’re setting up a new channel with Maker that’s going to be purely educational,” he said in an on-stage interview at the MIPTV television industry conference in Cannes.

“I think Minecraft is an amazing platform. One, the fact that it is a open sandbox to do whatever you want in it, and two, everyone’s playing it, and if you’re not playing it, your kids are playing it,” said Garrett.

“If you take their engagement and put it into a more productive space like education or the arts, they’re going to be involved in that, they’re going to be engaged.”

Garrett also talked about how he got started making Minecraft videos under the guise of Stampy (also known as Stampylonghead and Stampylongnose), as light relief from trying to break into the games industry as a journalist.

“For fun I started recording what are called ‘Let’s Plays’, where you’re playing and recording at the same time,” he said.

“That blew up, and I immediately realised that kids were watching, so I immediately cut out all the swearing, made it family-friendly, made it bigger and brighter, and now that’s what I’m doing as a career – completely by accident!” he said.

The new channel is great news, we think: Stampy / Garrett has a huge, loyal fanbase among children, but also among parents, who know that his videos are perfectly safe for their kids to watch. We’re looking forward to what he comes up with on the education side of things.