Minecraft Edu - Minecraft in schools?

[RJohnson91]

Hi all,

 

This morning a student approached me and asked why we 'don't have minecraft in the school'.

 

I responded with the obvious, you aren't here to play games blah blah, but he went on to explain to me that there was an 'educational version' so I laughed and ignored him.

 

However after a little bit of youtubing I found '

', now I may be late on finding this so just laugh if you all knew about it and im in the dark!

 

But my question is, would you / have you ever tried to put this in place in your school?

 

If you have, how have you made it relevant to the curriculum?

 

Ryan

[rich_tech]

I think its been discussed in ours in a preliminary sort of way

[RJohnson91]

I think its been discussed in ours in a preliminary sort of way

 

Yeah, it would be interested to see if anyone has actually impremented it in anyway.

 

I can see how it would be fun for the kids, I personally think minecraft is awesome, but not for a learning environment. I can see how this would be good to get them to learn minecraft, but as to learning different subjects, I have no idea!

 

Ryan

[localzuk]

There's a discussion about this here - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/gaming/89842-minecraft-edu.html

 

Basically, the possibilities with using Minecraft are amazing really. Live demonstrations of desertification in geography, engaging the more geeky kids in a drama production by allowing them to build a set in Minecraft which they then overlay their greenscreen'd performance onto, Historic reconstructions etc...

 

Some things could be 'full class' (like the demonstration for geography) but much would be individual learning stuff for those that would learn better through it (just like a kid in our school had to make a castle in their history lesson so they baked a castle cake).

[Cloud2012]

Also it would make for a good history lesson, the kids would be able to have a go at mining. Now before you say that it sounds dumb it's actually not, in minecraft you get chance to go mining and make good use of your resources that you gather in the game. You can mine coal and use it to create torches. chop down trees and use the wood to build houses, gather clay to make bricks and build houses, basically anything you can think of you can build. Now can you imagine how much a primary school kid will learn from this and i'd say alot

 

Edit: You even get to make your own bed out of the wood you got from the trees and the wool you got from your sheep, now how cool is that Also I saw some people on a server one day who made their own wheat and pumpkin farms. I could discuss this all day as I play the game alot.

Edited December 7, 2012 by Cloud2012

[bushby]

iv started to look at doing it here with some of the kids to build a working city. so it gives the kids something they can be proud to play insted of just killing things

 

the only issue i have is authentication with the account server

 

however the cost of the minecraft education is a bit to much imo. so i will be doing account checks eg get them to log on to the site from my laptop

[TotalGeek]

I am very interested in this as it has been asked for by my SLT via a student. I have been trying to get normal minecraft through my smoothwall but not fully happy about how it is working.

 

However I will try this as they state that I will not need to get through smoothwall.. Yipppeee!

 

Edit: has anybody got the normal Minecraft server working in their proxied enviroment?

Edited December 7, 2012 by TotalGeek