PETOSKEY — It was a zoo in Nikky Willison’s third-grade classroom on Wednesday morning.
In fact, there were about a dozen zoos in the process of construction as students worked in pairs to create the ideal habitats for a wide array of animals through the popular video game Minecraft.
Willison said they first began using Minecraft in the classroom at Central Elementary School at the start of the school year through a free trial offer. They purchased the program after the free trial ended with grant funds designated for STEAM resources.
In the latest project, students have been studying how to calculate area and perimeter. The math lesson merged with a science lesson on animals and habitats and students will use all of their research to build their own zoos in the game.
“We’ve been working on area and perimeter and so this ties in with their Common Core standards,” Willison said. “They’re working with a partner, so learning how to collaborate, and then they’re going to design their own zoo.”
Depending on which animals they chose to populate their zoos, the students have to calculate how large to build the habitats based on the animal’s needs. Before they can begin building in the game, Willison said the students map out the zoo by making a blueprint on graph paper.
“They’ve designed the blueprint of their zoo on there and when they have that done, then they’re building it in Minecraft,” she said. “They’re building it together.”
Because of the collaborative nature of the project, Willison said students are learning to recognize that there are real people behind the avatars in the game.
“A lot of times, if they’re playing games, they don’t actually see the person and now their friend is right with them,” she said. “So we’ve had kids where they knocked over a building and their friend has gotten upset and they’ve actually seen them get upset. That’s been a good lesson for the kids to learn.”
One of the students, Alex Cannon, said he has animals such as red pandas, gorillas and iguanas in his zoo and that his favorite part of the project is “probably building the cages with the animals.”
Emma Mitas added that “it’s really fun” using Minecraft in the classroom.
“You have to do math to get their habitats done,” she said.
Because the program is fairly new to the classroom, Willison said she is still learning of new ways to incorporate the game into her lessons.
“You can also combine social studies with it. You can build longhouses and simulate trading posts in it,” she said. “(The students) love Minecraft. They write in their journals, they give me ideas of ways we can use it in school, which is great. They’re motivated to learn.”
In fact, Willison said the students are learning above grade level skills as they build their zoos.
“It’s fun to see them stretch their brains and learn a little bit more,” she said. “I’m so happy we got an opportunity to try it because it’s really great for these guys. They really love it. I just love how engaged they are.”
At some point in May, Minecraft will experience a kind of coda to Microsoft and Mojang’s grand synchronization of the original Java version and its newer, future-proofed Windows 10 and smartphone/tablet ones. It’s called the Discovery Update, and it will add the last few absent components — llamas, shulkers, spooky woodland mansions, ill-natured villagers and spectral vexes — to a game that has perhaps received more post-purchase content, gratis, than any other.
And then it will go a step further, adding features the Java version will never see. Like a new, curated, in-app marketplace for handpicked creators to offer things like skin packs, retextured overlays and entire worlds. Those creators, dubbed “Pioneer Partners” and limited to just nine at the outset, will be allowed to sell their wares alongside Microsoft and Mojang’s own. To buy them, players (with Xbox Live Silver or Gold accounts) will have to spend a new in-game currency dubbed “Minecraft Coins,” reserved in exchange for real world money ($1.99 for 300, $4.99 for 840 or $9.99 for 1,720) and intended to be the de facto means of buying all things Minecraft going forward.
Microsoft
“We have nine creators today, but we’ll be growing that number at a measured pace,” John Thornton, Executive Producer of Minecraft Realms, says when asked how fast Microsoft hopes to scale things up. “We want to have high quality content, we want to be able to support each creator building what they want to build. To do that we need to pace ourselves and grow our team at the same time that we’re growing the marketplace. Every creator needs somebody to talk to, like an account rep, somebody to review content, so there’s a bunch of mechanics.” The plan right now, he says, is to add partners at a pace of roughly two to five a month.
One of those launch partners, an outfit calling itself Blockworks, is known for seemingly impossible feats. Like creating a scientific facility staged in a martian landscape composed of some 2 million blocks. The twist? It took five builders just two days to pull off. Or an ancient civilization at the bottom of the ocean composed of 33 million blocks that took 15 builders less than a month to complete. “Until now, all of our content’s been pretty much exclusively on Java,” says James Delaney, Blockworks’ founding and managing director. “So this is a chance to connect with all the other Minecraft platforms excluding Java and console. That’s a been a community that’s struggled to access quality content up to now.”
