Minecraft: Education Edition has been in an early access beta since June of this year when it was announced; two months ago, Microsoft and Mojang announced a release date for the Education Edition’s first proper version – November 1st.
The Education Edition is now available to educators around the world – 50 countries to be exact – in 11 different languages. This release includes the Classroom Mode companion app for educators.
The Features
There are a bunch of unique features specifically built for educators in Minecraft: Education Edition, one of the significant ones being Classroom Mode.
The Classroom Mode companion app lets educators – in a classroom – set up and manage a Minecraft session; the educators can interact with students in the game, manage their inventories, teleport them around the game world and so on – it’s basically a god mode for the educator.
As for the version of Minecraft – the Education Edition is based on the Windows 10 Edition, and therefore has everything that the Windows 10 Edition does in terms of features. Mojang says that the Education Edition will maintain feature parity with the Windows 10 Edition in the future as well; making sure students can be familiar with the things they learned while casually playing Minecraft.
Availability
Minecraft: Education Edition is not something you can buy individually, but there are options. The program is available to purchase for $5 per user per year, or through a Microsoft Education Volume Licensing discount.
You can find out more about the availability over at the official website; below, are the lists detailing the eleven languages and fifty countries that the program is available in at the moment.
Languages: English (US) Spanish (Spain) Spanish (Mexico) German French (France) Italian Portuguese (Portugal) Portuguese (Brazil) Russian Chinese (Traditional) Chinese (Simplified) Korean Japanese |
Countries: Argentina Australia Austria Belgium Bulgaria Canada Chile Colombia Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Hong Kong Hungary Iceland Indonesia Ireland Italy Japan Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malaysia Malta Mexico Netherlands New Zealand Norway Philippines Poland Portugal Romania Singapore Slovakia Slovenia South Africa Spain Sweden Switzerland Thailand Turkey United Kingdom United States Vietnam |