Minecraft announces global launch of Education Edition
Minecraft has released Minecraft: Education Edition in schools in over 50 countries to promote creativity, teamwork and problem-solving to children. At a price of $5 per user per year, teachers can supervise classroom activity via its Classroom Mode companion app. Already, over 35,000 students and teachers have participated in the programme.
Teachers are getting the building blocks they need to lead lessons in Minecraft worlds as Microsoft launches Minecraft Education Edition.

Sometimes the push to bring tech into the classroom seems like a misguided distraction from the Three Rs, but I appreciate that anything which helps engage children is generally a good thing. Just like a box of wooden building blocks, Minecraft in the classroom can be a distracting toy or a powerful learning tool depending on how you use it.

Minecraft is getting an education overhaul to make it easier to teachers to run classes in virtual worlds. Credit: Anatoliy Babiy

Schools have been using Minecraft in the classroom for several years but effectively managing a gaggle of students in the standard game requires a level of command line Kung Fu which might be beyond some teachers. Minecraft Education Edition has been in beta for several months, after Microsoft purchased MinecraftEdu, and its official launch aims to simplify a lot of those administrative tasks as well as adding a few new tricks.

Education Edition offers tools which make it much easier for teachers to alter a Minecraft world's settings, send messages to students, teleport them to different locations and issue them with resources. You could already do these things if you had OP rights to access the command line, along with a grasp of Minecraft server commands, but with Education Edition the teacher can spend less time managing the world and more time focusing on the lesson plan.