Teachers have long used a wide variety of tools to teach students, even games. Now, Minecraft joins the ranks of titles which are both fun and educational, and you can see it in action right now! MinecraftEdu is a collaborative team of educators and programmers who seek to bring Minecraft to the classroom in affordable ways, so it can be accessible to as many schools as possible. They offer onsite workshops and in-service training to help educators use this incredible game to its fullest potential in a learning environment. In the near future, they will also be offering custom game versions, easy-to-use servers for classroom-driven SMP, a library of worlds, levels and activities to assist in activities, and more!
While still in the private beta stage, this remarkable project sets itself up to take the learning world by storm, merging learning and gaming in amazing new ways. Keep an eye out for MinecraftEdu, coming out soon!
Minecraft is horrible at TEACHING valuable lessons I have seen many a dumb ass play this game and not learn a thing. It is however a decent place to apply logistic thinking but you can't really learn anything from it. Still it should be kept out of classrooms as it will just waste students and teachers time. Then again I'm all for the game being available on school computers to play during their breaks but not as part of any proper curriculum.
If I had a child I'd want them to be educated not babysat at a pseudo arcade... They can play when they get home.
Instructions: Flip the correct switch on the wall that answers the math problem. If you get it right, the iron door will open to the next room. If you get it wrong, you fill have to deal with one of the following:
1. Lava
2. A TNT cannon
3. Arrows
4. Creepers
Now that I see it, with some building skills, Minecraft could have potential for educational use.
PVP and monsters are off by default on MinecraftEdu.
With MinecraftEdu servers, teachers can get the server up and running within three clicks and can set teacher password, which will be asked when users are logging or users can login as student if they do not know the password: http://minecraftedu.com/img/screenies/MCEdu-screenshot-27.jpg
Everything is currently localized to english and finnish, but we are adding more languages in the future.
Currently teachers can freeze/unfreeze, mute/unmute all students, but we will just write a new player list from a scratch for the next release so that teachers can invidually control students.
As for the teaching part: We will at first target it for lower grades, classes 2-6 to teach math, geography, history, languages, teamwork, creativity, but we've also been contacted from higher educational institutions with ideas like "demonstrating how production management works". At first we will be providing just MP maps, but in the future single player assignment maps and also ways for teacher to demonstrate effects in their projector.
I can imagine the teacher teaching minecraft,"How many hearts of damage does a zombie do on easy difficulty?" xD I wish they would come to our school, but its highly unlikely :sad.gif:
If I had a child I'd want them to be educated not babysat at a pseudo arcade... They can play when they get home.
Jokes aside, this seems like a great idea for teaching in my opinion.
Hmm, Wait till you get to measuring the area of a triangle ohh circles too...
1. Lava
2. A TNT cannon
3. Arrows
4. Creepers
Now that I see it, with some building skills, Minecraft could have potential for educational use.
We all have a different perception of the perfect world. Deal with it.
When i said religion i meant all types of discrimination (unreasonable ones).
But the religious one was the first one to come up on my mind.
If this comes to australia, Notch officially completed my childhood life.
Basically the premade maps are protected, so students can only build on certain areas / cannot destroy blocks from certain areas and students cannot go past map borders: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/28919118/mcEdu/24102011/10_student_protection.png
PVP and monsters are off by default on MinecraftEdu.
With MinecraftEdu servers, teachers can get the server up and running within three clicks and can set teacher password, which will be asked when users are logging or users can login as student if they do not know the password: http://minecraftedu.com/img/screenies/MCEdu-screenshot-27.jpg
Teachers will be automatically opped and they will be granted option to use the teacher panel to tweak settings, give theirselves items or set assignments to students.
Assingment window: http://minecraftedu.com/img/screenies/MCEdu-screenshot-19.jpg
Auto-completing give item panel: http://minecraftedu.com/img/screenies/MCEdu-screenshot-21.jpg
Everything is currently localized to english and finnish, but we are adding more languages in the future.
Currently teachers can freeze/unfreeze, mute/unmute all students, but we will just write a new player list from a scratch for the next release so that teachers can invidually control students.
As for the teaching part: We will at first target it for lower grades, classes 2-6 to teach math, geography, history, languages, teamwork, creativity, but we've also been contacted from higher educational institutions with ideas like "demonstrating how production management works". At first we will be providing just MP maps, but in the future single player assignment maps and also ways for teacher to demonstrate effects in their projector.
Hope this clarifies some points.
Best,
Aleksi
I think I will suggest that to my group