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MinecraftEdu?!

Mr_Jiminy

By Mr_Jiminy
in Educational Software

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dhicks

dhicks

Posted
Posted
Is anyone using the MinecraftEdu under the new $5 per head scheme?

 

Specifically, does anyone have any idea who we actually give that $5 to? The Minecraft: Education Edition website itself is rather vague, when you click on "Get Started" you get prompted to put in a school email address, and you can download the client, but we can't find anywhere where we pay Microsoft any money. We've contacted our usual Microsoft license provider, through whom we license Windows and Office and so on, to see about a site license, but they seem unsure as to how we go about getting a site license, too.

 

The place I was expecting to be able to assign licenses is the Office 365 licensing centre, where you can buy licenses to assign specific users, but I can't find any mention of Minecraft there, either.

dhicks

dhicks

Posted
Posted
Looks to me like you have to buy it through the Windows Store for Business and deploy it out as a licensed Modern App through SCCM or something.

 

Ah! That looks encouraging - we're planning to deploy on Mac OS, so I've got the Mac OS version ready to deploy, I've bought 30 licenses and assigned myself one, let's give it a try...

  • 4 weeks later...
dhicks

dhicks

Posted
Posted
I've been tasked to looking into this for the school and not sure where to start.

 

Just to update this thread to answer the original question: we now have Minecraft Education Edition working for pupils with our after-school Minecraft club. First we synced our existing users in Active Directory with Office 365 - this process is less complicated than it used to be (the use of ADFS is no longer required), see this thread:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/178481-azure-ad-connect-thoughts.html

 

Then we had to purchase and assign licenses for the pupils and the staff who would be running the club. This doesn't seem to be done from the Office 365 dashboard, you have to go to the separate Windows Store For Business, as Blue_Cookeh pointed out:

 

https://businessstore.microsoft.com/en-us/app-detail/9NBLGGH4R2R6/0016/00000000000000000000000000000000/online

 

I found the process easy enough - I purchased licenses using my school credit card, and assigned individual licenses to the pupils and staff in the club, only about 30 licneses, so easy enough to do by hand. If you don't have a credit card I'm not quite sure how you go about purchasing via invoice or similar, and there didn't seem to be an obvious way to bulk-assign licenses, I had to enter individual users.

 

The licenses you are buying are per user, and Minecraft Education Edition requires you to log in with your account before you can do anything. This works out quite well - you can install the client on as many computers as you like and give out copies / links for home installation, then pupils can log in from home with their school account. We are using Minecraft in our Mac suite, I'm not sure about installation details on Windows 10, but I imagine it's simply a case of running an installer in the usual way.

 

I don't run the Minecraft after-school club, so that's the end of my involement. Speaking to the chap running the club, it seems that he logs in to one of the machine in the ICT suite and starts up a world for the rest of the devices to connect to. We've installed an extra set of Minecraft utilities (available from the Minecraft website I think - sorry, not too sure, I just got handed an installer file to run) on the machine he uses that sets the machine up as the "teacher" machine. There doesn't seem to be a way to do this on a per-user basis instead, it seems to be per-machine.

 

I've set aside a Windows 10 VM for the Minecraft club teacher to use, with the idea that he would run a persistant world on there that the pupils could then connect to, but I'm not sure if he's made any use of that yet. He seems to think the persistant world is stored on whatever machine he happens to be running Minecraft on at the time, but I haven't checked if this is true or not - the world (and, indeed, server that the clients are connecting to) could be away in The Cloud somewhere.

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mavhc

mavhc

Posted
Posted

If you're paying per year I'd expect the server to be hosted by MS

 

I assume you could just create 30 accounts, minecraft1@school etc and use those instead of assign to real people.

GuyJD

GuyJD

Posted
Posted
The licenses you are buying are per user, and Minecraft Education Edition requires you to log in with your account before you can do anything. This works out quite well - you can install the client on as many computers as you like and give out copies / links for home installation, then pupils can log in from home with their school account. We are using Minecraft in our Mac suite, I'm not sure about installation details on Windows 10, but I imagine it's simply a case of running an installer in the usual way.
Do the licenses remain under the control of the school or are they transferred to the Student? What happens if a student leaves the Minecraft club, can you revoke the license and assign it to another user?
dhicks

dhicks

Posted
Posted
Do the licenses remain under the control of the school or are they transferred to the Student? What happens if a student leaves the Minecraft club, can you revoke the license and assign it to another user?

 

Yes, they are transferable, so if a pupil leaves Minecraft club we can use their license for someone else. Another good point was raised above - the price is $5 (£3.something) per year, not a one-off.

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dhicks

dhicks

Posted
Posted
My understanding is from March 2017 pricing is going be available within OVS-ES/ ESS agreements.

 

Oddly, they already seem to be available for EES agreements, just not for OVS-ES.

Michael

Michael

Posted
Posted

Windows 10 1511 or later (to be precise). Not sure if you need the Edu version, but I have only tried it on this version (1607).

 

I'm hoping it'll be included in Redstone 2 as a default App, so you have to just buy into it (would make sense).

 

I did contact our VL provider recently and they knew nothing about it... I left it like that for the time being, but if someone can shed some light that'd be great. As per usual, Microsoft's licensing clear as mud.

Blue_Cookeh

Blue_Cookeh

Posted
Posted
What sort of machines are people running this on? All of ours are running variations of Intel HD Graphics (onboard) on Netbooks or Intel NUCs (all on Windows 10 CB), so I'm wondering how well they'd cope. I suppose I could just try one but I'm just interested to hear other's experiences too.
dhicks

dhicks

Posted
Posted
What sort of machines are people running this on?

 

We're running Minecraft on 6-month-old iMacs with 21.5" monitors, 2.8Ghz quad-core i5, 8GB of RAM and 1TB fusion drives. If you open Minecraft at its standard resolution in non-fullscreen mode it looks ridiculously small, taking up about a quater of the desktop. It's not the most demanding of applications by modern gaming standards. The NUCs should handle it very nicly, I guess you'll just have to try the netbooks and see how you get on.

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