Pi Minecraft Vs Minecraft Education Edition

Minecraft Education is a polished product, but it comes with a premium $5 per user per year.  Each student will need a Microsoft 365 account, so its personal to them.  There's some great features such as shared worlds and a great graphics engine designed for modern PCs and macs. I'd also stress that this is a fully featured PC version of Minecraft with Survival mode and some good features for teacher control.

However, Minecraft on the Pi is free, you just need to update to the latest version of Raspbian. If you already have Pis then you can simply get on and use it!

Now at this price if you want a lot of students to use Minecraft then you could actually buy quite a lot of Raspberry Pi hardware to play it on.  The other big advantage is that its the version that lets you use Python to build. If you've got 400 students who you'd like to play Minecraft once in a while then officially you should be paying $2000 for that experience per year.  If you invested that in buying Pis you get a version of Minecraft and so much more!


The costing for this will very much be down to individual schools and their setups. Some will have keyboards, Mice, Monitors that can be used with Raspberry Pis and others will have none of this, but as far as teaching potential is concerned the Pi brings a wealth of creative opportunities including a highly hackable version of Minecraft.

On the other hand if this is an after school club the loss of survival mode will be a big deal for most students and takes away a lot of their fun! Its also possible that students could pay for their subscription, which they will then be able to use anywhere.

First Review of Minecraft Education

We go through our first test of Minecraft Education! You will need an Office365 educators account, which can be setup with a school email at: http://education.minecraft.net/  

Installation is much easier than the old version and the game engine is much better too, but the fact that ComputercraftEDU is no longer there and this version is unmoddable is disappointing. Watch the video to see it in action!  Let me know your thoughts below.

Minecraft Mega Structures

My Little Minecraft Pi project!

This is my Raspberry Pi project.  It's great to use Minecraft to create buildings, but the power of doing it programmatically is that you can create whole streets and towns.  This basic Python code will produce a street of skyscrapers.  

There's a lot of potential here and I am sure it would make the basis for some great lessons. What's great fun is as soon as you show people the idea people run with it & think of all sorts of refinements.

Here's the Python code, I hope it all makes sense. 

# Setup Minecraft library
from mcpi import minecraft
mc = minecraft.Minecraft.create()
#Get player position
x, y, z = mc.player.getPos()
#Terraforming - Create air
mc.setBlocks(x-30, y, z-30, x+500, y+39, z+40, 0)
#Make a grassy area
mc.setBlocks(x-30, y-1, z-30, x+500, y-2, z+40, 2)
#Loop to create 6 buildings
for builder in range (0,5):
    # Create stone block
    mc.setBlocks(x+1, y-1, z+1, x+11, y+40, z+11, 1)
    # Make it hollow
    mc.setBlocks(x+2, y, z+2, x+10, y+39, z+10, 0)
    #Create a series of windows
    for glwin in range (0,4):
        mc.setBlocks(x+2, y+(glwin*10), z+1, x+2, y+(glwin*10+3), z+1, 20)
        mc.setBlocks(x+6, y+(glwin*10), z+1, x+6, y+(glwin*10+3), z+1, 20)
        mc.setBlocks(x+8, y+(glwin*10), z+1, x+8, y+(glwin*10+3), z+1, 20)
        mc.setBlocks(x+2, y+(glwin*10), z+11, x+3, y+(glwin*10+3), z+11, 20)
        mc.setBlocks(x+6, y+(glwin*10), z+11, x+7, y+(glwin*10+3), z+11, 20)
        mc.setBlocks(x+8, y+(glwin*10), z+11, x+9, y+(glwin*10+3), z+11, 20)
    #Create door to see inside
    mc.setBlock(x+2, y, z+1, 71)
    mc.setBlock(x+2, y+1, z+1, 71)
    x+=25

Minecraft's Role in The Classroom

We had a great Inset on Tuesday where we used Minecraft in an ECA. In fact, what was particularly useful was that rather than have CPD where everybody gathers in a room and talks ABOUT students. We ran our CPD inside the classroom with the students right there to talk to and see what they felt about the experiences they were having.  The students in the class were building 7 wonders of the world in Minecraft. (This is my reflection on that discussion, rather than notes from the discussion.)

The question is, how can it be taken from an ECA and used within the curriculum?  

Successes So Far

We have seen a few successful implementations of Minecraft within the curriculum. Tanglin has created a great citizenship unit, which teaches types of governance.  They use a world MinecraftEDU and change the kinds of government.

There are also some great units available for teaching history

James York has used it extensively to provide prompts for writing and as an engagement tool.  See his TED talk

Coding

The ability make mods and program parts of Minecraft is a real boon to hook students into coding. As well as MinecraftEDU.  There's a great version for the Raspberry Pi.  Kano have done a great job of enabling the visual programming of Minecraft. For the more advanced, you can download Minecraft and use Python to play with the program on almost any version of Raspbian.


Another option is LearnToMod  (Currently $30 per year)

Installation

Installing MinecraftEDU is not the most straightforward of installs on a network and on the PC, we had to spend quite a bit of time getting it right, so that it could be accessed across all accounts.  It's fiddly and can cause problems. 

On our network, one Desktop PC can support up to about 12 clients on a world that is on a hard-wired internet connection and wirelessly a laptop can support 6 others. It is highly variable and you would need to test it on your school network to know what can be supported.

On the other hand, the Raspberry Pi edition was very simple to do, but does require somebody with either a basic knowledge of Linux or the pre-built Kano kit. 

Probably the simplest way to get access to Minecraft is on a tablet. Most seven year olds can hook it up and be playing using a peer based server in seconds. 

The Challenges Ahead

The difficulty with these implementations is the time taken to create a world and the educational benefits from that world. Few teachers have the time or the know-how to develop a complete world fro their students.  So far, what I have seen available on MinecraftEDU are a few worlds with relatively specific educational teaching points.   It is in fact, replacing a video as a prompt or creating a place for students to explore.

Perhaps one solution is to use student clubs to make the worlds and then use classroom time to either explore the world or watch a video of the world?