Teach various lessons to children like coding and history with the use of virtual worlds
Teach various lessons to children like coding and history with the use of virtual worlds
Pros
- Tons of resources for educators that include full lesson plans
- An affordable option tailored to the needs of professional educators
- Flexible control over student communications and movement
Cons
- Interface can be overwhelming to new educators
- Missing many of the features from commercial Minecraft editions
Minecraft is a game that positions players in a practically limitless world of voxel blocks and gives them the tools to create new worlds or works of art, and the Education Edition strips down some of the scale to offer a platform more focused on engaging students in educational exercises. That more limited approach may chafe players who are used to being able to do anything, but it allows educators to create a variety of virtual sandboxes that can be tailored to the specific needs of the curriculum and the class. To make it easier for educators to create sandboxes that can accurately communicate a lesson and keep students from wandering off task, they can place deny, allow, and border blocks that can control where in the virtual world students can do and how they can interact with their environment.
Also unique to Education Edition is the inclusion of a camera and a chalkboard. These new tools may be simple in functionality, but they make it far easier to communicate directly with words and pictures. Educators are also given a number of different toggles that can help them create unique environments for their students. Using the same system of biomes that standard Minecraft employs, teachers can determine everything from the size and the weather within their environment to day and night cycles. That level of control extends to direct interactions with students as well. You can teleport students back to a specific location if they stray too far and send text messages to communicate with individual students or with the whole class.
The amount of freedom that Minecraft: Education Edition offers could be intimidating to instructors who are new to the format, but it's fortunately paired with a huge library of resources to help in the entire process from learning the fundamentals to develop complex and multi-part lesson plans. Microsoft provides an entire catalog of professionally-crafted scenarios that offer everything from virtual art tours to progressive lessons in computer programming to collaborative experiences where students can learn the fundamentals of math and physics. The breadth of these lessons is expansive, and it's always growing thanks to a platform that lets instructors from around the world share biomes and scenarios with one another.
These lessons provide a more narrow approach to learning within the Minecraft ecosystem, but teachers have the liberty to take a more freedom-oriented approach to education as well. Survival mode is similar to the standard version of Minecraft, and it forces students to manage their resources to overcome their environment and carve out a space for themselves. It's an engaging approach to play that can build cooperative learning and is especially well suited towards older students and extracurricular clubs.
Pros
- Tons of resources for educators that include full lesson plans
- An affordable option tailored to the needs of professional educators
- Flexible control over student communications and movement
Cons
- Interface can be overwhelming to new educators
- Missing many of the features from commercial Minecraft editions
