Minecraft: Education Edition Recommended By Microsoft In Class: Will It Help Students With Their Lessons?

With an aim to make things better for educational institutions, Microsoft launched "Minecraft: Education Edition." It is a new version of Minecraft that includes some classroom tools and a way to roll out accounts to students in district or in class.

Since last January, the app is being developed by Microsoft when it bought a mod working toward the same goal. Microsoft hopes to have it ready by the opening of classes.

The educational tools went into a beta period during summer. It might have missed the tentative date by few months but the game is now ready to go for both MacOS and Windows 10, as reported by The Verge.

With this app, students can explore their lessons in a different way. Setting aside its name of Education Edition, it is not drastically different from the regular Minecraft. This edition is quite similar to the same game, only some tools are changed to make it easier for teachers to use.

For instance, teachers will be able to see where all the students are. It is possible using the map available with this version. Teachers can also give students various resources and can teleport users to specific locations. Few new in-game items, such as the camera and chalkboard, were also developed.

Microsoft launched "Minecraft: Education Edition" in hopes that the teachers can use it as a means of exploring their subjects while the students are engaged to it. Educators can find it instrumental in building worlds which they can connect to their subjects, whether it is in a setting of a book or a historic structure. For instance, a block model of the human eye has been created, made for students to explore what is inside and to find out how it works.

Lesson plans and worlds will be collected in the website but it will not be up to Microsoft. Teachers have the freedom to create instructive worlds.

The pitfall of this edition is that creating a Minecraft world can be quite time-consuming which means it will be another burden on the part of the educators. The success of "Minecraft: Education Edition" is on the hands of the community of educators.