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Microsoft Makes Minecraft Education Edition Available To Schools (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Posted by BeauHD on from the learning-games dept.

Mickeycaskill quotes a report from TechWeekEurope UK: Microsoft has bolstered its push into the education sector with the release of Minecraft: Education Edition for teachers around the world. The beta is an "early access" release, meaning it is free for testing purposes for schools. It comes after Microsoft last year launched a Minecraft site for educators to seek ideas on how the video game could be used as part of lessons. With the early access version of Minecraft: Education Edition now available, teachers have the chance to install and try an early version of the experience for free throughout the summer with classes of up to 30 students (without the need for a separate server). The complete version of Minecraft: Education Edition will be available in September. It will cost between $1 and $5 per user, per year depending on school size and volume licensing offers. Minecraft shows no sign of slowing down. It recently passed 100 million sales across all platforms and Microsoft, which acquired Mojang roughly two years ago, even has plans to bring Minecraft to China.

5 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Bad idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There are far better educational games. Minecraft is not educational. This actually distracts students from doing important things like learning to read, write, doing math problems, understanding scientific reasoning, and learning the scientific method. Maybe that's what passes for education in the US, but here in Europe, we're more concerned with the fundamentals.

    1. Re:Bad idea by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Are there better games? I haven't seen any dynamic voxel games that have the basic functionality of Minecraft.

      There are two. One is a clone, it is called minetest. The other is space engineers.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Bad idea by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Minetest is crap. I've been subscribed to the mailing list for Minetest's issues for the past 2 years; the dev's don't have a fucking clue most of the time.

      So, feature parity with Minecraft!

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. Minecraft Windows 10 upgrade scheme by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    And they'll be conveniently upgraded to Windows 10!

  3. MinecraftEdu was better, probably by Vrekais · · Score: 2

    We used MinecraftEdu in a previous workplace to teach a variety of things in Maths and Computing but we relied heavily on mods and this new one doesn't offer anything close to what we had. I was about to look into using in my new job but this version is Windows 10 only and has no mod support, this makes it pretty much useless for me.