<story><title>Announcing Minecraft: Education Edition</title><url>http://education.minecraft.net/announce011916/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fluxquanta</author><text>&amp;gt;Its a good starting place for showing kids in a familiar environment what they can do with programming.&lt;p&gt;Is it, though? Admittedly it&amp;#x27;s been a while but I feel like once you get beyond the absolute basics of circuitry Minecraft gets ridiculously complicated in terms of building the structures necessary to establish the circuitry (just search YouTube for the monstrosities that are necessary to build simple adders in Minecraft). At that point you&amp;#x27;re not really learning anything except how to play Minecraft.&lt;p&gt;When a student&amp;#x27;s at middle or high school level I feel like LEGO Mindstorms or even Arduinos would be a better option.</text></item><item><author>a2tech</author><text>Many middle schools&amp;#x2F;high schools in my area teach computer science (programming mostly) with Minecraft. Its a good starting place for showing kids in a familiar environment what they can do with programming.</text></item><item><author>fluxquanta</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m very familiar with Minecraft -- I still have the PayPal receipt for when I sent 10 Euro to Mojang to get in on the beta back in 2010 (which seems like ages ago).&lt;p&gt;But, I ask innocently and without agenda, how is this used as a tool for educators? I know kids love it, and I understand why, but quotes like&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Since the introduction of Minecraft to the classroom, educators around the world have been using Minecraft to effectively teach students everything from STEM subjects to art and poetry.&lt;p&gt;make me wonder what exactly is the benefit of using Minecraft in the classroom from an educational perspective? Are lessons actually being planned around Minecraft, or is it like the video games I played in &amp;quot;computer lab&amp;quot; which were just a convenient way to get a group of 30 second graders to be quiet for 45 minutes?  What&amp;#x27;s the benefit of using Minecraft over traditional teaching tools, other than shoehorning lessons into something kids are already familiar with?&lt;p&gt;I realize that this comment may sound like it&amp;#x27;s coming from a place of bitter skepticism, but I&amp;#x27;m genuinely curious.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Bjartr</author><text>Your comment is spot on for vanilla Minecraft, however this is MinecraftEdu which includes ComputerCraftEdu which has both a tile-based and text-based programming environment (based on Lua). It seems fairly well designed[1].&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;services.minecraftedu.com&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Teaching_with_ComputerCraftEdu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;services.minecraftedu.com&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Teaching_with_Computer...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Announcing Minecraft: Education Edition</title><url>http://education.minecraft.net/announce011916/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fluxquanta</author><text>&amp;gt;Its a good starting place for showing kids in a familiar environment what they can do with programming.&lt;p&gt;Is it, though? Admittedly it&amp;#x27;s been a while but I feel like once you get beyond the absolute basics of circuitry Minecraft gets ridiculously complicated in terms of building the structures necessary to establish the circuitry (just search YouTube for the monstrosities that are necessary to build simple adders in Minecraft). At that point you&amp;#x27;re not really learning anything except how to play Minecraft.&lt;p&gt;When a student&amp;#x27;s at middle or high school level I feel like LEGO Mindstorms or even Arduinos would be a better option.</text></item><item><author>a2tech</author><text>Many middle schools&amp;#x2F;high schools in my area teach computer science (programming mostly) with Minecraft. Its a good starting place for showing kids in a familiar environment what they can do with programming.</text></item><item><author>fluxquanta</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m very familiar with Minecraft -- I still have the PayPal receipt for when I sent 10 Euro to Mojang to get in on the beta back in 2010 (which seems like ages ago).&lt;p&gt;But, I ask innocently and without agenda, how is this used as a tool for educators? I know kids love it, and I understand why, but quotes like&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Since the introduction of Minecraft to the classroom, educators around the world have been using Minecraft to effectively teach students everything from STEM subjects to art and poetry.&lt;p&gt;make me wonder what exactly is the benefit of using Minecraft in the classroom from an educational perspective? Are lessons actually being planned around Minecraft, or is it like the video games I played in &amp;quot;computer lab&amp;quot; which were just a convenient way to get a group of 30 second graders to be quiet for 45 minutes?  What&amp;#x27;s the benefit of using Minecraft over traditional teaching tools, other than shoehorning lessons into something kids are already familiar with?&lt;p&gt;I realize that this comment may sound like it&amp;#x27;s coming from a place of bitter skepticism, but I&amp;#x27;m genuinely curious.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>It would depend on what this initiative does. I&amp;#x27;m hoping this looks more like an official path to modding-like tools that may not offer the whole complexity of the world, but would allow things like programmatic world generation and possibly interactive entity AI, etc. I would tend to agree that redstone, for all its possibilities, is not really a very good educational mechanic beyond the basics on its own. In Brooks&amp;#x27; terminology, redstone has &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; too much accidental complexity for what little essential complexity it could expose... it&amp;#x27;s the opposite of what I&amp;#x27;d want in my education. What little time I&amp;#x27;ve spent fiddling with it has involved &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; too much very, very, very low-level physical routing (and a lot of time wishing I could stick redstone on the &lt;i&gt;side&lt;/i&gt; of a block).</text></comment>