Online Teaching
This year I will be teaching remotely for my district. We are a Microsoft district and we all have access to Minecraft Education. Is there a way I can run a server from my house so my students and I are able to play on the same world together?
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Official comment
Gary Ong and Joseph Interdonato
Gary thank you for reaching out to your fellow educators with the information! And Joseph he is absolutely correct! While Minecraft: Education Edition was designed and optimized for in-class use on a school network, you can indeed host a multiplayer game from home! Because of the safety restrictions of the game there are some steps that need to be taken on the host router and on the students' security settings and I will link the instructions below for you! Feel free to reach out anytime for more questions!
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Hi Joseph,
This is pretty easy. You simply host a world on your computer and let your students know the join code (4 pictures). As long as they are using accounts on the same school domain (e.g. user@school.edu) they can join. Ideally the computer that hosts the world has a fast, reliable internet connection. Up to 30 students can join the world. You can test this by hosting the world and getting another teacher to try and join. Students must be able to login to their Microsoft account as they will need this to login to the game. They must also have the same version of Minecraft that you are running. I do this quite a lot so happy to help with any other questions.
Kind regards and greetings from Australia.
-Gary
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Hey Gary,
From my experience we would have to all be on the same network. I will be teaching remotely and the other students will be at their individual houses. Will it still work?
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Hi Joseph, this used to be the case earlier in the year, but something has changed over the past few months that removed that constraint. Now my students host worlds and invite their classmates as a way of hanging out together when they cannot physically meet. I guess remote learning using M:EE would be impossible with the restriction so I'm happy.
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Gary,
Did the students hosting the worlds from home have to setup port forwarding, or is it just working with the Join Codes?? This is very exciting news. I heard that the update improved multiplayer settings, but this would be huge.
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We have actually had students put in technical support tickets for this. Join codes may work but usually they are not, they still may need the IP address and they may have to change their router settings at home. We are finding that some can connect right away and some cannot. Our suspicion is some students (not knowingly) have their home router actually set up the way it should be for Minecraft: Education Edition to work.
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I did the port forwarding initially on my home computer to host a multiplayer world as my 3 teenage kids are keen Minecrafters but I never had to do it for students joining. They had to enter my IP address rather than a join code. Some students wanted to host worlds too and I wasn't looking forward to walking them through the port forwarding setup and other steps which aren't difficult... but it's not something you want to do more than a few times. I have hundreds of students.
Then something changed... I also got our school IT guys to setup a virtual machine so I could host shared worlds on it rather than my home pc. This way I could use join codes and it would also be faster and more stable. It took a while to get this right and maybe they made some other config changes... I'm not sure, but that seemed to be about the time that students started telling me that they could now host worlds with other students just by giving them the join code. This worked on my laptop too - I just start the world and tell them the join code.
It's possible that those hosting worlds have the port forwarding setup, but I doubt that all 250+ of my students have done it. I do get parents contacting me with some tech issues with Minecraft, but usually these are solved by re-installing the software. I would definitely hear from students that couldn't join because they are super motivated. Anyway, that's my experience over the past few months.
A big thank you to Microsoft/Mojang for extending the demo period for all student accounts until the end of June. We certainly benefited from it and for many of my students it was a much needed way to socially connect with their classmates.
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