Learning can be fun. Just ask the creators of MinecraftEdu.
This “remixed” version of Mojang’s hit creation/survival game uses powerful world-building tools to enhance classroom lessons in a language that young students are familiar with: video games. The newly announced Minecraft: Education Edition aims to build on that foundation, with some help from a new Microsoft acquisition.
Under a new parent company’s direction, MinecraftEdu will expand on its existing success with a wider set of features aimed at assisting teachers and giving students the tools they need to learn. The current plan is for a free trial to launch this summer, with existing MinecraftEdu customers enjoying their first year under the new “Education Edition” heading for free.
If the details sound hazy here, that’s because they are. The intention is to rely on a community of educators to help shape this new version of Minecraft, with the website education.minecraft.edu offering lesson plans, discussion forums and a mechanism for delivering feedback.
Here’s what a new FAQ has to say about how Education Edition builds on MinecraftEdu:
MinecraftEdu is a modified version of Minecraft developed for schools and sold by a company called TeacherGaming. Minecraft: Education Edition builds on the early learnings from MinecraftEdu, while growing and expanding its feature set. Working with the MinecraftEdu creators Joel Levin and Santeri Koivisto, we started with all the learnings from the EDU edition, and built its key features into the Minecraft: Education Edition. We also added new features including login and personalization, the student portfolio feature, a second screen experience for teachers, and the ability to save student progress.
The FAQ also notes that the plan is to price Education Edition licenses — each user, student or teacher, needs one — at $5 per license, per year.
That’s a shift away from MinecraftEdu’s pricing, which is built as a one-time cost of $18 per license (or $14 per license if more than 25 are purchased) and $41 for the server software required to rope all students in one classroom into a single world. MinecraftEdu also offers cloud-based server hosting that, for a $25 monthly fee, simplifies setup and execution, and offers technical support.
In terms of raw numbers, setting a classroom of 25 students up with MinecraftEdu carries a one-time cost of $391 — and that’s the end of it unless the educator opts for outsourced server hosting. The Education Edition pricing for a classroom of 25 would — assuming the FAQ’s target price doesn’t change — come out to $130 per year (assuming 26 licenses, since the teacher needs one as well).
The subscription pricing falls in line with a larger shift in recent years toward subscription pricing for Microsoft products like Office, but there’s no denying that it’s more costly in the long-term for educators. With so many unanswered questions at this point as to how Education Edition improves on MinecraftEdu, that added cost is hard to accept.
It’s great that Microsoft is moving to further support education with something like Minecraft: Education Edition — but the company’s got a lot of questions to answer about what new features it’s offering before that summer trial launches. Read more…