Computer games and healthy eating might not seem like a natural combination, but the two go hand in hand for Year 5 students at Methven Primary School in Canterbury.
Using Minecraft’s education edition, the pupils are building a virtual village, complete with a free range chicken farm, crop fields and shops to sell the produce.
Teacher Adele Warburton says Minecraft is more than just a fun computer game. She says using Minecraft as a learning tool encourages 21st century skills such as collaboration, communication, creativity and problem solving. It also teaches the children about being good digital citizens.
“We talk about how you wouldn’t rip someone’s book up, therefore you wouldn’t tear down their house in Minecraft.”
Warburton admits that her students are all better than her at Minecraft.
“They’re digital natives after all. Accepting differences is one of our school values and the kids have to accept that I’m useless.”
Director of Minecraft Education Neal Manegold said his goal is to make Minecraft: Education Edition accessible to all teachers, not just the techie types.
“We’ve baked a tutorial world into the game that is designed not only for teachers who have never played Minecraft, but teachers who have never played a computer game.”
Microsoft introduced Minecraft: Education Edition just over a year ago and the tech giant has been working hard ever since to keep up with teachers’ growing demand for the game as they begin to recognise its value as a teaching tool.
At the Bett Asia 2017 education technology summit held last week in Kuala Lumpur, teachers from all over the world got hands-on with the game in Minecraft Teacher Academy sessions.
Manegold says Minecraft can be used in and across all subjects.
“It’s not a case of teachers saying ‘ok, now it’s Minecraft time’; it’s about seamless curriculum integration.”
He points to a growing bank of Minecraft lesson plans shared by teachers, for teachers.
Most of the plans are multidisciplinary. One lesson plan tasks students with building a sustainable community on an island with limited resources, touching on literacy, geography and environmental sciences.
Manegold also says there needs to be clear evidence of students’ learning. “It’s not enough for teachers to say, ‘I’m cool, I’m using Minecraft’. Students need to be able to show the benefits of what they’re doing and what they’ve learned.”
There are tools within the game – such as virtual blackboards and non-moveable players – to allow teachers to plant resources and information. Students have access to a camera tool to take pictures of their work, and a digital book for recording and sharing their learning. They can also use Code Builder to replicate code they’ve created and use it in other applications, and pull their 3D models out of Minecraft and into other projects.
Minecraft helps kids understand the basics of coding and computer programming.
Partnering with the global Hour of Code initiative, Microsoft launched last week a new Minecraft tutorial for this year’s event in December.
However, Don Carlson, director of education for Microsoft Asia Pacific, says there’s more to Minecraft than learning to code.
“Coding empowers young people, giving them the tools they need to not only express themselves, but also transform the way they think critically and solve complex problems.”
Dr Richard Campbell of Coding Heroes in South Korea agrees.
“We shouldn’t be teaching coding for coding’s sake. It’s the creativity, critical thinking and other 21st century skills that kids utilise that are important to take away from the coding experience.”
Minecraft: Education Edition
•Launched in 2016
•2 million licensed users
• Used in 115 countries
• 70 million Minecraft Hour of Code tutorial sessions
Mojang has officially published all the big announcements from this year’s Minecon Earth live show—a much more convenient replacement for the traditional convention the company throws for its world-building game. Before we chat about the new aquatic content comign to Minecraft, we’ll get the bad news out of the way first: The game’s Super Duper Graphics pack isn’t going to arrive this year.
Instead, says Mojang, the optional downloadable content—”crammed full of excessive visual razzmatazz” for console and mobile players, including 4K HDR graphics—is going to arrive next year. Mojang didn’t offer a specific release date, but says that it’ll be updating Minecraft.net with new information as it becomes available.
Similarly, a new version of Minecraft for the Nintendo Switch that allows for cross-platform multiplayer is also being delayed until 2018.
“Nintendo has been a great partner and we’re really excited to fully bring Switch players into the fold, however, we need to make sure we deliver the best experience possible. So the new version of Minecraft will now be coming to Nintendo Switch next year. Xbox One, PC, mobile and Nintendo Switch, all playing multiplayer Minecraft together in 2018 – I’m getting emotional just thinking about it,” write Mojang’s Tom Stone.
The big content announcement from Minecon Earth is Mojang’s ‘The Update Aquatic,’ which will add lots of new watery features to Minecraft, including new fish, dolphins, coral, water physics, and explorable shipwrecks. Players will also be able to wield tridents as they adventure around—weapons you jab enemies with or throw at them. And, yes, you can enchant your trident to ensure it always returns to your hand once you’ve tossed it, the world’s most awkward boomerang.
