Minecraft Education Edition just launched: initial thoughts
So Microsoft, which recently purchased Mojang, the company behind Minecraft (MC), just released the long awaited fork of the popular sandbox game that kids all over the world are rabid about. I just started playing the game myself after watching my kids watch one annoying YouTube video after another while also playing the game endlessly these past six months. And yeah, I’m kinda hooked on it too. But as a parent educator, I can kinda see beyond the creeper-killing aspects of the game, and appreciate it’s educational value as a teaching tool, especially for domain areas like coding, architecture, history, social studies, art, and storytelling. There’s real potential here to change the game, so to speak, on how we think about games in education. So once this new version was released, I proceeded to immediately download it and try it out. I won’t go into detail about new commands and features, but instead want to point out some interesting angles from the perspective of someone who has worked with technology in the classroom. Hopefully the Microsoft education team is thinking about these issues and addressing them in future releases.
Version Compatibility
My kids and I have been using the Mac and Pocket Edition (iOS) versions of the game. The world files on these two platforms aren’t compatible, and that’s caused some grief in our household when my son’s roller coaster which he painstakingly made on the iPad couldn’t be transferred to our desktop Mac. We’ve gotten over that, but imagine when teachers roll out Education Edition and kids find out their worlds created in the vanilla (standard) edition isn’t compatible with the version they use in school. Someone needs to figure out a way to convert them, or provide a conversion tool or else you’ll have a lot of frustrated teachers trying to load a kid’s world file which he/she made at home.
Mods & Third-Party Tools
Education Edition (EE) doesn’t come with the ability to mod (customize) the game with special programmatic code. This is a huge part of the MC fanbase. While I understand the need to simplify things for teachers, like the first observation, it will cause some grief when kids ask for and get told, no, you can’t rain down TNT or fly to the moon on your school account. With respect to third-party tools, the community has built-up lots of additional “helper” utility software to be able to, among other things, design structures more easily inside the game. I would imagine teachers will need robust, easy-to-use utilities to help them create their own curriculum. Building a replica of the Parthenon block-by-block isn’t something your average teacher has the time and patience to craft on their own. Perhaps this is a fledgling opportunity for new companies to fill this niche in the MC ecosystem.
Student Accounts
As far as I understand the situation, Education Edition will be targeted at teachers and schools. The only way you can access it is to have an educational e-mail address (presumably a .edu or .org domain). Once you supply that, you also have to sign up for a free Office 365 account. Once you have both, you login to the Minecraft game using both credentials. Microsoft says students can connect with each other via IP address on the same domain, but I think there will major hassles just to get to that point. With other apps and ed-tech software I’ve used, the best ones simply provide the teacher with a class code. The teacher then simply shares this code with students and parents to sign up. No e-mail account is needed. Indeed, with FERPA privacy restrictions, no student under 13 should have an e-mail account that asks for personal information anyway. I just feel EE should follow this protocol and/or allow the teacher to simple, fast way to set up bulk generic accounts rather than go through the signup process. Many students who would otherwise benefit from MC in the classroom simply don’t have an existing e-mail account that they regularly use. It’s sort of a digital divide issue actually. And what about those kids who do use e-mail but want to access the game from home (different IP, likely different domain (Gmail), etc.). Must we teach kids the intricacies of VPNs and multiple-account management when all they want to do is craft with their classmates?
Lack of Early Content
I wasn’t around in the early days of the game, but I imagine running MC:EE now is like what it must have felt like in the beginning, when there wasn’t such a robust community and learning resources like there is now. Between wiki’s, YouTube instructional videos, forums, and the like, someone out there has probably already answered that burning “how do I do this” question about the standard edition of the game. I’m sure these extras will soon arrive as more teachers unpack and mess around with the new version, but at this point, I could use some handy templates or schematics to pre-seed my new worlds with some engaging, interesting stuff to serve as the basis for more engaging pedagogical content.
I’m hopeful to see what comes next. I guess worse case situation I can always switch back to the vanilla version, but if these helper tools come quickly, I don’t see much need to spend time on both versions (unless I want to rain down TNT on my creepers).
