Minecraft EE inside and outside the classroom
Our research team is going to conduct a research project using a serious game on ecosystem services with students and non-students. We are thinking of doing it within Minecraft EE and I am trying to get as much as information I can if this is indeed feasible. I have never played any version of Minecraft so I have some questions:
1) Regarding licencing, we are planning to use the game with different people (students and non-students). What kind of license do we need? or is this even feasible?
2) We are looking to design a game about ecosystem services (and disservices) delivered by insects. apart from bees, are there any other insect game assets in the game? Moreover, can these assets be programmed or customized?
3) Can you define the actions of the other players within a world? that is each player may have a different set of actions that they can perform within the game?
4) Is it possible to extract game-play and player data from the players? We would like to do a comparative study based on different factors or contexts of the players. If so, how?
Can a game session be recorded within the game?
Thank you very much in advance for the response.
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Official comment
Thanks for reaching out and your interested in utilizing Minecraft: Education Edition for your research projects. The game requires all users to have an active Office 365 Education account to be able to play. I will link to our information page on the subject and how organizations can go about looking into eligibility (please note the Minecraft team does not have any insight into the eligibility process as it is managed by the Office 365 team). https://educommunity.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360047118132-Eligibility-for-Minecraft-Education-Edition-and-Office-365-Education
Currently in our release of the game (which is typically one full release behind the Java/Bedrock versions of the game) there are bees, spiders and cave spiders. These mobs have their own programming and actions that they will do on their own. Each player in the world has free reign to do what they want, however with classroom mode, our teachers can limit what items players can break and create invisible barriers to keep players in a certain area: https://educommunity.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360047116852-Specialty-Blocks-Allow-Deny-Border-Structure-
Game data is not collected in the game due to privacy concerns for our student users. If you wanted to record or collect data you would have to find your own 3rd party programs that can do this for you.
I recommend trying our trial version of the game and to take out free how-to lessons to see if the game can perform the way you need for your research project: https://educommunity.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360047554531-Get-started-with-Minecraft-Education-Edition-all-platforms-
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