#Classroom minecraft education edition free

As we round the corner into 2021, we want to enter a new year with a spirit of hope and celebration by looking back over some of this year’s most exciting moments. Hopefully, Minecraft: Education Edition will enable teachers to help my kids become better equipped than I am.2020 has had its ups and downs for sure, but in spite of all the challenges facing educators and students, incredible things have been happening around the world. And seeing how as I’m not a member of Generation Blockhead, my education and formative experiences did not equip me with adequate ways to make sense of this bifurcated existence. Things get complicated when there are both virtual and material worlds. Perhaps they’re really bringing the classroom into the block-universe. So it only makes sense that teachers should begin to bring the block-universe into the classroom.īut wait…maybe I’ve got this all wrong. But now that kids spend less time outside and unsupervised it happens in the world of Minecraft. In the past, much of the integration of that material happened in familiar, material world ways. They need to let them sink in, to become part of their being, to empower them as autonomous individuals. This is one reason why recess is such an important part of the school day it is not because kids need a break, but rather because they need the space to experiment, in unstructured ways, with the things that they’re learning. They see how the learning they do in school can be applied in playful spaces. When kids play, they take these conceptual structures into social settings and try them on. That’s all academic subject really are-ways of thinking, interacting, and articulating experience. Especially if you consider that what children learn in school are the languages and frameworks with which to make meaning out of the world. Of course, being the location of such important formative experiences is no small matter. Today, however, without a place to act out imaginative narratives, to make meaning out of emplaced experience, kids find their best opportunities in the virtual reality of the block-universe. Consider the fact that the term “free-range parenting” would have been unthinkable just two generations ago. It is so uncommon, in fact, that we debate it as if it were an alternative parenting strategy. We’re living at a time in human history during which kids have very little unsupervised playtime in the material world. And even kids whose parents put strict limits on screen time discover their freest and most creative experiences in the block-universe.

#Classroom minecraft education edition free

Kids with permissive parents spend most, if not all, of their free time in the virtual Minecraft landscape. Minecraft forms the playground for this generation. The game is so popular and is such a prominent part of kids’ everyday experience that I’ve advocated naming the current generation of tweens and pre-teens: “Generation Blockhead.” And I don’t mean that in a negative or insulting way. There will also be a new “Minecraft Mentors” page where newbies can seek guidance from more experienced teacher/players.Īt the time of this writing over 22.2 Million people have purchased the PC/Mac version of Minecraft. Community pages at will host crowd-sourced lesson plans and curriculum ideas. The folks at Mojang and Microsoft are always protective of the grassroots community that helped make Minecraft the most popular game in the world so they want educators to be involved in shaping the product themselves.