Each creator can only furnish so much content per month, explains Thornton, which makes for a natural bottleneck that should keep the curation process expedient. The content can also now be folded into Minecraft‘s worlds without requiring a full game update. The store itself will have its own approval guidelines, and includes a conventional 30% sales cut back to the app platform, after which the company says it will “seek to give the majority of the remainder to the creator.” What sort of content will Microsoft approve? “Our goal is to make content that’s appropriate for our audience,” says Thornton. “We’re not necessarily critiquing the art style or choice of gameplay. That’s up to the creator. But what we will do is make sure it fits with our brand and within the marketplace itself.”
Microsoft
Could the store wind up catering to mass market brands? Is this what went around circa Mojang’s banning of advertising agencies and corporations using Minecraft as a promotional tool last year finally coming around, only with Microsoft at the wheel? Never say never, but Thornton stresses that the company’s plan at this point is to foster a community-driven marketplace. “The goal isn’t to call up Coca-Cola tomorrow and say ‘Come in and party with us’,” he says. “We want our community to come into the marketplace. That’s really our focus.”
And if you’re an original Java version player feeling threatened by any of this, don’t be, says Thornton. “We’re not changing the existing community at all. If you want to still make content for free, and feel the best way to get known is to go out there and just make stuff, that’s still encouraged,” he says. “We’re not changing anything there. Players and creators are still welcome to make free content and put it on social media sites to try to make a name for themselves.”
Microsoft
Regardless, some of this is surely down to a company that paid $2.5 billion for the industry’s all-time second bestselling game a few years ago forging new, fire-walled profit channels for an experience that has to date flourished off unfettered user mods. But curation also entails safeguarding, and to that end, Microsoft says this is partly about creating a place for players to find content dependably free of viruses or malware. It’s also working on a way to enable a buy-once, play-anywhere framework through its Xbox Live service, though since this involves multi-platform coordination, all it’s committing to is to say more about how or when this might happen later this spring.
When Google’s Daydream headset came out, we praised it for its comfortable construction, but noted its bare game library. Little by little, the platform is adding experiences, even if many are ports that have already had successful runs on other VR platforms. Today, Daydream got its own version of SculptrVR, a Minecraft-like world-building sandbox game that had previously been released for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
It’s great news if you’re sad that Minecraft hasn’t come to Daydream yet and want to play with your VR-owning PC friends. That might be due to the mobile platform’s controller, fans havespeculated, which isn’t nearly as agile as those on other VR platforms, like Oculus Rift’s Touch. It’s a shame, since creative experiences flourish in virtual reality — just look at Google’s Tilt Brush, which has gotten multiple ports and updates. In any case, download SculptrVR from the Google Play store here.
On this week’s GamesBeat Decides podcast, host Jeffrey Grubb and co-host Mike Minotti go over the news from the last week. Then in the second half of the show, they speculate on what it means that Minecraft is going free-to-play in China while it gets a marketplace where players can sell content to one another.
Is this a precursor to one of gaming’s biggest hits going free-to-play everywhere? Listen to hear what we decide.
In addition to Minecraft, Jeff and Mike check in on Overwatch and its latest cooperative event. Is this what we want from the shooter? We’ll make a decision about that as well.
This week, Roblox Corporation, the San Mateo, California-based developer of the popular online social gaming platform for kids known as Roblox, announced the closure of its first private equity offering in more than five years.
The funding round, which raised $92 million for the company, was primarily backed by Meritech Capital Partners, a venture capital firm that was an early investor in many tech giants such as Snapchat, Facebook and Index Ventures. In addition to expanding the company’s mobile strategy, the funds raised will also be used to repurchase shares from those employees who wish to cash out of some of their equity. (For related reading, see: Is Microsoft Stock a Bargain at Tech-Bubble Highs?)
Minecraft Rival
The game Roblox allows its players to create their own virtual worlds, and is often described as being very similar to Microsoft’s Minecraft video game. Microsoft acquired Minecraft for $2.4 billion in 2014. The funds raised from the recent funding round could help to better position Roblox to compete with Minecraft. The main ages for the users of both gaming platforms ranges from 6 years to 16 years.
According to the company’s corporate website, Roblox’s platform currently sees 48 million monthly users while a March 2017 article in Bloomberg reports that Minecraft has a total of 55 million active users. (For more, see also: Can LinkedIn Become Microsoft’s Instagram?)
The Business Model
Although Roblox declined to disclose the valuation at which their recent financing round was offered, an article that was published in Forbes last summer revealed that the company had realized more than $50 million in gross revenues in the year 2015. The company primarily makes its money by selling a virtual currency to its players and also by charging a subscription fee to developers who use the platform to develop games. Roblox also takes a commission from purchases on games that were made by developers. Some of Roblox’s top game creators are reportedly making as much as $50,000 a month.
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* Minecraft introduces Minecraft Coins, which can be bought using in-app purchases on device; coins let creators set flexible prices, take share of sale Source text : bit.ly/2ojvqD6 Further company coverage:
