Minecraft in the Classroom: Gaining Approval and Purchasing the Game

The world I have created for students to plot their missions

Chapter 2:

Selling High and Buying Low

Getting Approval from The Big Three:

There are really only three people you need to convince in order to upload Minecraft at your school.  Once those three are on board, you are ready for your adventure into the never ending abyss.

#1 Your site IT expert 

This may be the hardest person to convince, because they will most likely be doing all the work of loading it onto every computer.  Find some time to sit them down in the computer lab to review the website minecraftedu.com.  There you will quickly find what specs are needed and if your internet can handle the bandwidth.  Before purchasing the game, it is very important do download a sample to make sure it can run smoothly on your computers.  If the graphics look like they are not in the 21st century, that is okay, the game is supposed to look like that.  Don't be discouraged, just think, they are getting a glimpse into how we experienced gaming at their age.

#2 Your principal. 

Most likely, if you have an open minded principal you should have no problem here.  The game will cost under $20 dollars a student to run which should not be too huge of a burden if you are working with one grade level or even a class.  We spent $466 dollars for 25 students to each build a California mission, create a community of laws, and work peacefully side by side.  For the amount of standards that addresses, I say that is a pretty good deal.

#3 Your-realalistic-self.

This is the most important person you need to convince.  It sounds fun and all, but you honestly need to take the time to invest, watch videos, and learn from your students the insides and outs of the game. When you purchase it, you will have complete control to build a map for them, toggle settings, and even mute and freeze all students, in case you need to make your point.  (Caution: freezing students while playing Minecraft may result in bodily harm, unbearable noises, and overwhelming sadness.  Do so at your own risk)  I may have gotten carried away creating a huge map of California for them to each plot their mission on, but I had a fun couple Saturday nights doing so.

Purchasing the Game:

Buying the game itself takes a little bit of research.  I can't even tell you with 100% accuracy I did it correctly, but it works, and I could not be more happy. 

The biggest disappointment I had was that the game was not compatible with our class chrome books.  This was a huge letdown as I would have liked to give them reward time to work on their missions in class.  Nonetheless the computer lab computers were purchased within the last 5 years and are more than able to handle the load of the game. 

They have a few options when buying the game.  The first thing you need to do is buy your own school server so that students can only play the game at your school, with their passwords (feel free to correct me if I am wrong in any of this, I am no expert, just letting others learn from my process).  We bought one server for $41 and 25 student accounts at $14 a piece.  This will allow you to have 25 passwords on top of your teacher account.

It seems like there is a way to save the game manual, or save it into the cloud automatically.  We could not seem to get around this as it required us to pay $25 a month for a cloud subscription.  regardless it is well worth it.

 That monthly fee can be a recurring payment, which I highly discourage if you are using a school account, or a one-time monthly charge for 3-12 months.  We selected 3 months as we do not believe it should take longer for the students to complete this project in that time.  I would suggest the same, as you can always add on.

Thoughts:

Like I said before, our grand total for one classroom was $466 at less than $20 a student.  That average price only goes down with the more students you enrolled. I ended up not being able to wait for the computer tech and manually downloaded each game onto 25 computers my self. If you would like to really dive in and find out more technical details the Minecraftedu FAQ page is a fantastic resource to answer any of those pesky questions your principal, IT expert, children or parents may throw at you.


Next weeks addition: Chapter 3: Setting up Your Own World