The new school year is now underway for the millions of students across the United States. It is fitting then that Mojang has just announced that the final version of Minecraft: Education Edition will be available for purchase on November 1st.
The November availability comes after Minecraft: Education edition launched back in early June in an early access version. Since then, those 35,000 students and educators who managed to get their hands on the title have helped Mojang in the development of the final version. Educators, nonetheless, will be able to try the experience for free by trying the early access version through November 1st.
Overall, the final version will debut several key features which the education community deemed necessary for the experience. The features include Classroom Mode, and new Minecraft game features. For the details, please see Mojang’s description below:
- Classroom Mode: A companion app for Minecraft: Education Edition that enables educators to manage world settings, communicate with students, give items and teleport students in the Minecraft world. It displays a map view of the Minecraftworld, a list of all the students in the world, a set of world management settings and a chat window. There is even aMinecraft clock to show time of day in the world. Classroom Mode offers educators the ability to interact with students and manage settings from a central user interface.
- New Minecraft game features: We will continue to updateMinecraft: Education Edition to include new game features from other editions of Minecraft. All the latest updates to Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition beta will be included, such as leads and horses, additional player skins, pistons and the remainder of Redstone functionality and an updated user interface.
Minecraft: Education Edition will be available for $5 per user, per year, or through a district-wide licensing mode. Use of Minecraft: Education Edtion will require a computer with Windows 10 or OSX El Capitan, an Office 365 Education account using your school or district email, and a download.
