The full version of Minecraft: Education Edition will be available to purchase in the Windows Store on November 1.
Microsoft says that more than 35,000 students and educators around the world have utilized the early access program and provided feedback to help the company fine-tune the experience across a diverse set of learning environments.
Minecraft: Education Edition is built based on feedback from the educator community and the features and capabilities important to enhancing the learning experience. While several of these features debuted with early access in June, even more key capabilities are rolling out on November 1, including:
- 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 Minecraft world, a list of all the students in the world, a set of world management settings and a chat window. There is even a Minecraft 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: Microsoft will continue to update Minecraft: 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.
The complete version of Minecraft: Education Edition will be available for purchase on November 1 for $5 per user, per year, or through a district-wide licensing model.