Last week, CEE released two free Minecraft lesson plans providing teachers in grades 3 to 5 nationwide the opportunity to further engage their students on the subject of economics via one of the most popular games in the world.
The lesson plans are designed for students to explore how to make smart economic choices in a team setting. When playing Minecraft, groups of students will evaluate the costs and benefits to help determine the types of resources needed to build a structure. In turn, when they’ve created a structure in Minecraft, they will reflect on how their economic decisions made a positive or negative impact on their built environment.
“Only 20 states require students to take a course in high school economics and it’s our mission to ensure kids at every age are given the opportunity to learn key economic concepts,” said Nan Morrison, CEO and president of CEE, in a statement. “Using Minecraft is a fun and easy way to teach kids about fundamental life skills —choices, costs and benefits — all core principles of economics.”
CEE will continue to develop free Minecraft lesson plans tied to economic concepts for teachers to use in the classroom. To view the two free lesson plans, visit these sites:
Teachers can sign up for a trial of Minecraft: Education Edition by visiting the Minecraft Education website.
CEE is a nonprofit organization that focuses on the economic and financial education of K–12 students. The organization provides free economic and personal finance lessons and resources for educators at its site EconEdLink.
To help address some issues introduced after the release of 1.42 on Tuesday, 4J Studios has released Minecraft update 1.43 for PlayStation 4. Here’s the bugs it fixes:
Fix for MCCE-4226 – Wrong LOD showing for non-block item icons in the UI.
Fix for MCCE-4227 – Nether portals sending players to the wrong portals.
Fix for seeds always appearing as “0” in Load World menu.
Fix for MCCE-4321 – Player may fall through the block below them when jumping in a confined space e.g small tunnel.
“We’re currently working on a bug fix update to address issues found in the last update,” 4J wrote on Twitter yesterday. “Thanks for your patience.”
An ETA for the update on other platforms wasn’t given.
Discussing the recently released Fallout Battle Map Pack, 4J Art Director David Keningale said:
We tried out various different scenarios to see how they would look as Battle maps and we could quickly see Fallout would fit really well. But we knew we couldn’t just take anything from Fallout’s open world and hope it worked: Battle maps have to be pretty self-contained. By contrast, we did think about doing things in a Vault but we felt it was too enclosed for the way that Battle plays and you might get lost in the tunnels a little bit too much. So we decided to take it above ground and condense some of our favorite areas from across the series.
The Fallout Battle Map Pack is available for $1.99 USD/£1.99 and includes three maps: Libertalia, Capitol, and the General Atomics Galleria.
[Source: 4J Studios (1), (2), Minecraft Forum, Minecraft] Read more at http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2017/03/03/minecraft-update-1-43-live-ps4-addresses-issues-1-42/#2LDGxKpshcvvQ0dt.99
We call Minecraft today’s Super Mario because the level of excitement and engagement this game has is just like Super Mario. Based on the cultural formula, the game is not just a game but an educational tool. Too much of our excitement, the sale milestone has just crossed 121 million copies!
From 121 million sold copies, every month 55 million people play this game on average. This is the first official sales and engagement update since June when Microsoft confirmed 100 million sales and 40 million unique monthly players.
Minecraft – 121 million copies sold
Back in the year 2014, Minecraft was taken over by Microsoft for just $2.5 billion. At the time of the deal, Persson mention in the news that “It’s not about the money. It’s about my sanity.”
Minecraft is available on PC and all major consoles, as well as smartphones. Looking ahead, Minecraft and Minecraft: Story Mode is headed to Nintendo Switch. In 2014, Xbox boss Phil Spencer addressed the possibility of developing a Minecraft sequel.
I don’t know if Minecraft 2 if that’s the thing that makes the most sense,
he said at the time.
The community around Minecraft is as strong as any community out there. We need to meet the needs and the desires of what the community has before we get permission to go off and do something else.
A few months ago Minecraft was in the news for its update on Windows Phone on which Marsh Davies spoke to a newspaper, saying that
We stopped shipping Minecraft updates for Windows Phone 8 back in October last year, Of course, players can still carry on building and explore their worlds as they always have, but, to get access to the newest Minecraft goodies, DLC, and other fun stuff, you’ll have to upgrade to the Windows 10 Mobile version of the game.
The Minecraft franchise continues to soar. Microsoft announced today that the series has passed 121 million copies sold and 55 million unique players. This is the first official sales and engagement update since June, when Microsoft confirmed 100 million sales and 40 million unique monthly players.
Microsoft celebrated the new Minecraft milestones today with some animated GIFs that speak to the enormity of the sandbox game as it relates to sales and monthly users.
At the time the buyout was announced, Persson said about the deal: “It’s not about the money. It’s about my sanity.”
Minecraft is available on PC and all major consoles, as well as smartphones. Looking ahead, Minecraft and Minecraft: Story Mode are headed to Nintendo Switch.
“I don’t know if Minecraft 2, if that’s the thing that makes the most sense,” he said at the time. “The community around Minecraft is as strong as any community out there. We need to meet the needs and the desires of what the community has before we get permission to go off and do something else.”
Being the biggest game in the world means you never stop growing, like a completely out of control katamari. Such it is that Minecraft 1.12 has begun development, with snapshot 17w06a available to the public and thoroughly analysed for new bits and blocks. Here’s the basics.
Can create patterns by being placed in certain ways.
Wool and Banner blocks got new textures, while various bug fixes and quality of life changes were applied, as laid out on the wiki. The change to Wool also effected Sheep. Naturally.
The only wider-scope change is the addition of savable toolbars in creative mode, letting you more easily make that giant statue of Mega Man, or whatever it is you get up to in there. Unsurprisingly, you can have nine of them as they use the number keys for loading and saving – ctrl+# and shift+# respectively.
Some more deets over on the official wiki. Goodness knows when it could release, but there’s usually a few of these before it all goes live and Mojang have been working out the deets on 1.12 since late last year.
YouTuber LowSpecGamer makes a living out of making games playable on the weakest computers, reducing games to their most basic visual components so they can run on rigs made of balsa wood and held together with duct tape. He’s already tackled a range of modern games, including The Witcher 3, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dishonored, but his latest video — for Valve’s bona fide classic Half-Life 2 — represents his biggest graphical reduction yet.
By removing shadows, weapon effects, textures, water reflections, and even character teeth, LowSpecGamer makes Half-Life 2 look peculiarly like Minecraft. Vehicles, buildings, and mountains morph until they look like they’re built of that game’s pixellated blocks, so much so that you’d expect Gordon Freeman to pull out a pickaxe and dig his way out of City 17.
It might not be a hugely sustainable way to play Half-Life 2 — especially when the sky looks like a Lovecraftian nightmare hellscape — but it does make the game run like greased lightning on a PC the size of a USB stick. So tweakable is the 13-year-old game that the Intel Atom CPU powering the Intel Compute Stick barely breaks a sweat, and with almost every visual effect removed, is capable of running it at more than 160 frames per second. If you want to copy his methods, LowSpecGamer provides a handy guide for Half-Life 2, and many other games, through his YouTube channel.
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