Microsoft has made the early-access version of Minecraft: Education Edition free for teachers for a limited time, as the tech company prepares for the game’s September release.
The Education Edition of Minecraft bridges the building block game to the world of academia, leveraging a host of new features that facilitate or cater to the learning experience.
Unique to this edition are in-game chalkboards and non-playable characters, both of which can be customized by educators to act as guides and guideposts for students exploring the game world.
The Education Edition also has a “simple, secure sign-in” to ensure the security and privacy of the game’s users, an essential feature for software that works with personal data from minors.
And because teachers just love diaries and portfolios, Minecraft: Education Edition includes tools for creating both.
“Another important aspect of Minecraft in education is being able to collect evidence of learning in the game, and being able to demonstrate student progression,” says Microsoft. “The camera and portfolio features allow students to take screenshots of their work and document the development of their projects.”
Features in the pipeline for the Education Edition include a Classroom Mode user interface, which helps teachers map out their students in the game and provides a list-view alternative. Microsoft is also working on teleporting abilities and a chat window.
To get started with the early-access version of the game, educators will need to sign up for a free Office 365 account on the Minecraft: Education Edition website using a school email address. They will then have access to a digital download of the game, which requires hardware running either Windows 10 or OS X El Capitan.
And for those concerned about possible technical pitfalls, take it from Steve Isaacs, a game design and development teacher at William Annin Middle School, who reports that the game was easy to set up.
“Within 45 minutes of the download being provided to me, I was able to get it installed and my students logged in and [started] playing in a world together,” Isaacs says. “No server setup, or networking configuration required.”
The arrival of the early-access version follows the 14-puzzle Minecraft tutorial that Microsoft released last December as part of the annual Hour of Code event encouraging elementary school students to learn code.
The puzzles were meant to introduce educators to Minecraft’s potential in the classroom. Microsoft followed up the puzzles with daily challenges, which would task students with using code to reconstruct challenge images inside the game.
Some kids like Minecraft so much that they’re willing to get graded on how well they play the game.
Elena Rezac, a 13-year-old at William Annin Middle School in New Jersey, even prefers playing at school to playing at home.
“You have to do your best,” the seventh grader told CNNMoney. “It ends up being way better than what you do at home.”
That’s because there isn’t really a “point” to Minecraft. The video game lets players build virtual worlds out of blocks, and sometimes there are zombie or animal attacks. But at school, students can use Minecraft to create their own games and story lines.
Rezac has spent the past few weeks building a quest-driven maze inspired by “The Fifth Wave,” a science fiction movie about earth after an alien attack.
The main character of her game is Ella, one of 10 human survivors trying to protect the earth’s plants from being destroyed by aliens.
Rezac really wanted to take game design and development as an elective because it would allow her to work on multiple things at a time. She said, for example, that in art, she would only be able to paint a picture. But computer science is “a lot more fun because you can do whatever you want.”
Her teacher Steve Isaacs agrees and says he likes Minecraft because it allows students to be inventive. His class was one of the beta testers for Microsoft’s new program Minecraft: Education Edition.
“They can find an area where they can succeed,” said Isaacs, a 24-year teaching veteran. “That’s why I give so much choice.”
Students who take his elective have to write a design document that outlines the objectives and rules of their MInecraft game. Then they spend several weeks creating the game and get points for what they build. An A+ means 700 points.
Rezac says she doesn’t think too much about how to get a good grade. Competition among classmates doesn’t really exist either because everyone builds their own version. “It’s more fun [this way],” she said.
Elena Rezac, of William Annin Middle School, has been beta testing Microsoft’s Minecraft: Education Edition.
Microsoft(MSFT, Tech30) is pinning a lot of hope on Minecraft as a way to break into the education sector. The game’s massive popularity with kids (and adults) is one of the major reasons that the software giant bought Mojang, Minecraft’s developer, for $2.5 billion two years ago.
On Thursday, Microsoft announced that schools and teachers can download a special education version of the game for free. The company also added several new features to the game that make it easier for teachers to give feedback, as well as classroom collaboration tools and a simpler setup process.
A full version of Microsoft: Education Edition will go on sale in September and costs school districts an average of $1 to $5 per player each year. About 1,700 students participated in the beta program.
Rezac has been playing Minecraft since she was eight. CNNMoney met her and Isaacs at a recent Microsoft event promoting the game. Three eighth grade boys we talked to said they have been playing for about five years as well.
Tom Ruggiero, a 14-year-old in Isaacs’ class, said he likes Minecraft because it involves more variables and therefore more freedom to create.
His classmate Ethan Otash, also 14, agreed and said the game teaches skills such as engineering. After learning the basics, students can make the game more complex.
Because Minecraft is so customizable, Isaacs said aging out of the game isn’t likely.
“There’s a sweet spot,” he said. “But that sweet spot is huge.”
Following up on its promises from January, Microsoft today released a free trial of Minecraft Education Edition – the version of Minecraft meant for use in the classroom – to educators worldwide. This “early access” version of the program includes new features and updated classroom content and curriculum, the company also says.
For those unfamiliar with the Education Edition, the idea is to bring the world of Minecraft to the classroom to be used as a learning tool where students can develop skills in areas like digital citizenship, empathy, literacy, and more. They can use the software as part of a coding camp, study science, learn about city planning, or they can study history by re-creating historic landscapes and events in the program, for example.
Microsoft also notes that this early access release includes more lesson plans, across a range of grade levels and subjects. For example, some sample lessons are: “City Planning for Population Growth”, “Exploring factors and multiples”, and “Effects of deforestation.”
This early access release available now is not the final version of the software – there will still be some kinks to work out. And Microsoft is still interested in hearing feedback from teachers who try out this edition over the summer break.
This is also not the first time that teachers have been able to get their hands on the Education Edition – Microsoft began a beta test in May that reached 100 schools in 26 countries around the world. During that time, it collected feedback from teachers who used the software with some 2,000-plus students.
Thanks to their input, the release arriving now has a few more features that teachers asked for, including things like easier classroom collaboration, non-player characters and chalkboards to provide instruction, camera and portfolio features that lets students snapshot and document their work, among other things.
Up to 30 students from a classroom can play in a world together, without the need for a separate server, and they can work together or in groups. In a future release, Microsoft will launch a “Classroom Mode” interface for teachers that offers a map and list view of all their students, teleport capabilities, and a chat window for communication.
Microsoft didn’t develop this version of Minecraft in-house, but is rather building on top of the learning software is acquired earlier this year called MinecraftEdu. It plans to license the Education Edition to schools this fall, with costs per user ranging from $1 to $5, depending on the school’s size and volume licensing agreements.
Roblox CEO David Baszucki, 53, cofounded the San Mateo, CACA +0.21%-based computer gaming platform in 2006. With 12 million users last month, it lets people create their own virtual immersive experiences, like modeling in a fashion show or making pies at a pizza parlor. Users buy virtual currency, called “Robux,” so they can increase their power in the experiences and games. Game creators, who range in age from 14 to 25, get a cut of the payments, and the popular ones can earn as much as $30,000 a month, according to the company. Baszucki, who studied engineering and computer science at Stanford, chose the name Roblox because it combines “robot” and “blocks.” The company logged revenue of more than $50 million last year. It has 170 employees. In this condensed and edited interview, Baszucki explains why he thinks the company, which had more than $50 million in revenue last year and employs 170, will be worth billions of dollars.
Susan Adams: What did you do before Roblox?
David Baszucki: I founded an educational software company called Knowledge Revolution. We had the first fully animated physics lab on the computer. You could take ropes, pulleys, balls and anything else you’d use in your physics textbook and the program would allow you to build anything you can think of in a physics lab.
Adams: What happened to that company?
Baszucki: It was acquired for $20 million by a public company called MSC Software.
Adams: It sounds like you didn’t need to work again.
Baszucki: That’s fair to say.
Adams: What made you want to start a new company?
Baszucki: Seeing how kids lit up when they were creating things using our physics software made me think of what would be the ultimate platform for our imagination. Also I like construction toys and I saw the direction 3-D rendering was going. It became clear to me that there was an opportunity to create an immersive, 3-D, multi-player platform in the cloud where people could imagine, create and share their experiences together.
Adams: Doesn’t the blockbuster game Minecraft do that?
Baszucki: Roblox was created before Minecraft and today it’s growing much more quickly than Minecraft. It’s very likely that in the next couple of years we will pass their number of active monthly users.
Adams: The creator of Minecraft, Markus Persson, became a billionaire when he sold the company to MicrosoftMSFT -0.27% for $2.5 billion in 2015.
Baszucki: I was attracted to this venture out of pure passion. But ten years later, people in the industry are starting to see the potential for the ultimate size of companies in this space. I believe companies like ours are going to be as large as media companies and social networking companies that are valued in the tens of billions of dollars. I don’t know how long it will take but we know the opportunity is huge.
Adams: How did you get the company off the ground?
Baszucki: Another early employee of Knowledge Revolution and I got together and we wrote the first version of Roblox over the course of two years. We were self-funded. Later we raised $11 million from investors but we haven’t needed to raise any money in five years. We became profitable last year.
Adams: For people who don’t play videogames, can you describe what you were trying to build?
Baszucki: Roblox is less a game than a 3-D social platform where you and your friends can pretend to be in different places. You can pretend to be in a fashion show or that you’re trying to survive in a tornado or that you want to go work in a pizza restaurant, or that you’re a bird and survive by catching insects. It’s like when I was a kid and I’d go outside and play pirates. On Roblox people are playing in 3-D environments created by the community.
Adams: What’s one of your favorite Roblox environments?
Baszucki: I really like Natural Disaster Survival. You and your friends get transported onto an island in the middle of the ocean. Every three minutes a new disaster strikes, like a typhoon, a meteor shower, a lightning storm, a tornado. You have to figure out where to run and hide. It’s fun and it gets your adrenaline going.
Adams: Who created Natural Disaster Survival?
Baszucki: One of the members of the Roblox community. It’s been played more than 40 million times.
Adams: How does your company make money?
Baszucki: There are 500,000 people creating things on Roblox every month. Using Roblox is free but the creators are able to charge virtual currency for the experiences. In our bird simulator you can become an eagle for $10. Users can buy virtual currency with a credit card or a prepaid card or through iTunes or wherever they are.
Adams: Do the creators get to keep part of the payment?
Baszucki: Yes. The developer gets 18% of the dollars spent on the eagle. Some of our developers are earning more than $30,000 a month. One developer, Gus Dubetz, a student at Dakota State, paid his tuition and bought a house for $120,000.
Adams: Do you also sell advertising?
Baszucki: From very early on we have had remnant advertising, similar to banner ads. But over the last five years we’ve started immersive advertising partnerships with big brands that want to reach our audience. We’re running a deal with Disney for Finding Nemo sequel Finding Dory.
Adams: How much is Disney paying for that deal and do your developers get a cut?
Baszucki: Some of our advertising deals are six figures and beyond, and our developers get some of that money. About a quarter of our revenue comes from advertising.
Adams: What’s the gender breakdown of the people who use Roblox?
Baszucki: It’s approximately 35% female but the ratio of female players is growing. We don’t just have first-person shooting games. We have Roblox Top Model and Pirate Mermaid Neverland Lagoon.
Adams: To create a Roblox environment or game, do your users need to know how to code?
Baszucki: You can make an initial Roblox experience by dragging and dropping. If you want to become one of our top developers, you have to use code. Lua, our coding language, is built into the site. We have tutorials. Hundreds of thousands of people are learning to code on our site.
Adams: You say you played pirate games outside when you were growing up. Do you regret that Roblux keeps kids glued to screens indoors?
Baszucki: We want people to play outside as much as possible. But when our users have screen time, we prefer they use it in an imaginative, creative way, rather than consuming content or following steps in a procedural way.
Adams: How much screen time do you think kids should have?
Baszucki: I have four kids, aged 13 to 19, and they had screen time limits. When they were between 8 and 12 it was in the one to two hour range per day.
Adams: How much screen time do your kids use now?
Baszucki: My three girls use their phones, not computers. They do social media and listen to music. My son is at U.C. Berkeley studying computer science and he doesn’t have a spare second.
The LEGO Group has released a selection of new products from its Marvel Super Heroes and DC Super Heroes lines, featuring three Spidey-centric Marvel sets, and two Classic Batman Villain sets; check them out here…
76057 LEGO MARVEL Super Heroes, Spider-Man: Web Warriors Ultimate Bridge Battle (RRP: £89.99)
Swing into a bridge battle zone and team up with Spider-Man, Spider-Girl and Scarlet Spider to defeat Green Protect Aunt May from Green Goblin, who has a flaming pumpkin bomb and a Goblin Glider with stud shooters, along with Kraven the Hunter and Scorpion’s venomous tail! Press the bridge’s flag to launch a net to trap the villains, or launch a Super Hero from the side of the bridge and swing into action to save the day! The set includes a bridge section, trap door, web prison, Goblin Glider, taxi, police ATV and a Spider-Man, Spider-Girl, Scarlet Spider, Aunt May, Scorpion, Kraven the Hunter and a Green Goblin Minifigure.
