Student projects deleted
Heya,
I'm running MEE with two classes of 30. Part of this is to build a multi lesson project in the Make Code editor. Students routinely have their work vanish between lessons, gone. On average this is happening to about two students per class. This makes multi-level projects a real challenge, as you can imagine. This has also happened to me, making all of my reference code for next year vanish.
We are doing a work around where students convert to JS and save locally every lesson, but it's a real pain.
Question: On MEE, where are their Make Code projects stored? Is it local or on a cloud server and why might they be constantly purged or unable to access their previous work? Is there any way to manage the drive directory ourselves?
As a potential solution could Minecraft Make Code integrate with One Drive? They all have Microsoft accounts anyway and this would make the safety of those files much better as well as added perks like being able to submit \ transfer work much more easily.
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Official comment
Thanks for reaching out with this. We have not heard of this happening before. The .mkcd files are typically stored locally on the device that the student is using. If these files are being purged when the student logs out the settings on the devices may be that "temporary files" or such are auto-deleted upon log out. I know that some schools and libraries will have this setting on in the background. You can definitely save the file to another source though, including OneDrive or other cloud storage then the students can import the files back into the game and continue where they left off. I will link to our page that covers how to save the .mkcd files.
Just note if you are on iPad, macOS, or Chromebook this option is not available. What you could do in that case is have the students publish their work, which will generate a URL which they can use next time to get back to where they left off, this is also covered in the link below,
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Ah! Thank you. I suspect it has something to do with the specifics of our school's setup and how they work our local drives. I had missed this solution and for next year I can have a class-wide set up that will prevent it from impacting student work, without relying on the autosave\load feature of the MEE program.
I'll also try running a proper search for *.mkcd to see if it turns up any of my old projects.. So far no joy though.
Thanks for your help.1 -
I have a student who has lost all of her worlds. Today, as she creates a world, it automatically deletes. We haven't had this issue yet and we have been using Minecraft EDU for about a month now. Is there a way to get her worlds back? We do not have anything set with the board or library to delete caches.
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I periodically lose my programs. I had them about 4 hours ago, and I just logged in and both programs were gone. This happens to me regularly but not at any noteworthy times. I've had several students lose their programs as well. Their worlds are still their, but their Make Code programs dissappeared.
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Hi John Garren I'm sorry to hear that you've lost your MakeCode projects. MakeCode saves their information in the browser cache, which can get cleared fairly easily. This article walks you through the process to export and save your MakeCode projects to make sure you don't lose them! Managing Projects in Code Builder for MakeCode – Minecraft: Education Edition Support
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MakeCode now has a cloud login and I have tried it with arcade projects. I need to test it with Minecraft projects.
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Bryan Sanders (archived) This is a good point!
I was logging into MakeCode online (yay!) because my students are using arcade in the APCSP class and the recent addition of cloud login was a huge help to them. However, because I use multiple Microsoft logins, this could complicate saving my code when I am on different machines using Minecraft. Let me know how it works with saving make up projects for you.
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Hi AdamS,
Would you be able to advise, what is the local path where the Codebuild .mkcd files are saved to? Having students save manually seems an extra step when the mkcd files are already saved somewhere on the local computer.
Additionally, there seems to be a weird issue that when we try to save manually, we are unable to click on the "save" button as the window focus is not on the save window. i.e. students need to alt-tab out and in again to have the save window focused.
Our students do not have a dedicated laptop for their use, and it may sometimes happen that a student need to change their laptop used because of makeup classes etc. When that happens, students lose all their previous code as it was on another computer.
I am trying to explore a quick way to do this by defining an onedrive shared folder and link it to the folder where the mkcd files are saved by default, so it is synched seamlessly across all the laptops.
Thank you! Appreciate any advice
ps just to add on, we are using the CodeBuilder within Minecraft Education Edition (not the website make code)
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