ICYMI: Year in Review 2024

It was a busy year for educators and our global Minecraft community! As we wrap up these last weeks of 2024, we want to reflect with a roundup of the resources now available to you. Thank you for staying with us, supporting your peers, and bringing your students meaningful learning experiences all year long!

AI ADVENTURES FOR ALL

This year we really embraced this new AI era, and made some big announcements to support educators, parents, and learners with materials and new tools to build AI literacy. AI Foundations is an educational program that includes videos, lesson plans, worlds, downloadable parent guide to help anyone learn the basics of how AI works, where its used, and how to use AI tools safely and responsibly. Lesson Crafter is a new AI-powered lesson generator to support educators getting started with Minecraft in their classrooms.

Speaking of responsible technology, we also launched CyberSafe: Good Game for Safer Internet Day to help young people stay safe, happy, and thriving online and while gaming with friends using tools like codes of conduct. Don’t miss our Cyber curriculum and recent research on Minecraft for digital citizenship.

SPECTACTULAR STEM LEARNING

We continued our partnerships with BBC Earth and NASA to bring classrooms into the wild world of natural history with the Planet Earth III DLC then launched into space with the James Webb Space Telescope. These collaborations present educators with highly engaging learning experiences, where students get to experience firsthand what it takes to survive as the climate changes and explore distant solar systems. We also introduced PiCraft, a special Minecraft adventure for Pi Day transforming Pi into a tangible, interactive journey.

CODING FOR GLOBAL IMPACT

It was a huge year for coding in Minecraft Education. In January, we launched a new partnership with Prodigy Learning to bring industry-recognized student credentials in coding and cybersecurity to Minecraft Education. Then over the summer we released the GameCode curriculum to educators around the world, empowering students to become creative coders and game developers. Hopefully you’ve tried Minecraft Hour of Code – we are celebrating 10 years of partnership with Code.org and 300 million Hour of Code sessions. Read about our Hour of Code tutorials over the years and how we’ve worked with UNICEF to bring Hour of Code to marginalized communities.

BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

Consider starting a Minecraft Club or Esports program in the new year! We brought four teams of students to ISTE for live esports build battle where they created sustainable schools in-game on the event mainstage. This event culminated a series of district-level challenges that were part of our Schools Reinventing Cities program, reaching more than 12,000 students around the world. Finally, to make hosting challenges even easier, we created the Build Challenges toolkit to support teachers wanting easy, fun and creative activities to engage students.

FAMILY-FRIENDLY RESOURCES

Curious to do more with Minecraft at home over the holidays? Check out this Family Guide in our AI Foundations program, explore this Intro to Minecraft Education blog for parents, and explore the collection of educational worlds on the Minecraft Marketplace, if you have Bedrock players at home.

As we look back on these achievements, we're grateful for the support and enthusiasm of our community. Your creativity and passion drive us to keep innovating and enhancing the Minecraft Education platform. Here's to another year of learning, building, and exploring together.