In Mojang’s update, players will be able to catch different kinds of fish depending on the temperature of the water they’re in, and they’ll be able to create and populate aquariums for their collections. Minecraft builders will also get a chance to drop new bubble columns into their creations, and all players can go on hunts for treasure around their worlds—dolphins can help point the way to the loot, found in various structures like shipwrecks and icebergs.
Mojang didn’t indicate when The Update Aquatic would land, only that it would arrive in a future Minecraft update.
A large part of Minecraft‘s allure is showing off your work. And now, it should be relatively easy to do that in real time. Mojang has released an update that lets you livestream directly to Microsoft Mixer (its parent company’s service, naturally) from within the game on Android devices, Windows 10 PCs and Xbox One consoles. If you’ve just finished recreating an entire country, you can take people on a live tour without starting a broadcast in a separate app or service first. And your audience doesn’t have to simply watch, either.
Mixer support also lets you make aspects of your Minecraft session interactive. Viewers can vote on spawning objects (including enemies) or even change the environmental conditions. They can turn day into night to see whether you’ll survive the trip back to safety, for instance. If you’ve ever broadcast a Minecraft stream and thought it was too predictable, this could add just the right amount of chaos.
The feature isn’t available in other versions of Minecraft just yet. A mod to bring it to the classic Java-based game is coming later in 2017. Even so, this promises to make the world-building game a more social experience, whether or not your friends are ready to play.
You can’t say retailers haven’t been offering some great (slightly early) Black Friday gaming deals. From Xbox One S bundles to PS4 Pro packages, there’s been deals a plenty and we’re not even at the big day yet. But for the Nintendo Switch, GAME and Amazon are offering the Switch with a game for under £300. Take a look:
So we’re already hitting sub-£300 deals for the Switch and there’s still two days until actual Black Friday. No doubt there are plenty of consumers out there waiting for such a deal for a Switch with either Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey for such a price. Of course, we’ll tell you if that happens, so keep an eye on our best Black Friday Nintendo deals hub for the latest.
That’s right. Minecraft has officially arrived for Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) headsets. Technically, you could already play Minecraft in WMR, but you could only play on a virtual big screen. The game has been updated on Windows 10, however, allowing you to strap on your headset and step into a virtual reality world. This update has been in beta testing for over a month, so we knew it was coming.
Here’s what Microsoft said in its announcement post: “Now, Windows Mixed Reality brings you even more options to 3D-ify your crafty fun, and requires next to no set-up. Just plug the headset into the USB slot and you’re good to go.” Speaking of headsets, check out Pocket-lint’s guide here to see what is available. There are many models to choose from, including ones from Samsung, Dell, and HP.
Alongside this news, Microsoft’s Minecraft team revealed that Mixer integration has been added to the game, giving you the option to start a stream from within Minecraft. Mind you, all this has arrived before a huge update coming to Minecraft. Microsoft has been hard at work on a new engine for the game so that it can run across Windows 10, iOS, Android, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch using the same codebase.
But the most exciting part about the upcoming update, dubbed Update Aquatic, is that it will add tonnes of new features to the game’s oceanic areas, including coral reefs, shipwrecks, new aquatic species, and more. Find out what else is coming via the video above.
The next two weeks will decide the fate of the Justice League movie. It’ll open in Japan and Pakistan later this week and debuts in Lebanon on the 30th. The film should be over/under $325 million worldwide as of yesterday, with a solid $10.55m Tuesday in North America for a new $111.9m five-day cume. At least it has already passed Green Lantern and Catwoman.
It’ll be the next two weeks, specifically the Thanksgiving holiday in North America and the general worldwide legs overseas that will determine whether the film will be a disappointment or an outright money loser. The good news is that it has earned double the domestic take overseas, meaning that it may well earn triple its domestic gross worldwide. And yes, that’s good news, because we could have easily seen a situation where the film opened small and had an overseas split closer to Wonder Woman (50/50) than Batman v Superman (33/67).
I’ll go into this next week once we get more info, but Justice League may be yet another example of why/how domestic box office is still so damn important even to global-targeted would-be blockbusters. So what kind of grand total are we looking at here? Well, let’s play around with the calculator for a moment…
Come what may, if the film plays like The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 2 in terms of legs and domestic/overseas splits, then we’re looking at a $195 million domestic (that’s bad) and a $585m worldwide cume (also very bad, or less than Transformers: The Last Knight or even It). Conversely, if it plays like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I (a 2.35x multiplier), then we’re looking at a $220m domestic total, which is still lower than Logan or Fate of the Furious. Of course, Fate of the Furious made $1 billion overseas, but that’s not happening here.