Stage a street battle scene as Spider-Man and Ghost Rider join forces against Hobgoblin. Dodge the Goblin Glider’s missiles and flaming pumpkin bomb, and use Ghost Rider’s fire chain to catch the evil demon. Knock Hobgoblin off his Goblin Glider or the top of the traffic light with Spider-Man’s Super Jumper! The set includes a Ghost Rider Bike, Goblin Glider, traffic light model and a Spider-Man, Hobgoblin and Ghost Rider Minifigure.
Rescue White Tiger from the Octo-Bot’s slippery tentacles! Doc Ock is wading through the water in his weaponized Octo-Bot and has taken White Tiger prisoner in one of the tentacles! Steer Captain Stacy’s speedboat with Spider-Man surfing in on his web surfboard tow and rescue her! Watch out for Vulture nosediving through the air and fend off his attacking claws. The set comes complete with Doc Ock’s Octo-Bot, police speedboat and a Spider-Man, Doc Ock, Vulture, White Tiger and a Captain Stacy Minifigure.
Help Red Hood™ and Katana™ stop the monstrous Killer Croc™ and evil Captain Boomerang™ from destroying Gotham City. Roll the Bat-Tank into action and fire the 6-stud shooter against Killer Croc’s Battle Chomper. Drop bombs from the tank or deploy the ram weapon to crush Batman’s enemies. Manoeuvre the motorbike out of reach of the Battle Chomper’s movable tail and chomping teeth, and dodge the vehicle’s flying boomerangs.
The set includes Batman’s Bat-Tank, Killer Croc’s Battle Chomper, Red Hood’s motorbike and a Batman™, Red Hood™, Captain Boomerang™ and a Katana™ minifigure plus a Killer Croc™ big figure.
76054 Batman™: Scarecrow™ Harvest of Fear (RRP: £59.99)
Stop Scarecrow™ and Killer Moth™ spreading fear on the outskirts of Gotham City with Gas Mask Batman’s Batcopter, featuring an opening minifigure cockpit, four pop-out stud shooters and a six-blade spinning rotor. Team up with Blue Beetle™ in an aerial battle to protect the frightened farmer. Evade the harvester’s rotating cutters and detachable fear gas stud shooter, and prevent the villains capturing the farmer in its fear gas tank.
The set comes complete with Batman’s Batcopter, Scarecrow’s harvester, tractor and a Gas Mask Batman™, Blue Beetle™, Scarecrow™, Killer Moth™ and farmer minifigure.
The movie is being directed by New Zealand’s Taika Waititi, who has confessed that he’s eyeing a cameo for himself in the blockbuster.
‘I can’t help myself,’ the 40-year-old told theDaily Telegraphafter revealing that he will ‘probably’ pop up in the highly-anticipated product.
‘I can’t help myself:’ Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi admitted that he’s hoping to make a cameo in the upcoming superhero film
If Waititi does end up in the film, it certainly won’t be his first time appearing in a superhero flick.
The handsome Kiwi previously had a supporting role in DC Entertainment’s 2011 movie, The Green Lantern.
Waititi previously opened up to the Daily Mail Australia about The Green Lantern’s famously poor box office performance, admitting that it didn’t come as much of a surprise to him.
Star studded: Thor stars Australia’s Chris Hemsworth
‘Being part of it and reading the script and seeing how it all came together, I wasn’t really surprised with how it was received,’ he told the Daily Mail Australia.
‘A classic example was when we were blocking a scene and I said ‘I have one line and it’s not really necessary to the story and it doesn’t further the scene, just a suggestion but maybe I shouldn’t be in this scene?’
‘They were like ‘Shut up Taika, just say your line and do the scene’ and I said okay, and just sat there literally doing nothing and wondering ‘What the f*** am I doing in this movie?’.’
Not the first time! The 40-year-old previous appeared in DC’s 2011 flop, The Green Lantern
‘I wasn’t really surprised with how it was received,’ he previously admitted to Daily Mail Australia
The Academy Award-nominated star has been producing critically and commercially successful films in New Zealand since 2003, and is even behind the highest-grossing New Zealand movie ever, Boy.
Unsurprisingly, he’s also known for casting himself in his own projects.
Waititi has appeared in every single film that he’s written and/or directed, Eagle Vs. Shark, What We Do in the Shadows, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople.
Thor: Ragnarok, which stars Australia’s Chris Hemsworth and Cate Blanchett, is due for release in 2017.
Coming soon! Thor: Ragnarok is set to his theaters in 2017
