Children were able to use TNT to blow up one of the houses in the middle to start the fire - it gave them the chance to see the enormity of it. “We saw one school building a simulation of the great fire of London. “Some of the simulations we’ve seen are incredible,” says Deirdre Quarnstrom, who’s heading up the Education Edition project at Microsoft, after three years as chief of staff on Xbox. The game includes elements of building, farming, mining and engineering, so teachers have used it to explore everything from architecture and physics to ecology, sustainable agriculture and history.ĭuring the Bett presentation, Microsoft showed how a school in Scotland got children to redesign Dundee’s waterfront area in Minecraft, while sixth grade pupils at a school in Seattle used the game to model a river and learn about its ecosystem by damming the flow in different locations. So what will this work actually entail? Schools have already been using Minecraft for several years in a variety of projects. Pupils can use the new in-game camera to take snapshots and selfies Photograph: Microsoft It is, according to Microsoft, more intuitive and adaptable than using the Print Screen function, and also allows teachers a better method of assessing student work. Subsequent images are automatically placed in a zip file which downloads to their desktops – and to their teacher’s machine. This allows children to quickly and easily take photos and videos of their projects, or even put the camera on a tripod to take selfies. The new game also adds a camera to the inventory. It could also be used to restrain building projects, requiring students to work within more confined spaces and thereby think more carefully about construction space and impact. The former is an invisible block type that can be placed around a model to stop pupils modifying it – it’s designed to stop the sort of vandalising and trolling that can ruin multiplayer classroom building sessions. There is, for example, a better in-game map – now called the Locator Map – which, when a class is playing together in a shared Minecraft world, lets everyone see exactly where everyone else is and what they’re doing – handy for teachers who want to keep a close eye on wayward pupils.Īlso useful for guiding activities in the world are two new teacher-only controls: Build Deny and Build Allow. The new product features a complete version of Minecraft Windows 10 Edition, the refreshed version of the main game released as a beta last year, but adds extra functionality for teachers. Minecraft: Education Edition will effectively be a replacement, developed in-house at Mojang in cooperation with a team at Microsoft’s Redmond campus. That product was designed and distributed by a small Finnish-American outfit, TeacherGaming, and while Microsoft says it won’t shut EDU down, the game won’t be receiving any new updates or support. Just a week before Bett, the company announced that it had purchased MinecraftEDU, an educational version of the game, which was already being used in hundreds of schools all over the world. Minecraft is a big attraction and Microsoft knows it. There is a constant throng of excitable children, all desperate to play. Behind the stage there’s a demo area with dozens of laptops running an early version of the new edition – all lined up on tables designed to resemble the game’s simple wooden blocks. As the company representative highlights the main features, spectators photograph every single powerpoint slide.
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