Removing Wonder Woman from the equation, a 2.22x multiplier — average for the DCEU — gets the film to $210 million, while a multiplier closer to Suicide Squad (2.44x) gets it to $230m and a run closer to the Hunger Games sequels and the first Twilight gets it to around $255m. The hope-against-hope scenario is where Justice League earns decent word of mouth and plays like a well-liked general audiences family fantasy, like Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (3.1x) or even Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2.9x) or Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2.85x).
Legs like that, which will take JL anywhere from $267 million to $292m domestic. That still won’t qualify as a success, but it will argue that general audiences liked what they saw and that positioning Justice League as a season premiere (as opposed to a season finale) may pay off down the line. Apples and oranges perhaps, but Chris Nolan’s Batman Begins was not the biggest hit in the world back in 2005, earning $205m (from a $72m Wed-Sun debut) and $371m worldwide. But folks liked it, the critics liked it, and the payoff was the game-changing $1 billion+ gross of The Dark Knight.
But put that comparison aside for a moment. The other big factor is how well it plays overseas over the next two-to-three weeks. If we’re looking at a 2/1 split, then a Deathly Hallows part I run gets it to $665 million worldwide while a run like the Hunger Games sequels, the first Twilight and the earlier Harry Potter movies means a $750m-$775m global cume. The alleged word is that $700m is the break-even point, so while the movie won’t be incredibly popular, it might sneak into the black by the edge of its teeth, especially if we do get some kind of “alternate cut” on post-theatrical release.
Obviously, there are rosier scenarios, like Justice League indeed playing like Fantastic Beasts in more ways than one. That film earned a mediocre $234 million domestic but powered it overseas for an $814m global cume. And as awful as that $94m debut was, I will argue that a leggier Justice League that gets to $800m+ worldwide is a pretty okay result. If we look at Justice League not as a culmination movie but as a soft reboot/introductory title, the question becomes whether audiences like what they had to see, specifically in terms of the characters.
If they like Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman (that franchise is already gold regardless), Jason Momoa’s Aquaman (I believe in James Wan) and/or Ezra Miller’s Flash, that’s a good sign for the long haul considering the next batch of likely DC movies. And yeah, while we may not need and may not get a Man of Steel 2, there is a case to be made for tossing Henry Cavill’s “good-hearted schmuck” Superman into a later DC Films offering as an added value element, just as Marvel has done with their third shot at making Bruce Banner cool. Ditto with Ray Fisher’s Cyborg (Fisher is fine in an understated turn and more Joe Morton is always a net-plus).
In a skewed way, Justice League has found itself in a position similar to Power Rangers and Ghostbusters. Power Rangers was far better than it had any right to be, operating as a kind of sleek, low-fi, character-driven origin story that felt like a cross between Chronicle and the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. But it earned just $140 million global on a $100m budget. Ditto Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters, which offered Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon as crowd-pleasing new Ghostbusters but earned $128m domestic but just $228m worldwide on a $144m budget. Thus, both would-be franchise starters got stalled on the first try.
In both cases, the first films nailed the main characters just right but didn’t quite create a compelling story around them. And in both cases the films A) lost money, B) earned mixed or mixed-negative reviews and C) didn’t display the kind of legs that would argue for a continuation or any potential for “break out sequel” status the next go-around. But just because Justice League is probably dead doesn’t mean that DC Comics movies are toast. Wonder Woman is now WB’s most important franchise, while I would be shocked if James Wan’s Aquaman isn’t at least a crowd-pleasing, meat-and-potatoes entertainment. You don’t need a cinematic universe to have DC Comics movies.
I’ve said over the last few years that Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. is more than just Batman and Harry Potter. There is zero reason why WB can’t thrive on a stand-alone Wonder Woman series and periodic DC Comics adaptations like Flashpoint, Aquaman or Matt Reeves’ Batman movie, which will be slated alongside the LEGO films, the JK Rowling stuff, the Conjuring Universe stuff and the New Line Cinema studio programmers among other bigger and smaller movies. Heck, if Tomb Raider, Rampage, Ready Player One or The Meg hit it big next year, WB may finally be confident enough to end the DC Films cinematic universe in favor of merely making movies that are based on DC comic books.
