Just recently i discovered one of these "crafting" games, called Robocraft.
It is similar to Minecraft, you build a robot out of cubes with different properties, and then you use it to battle other robots ;-)
Quiet entertaining, but nothing else.
Do you people think it would be possible to build a game on the "minecraft-principle" which could educate people about, for example, physics, chemistry, biology, genetics, and at the same time, serve as tool to develope things that have real world applictaions.