Launching this winter, Minecraft: Education Edition will be an “expanded” version of Minecraft for classrooms, distributed to educational institutions worldwide.
Based on the already existing MinecraftEdu program — a modded version of Minecraft, used for teaching, which Microsoft has acquired — this new edition wants to help things along by launching a community site that, as the announcement from Mojang puts it, will “host lesson plans and give Minecraft: Education Edition users somewhere to discuss ideas and provide feedback”.
According to the new site’s FAQ, what the developers are actually doing with the Education Edition is “growing and expanding” MinecraftEdu’s features — there’s a list of changes showing exactly what will be different compared to the game’s regular version:
- Enhanced maps with coordinates for students and teachers to find their way around the Minecraft world together.
- Student Portfolio feature, where students can take photos and selfies to show their work and learning.
- Enhanced multiplayer, where a classroom of up to 40 students can work together toward a greater world in Minecraft.
- Login and personalisation, where students have personalised avatars and feel more engaged in the game and teachers can know who each player is.
- World import and export, where teachers and students can create and save their worlds in the game.
It’s multiplayer Minecraft with an educational twist, basically, where you can play together with your class on a Minecraft server and learn about (or teach) all kinds of subjects — as the FAQ puts it, “from maths and physics to history and language arts.” Sounds more fun than the classes I’m used to, at least.
Microsoft plans to launch Minecraft: Education Edition for schools, libraries and museums this winter at a price of $US5 ($7) per user per year.
Comments
14 responses to “Microsoft And Mojang Announce Minecraft: Education Edition”
Can’t wait for Minecraft to leave java behind.
Are they working towards that?
the windows 10 version is C based. so far behind the java version though. i think its going to be a while personally, due to the enormous appeal of mods, moving entirely to C based code would render all mods useless. Plus i doubt the vast majority of Java coders would know enough C coding to port their mods across. Unless they can find a way to still support Java mods, but its going to get VERY messy if that happens. Their going to need to develop a more user friendly modding API
Apparently the C++ version recently put redstone in, so as far as I’m concerned it’s set 😛 And I’ve read previously that it has superior boats that aren’t held together with a vague sense of hope.
Though I always felt like Minecraft peaked at around 0.7.3 or something like that, so may not be the best to judge 😛
yeah i dont understand why adding content to the Windows 10 version is taking so long…. The amount of additions, fixes, etc that they used to pump into the java version, as well as the speed, baffles me. It should have taken no time to get the windows 10 version up to speed… especially with them already having mostly complete c#/c++ console versions
Oh, is the win10 version lagging behind the other non-Java ones? I thought they were all supposed to be based on the Pocket Edition, with that becoming the main branch now. Not that I’ve really looked into it at all, just seen stuff around the place.
yeah im sure its missing a TON of stuff
Great. Now the kids are taken care of, can Mojang start working on some version of Minecraft that will help me replace my pen-pushing 9-to-5 job as well?
“a classroom of up to 40 students can work together toward a greater world in Minecraft.”
This will be the most impressive part. 40 people on a single MC server (as supplied by education, I can’t imagine it will be too powerful) with no issues.
I work in IT in education and we have some pretty cranking servers. Though we probably would not give a minecraft server VM access to all of it. If it’s only RAM intensive we have enough of that to crank it up pretty high.
We are a private school but right at the low end of the price range.
I cannot imagine how difficult it would be for a teacher to herd a group of students 40 strong through a minecraft world without them all suddenly dispersing in all directions.
Pretty sure kids will be teaching the teachers about minecraft more often than not.
Will only work if the Education edition has Carmen Sandiego hidden somewhere in the map
And she’s at the end of the Microsoft Encarta maze.
You just blew my mind