Account is not eligible...
Last weeks MinecraftCLUB session was unfortunately halted because, for an unknown reason, all of our 365 Education logins were displaying the above text:
“This account is not eligible to use Minecraft: Education Edition”
Why? All licences were paid for and active on our Windows Store for Business account. All had been in use for the weeks previous. No information was available about server issues or potential problems with networks. It was a mystery, but thankfully not a misery.
It wasn’t easy for us to get educational status from Microsoft to use Minecraft: Education Edition. It was actually a bit of a struggle, with conversations in two different continents and with different areas of the organisation, none of which knew what to do about providing access to the beta last June. We missed out on purchasing the previous incarnation: MinecraftEdu, which was proving perfect to help us deliver a digitally creative response to our gallery programme, by a matter of days. Microsoft had bought that out as well and for four months there was no way of a new institution gaining access to an educational version of Minecraft before Minecraft:EE was released.
To clarify, Minecraft:EE states educational status is:
“ An eligible public museum must be an agency or institution organized on a permanent basis for essentially education or aesthetic purposes, and utilize a professional staff to exhibit tangible objects to the public on a regular basis.”
Now public galleries often come under the label of “museum” for ease and this is also in the American clarification of this type of organisation. QUAD as a public gallery is a permanent location, which provides both education and aesthetic programmes, as funded by Arts Council England (ACE). It is open 363 days a year, with gallery and/or educational delivery throughout. So, pretty much a “regular basis”. Finally, we only hire professional permanent and freelance staff to deliver our programmes. So that’s all bases covered, right? Nope, they still said no. This was highly frustrating and at times felt hopeless. What changed this you might be wondering? You’re using Minecraft:EE for the purpose of artistic reflection, we can see this in this blog. Well, the short answer is we told them that Apple and Adobe recognise us as educational institutions. Which, isn’t a lie. They do. We were using their tools to deliver creative activities. They saw this, why couldn’t Microsoft?
So it all changed, we had access to the beta and MinecraftCLUB was born. Now the beta was not MinecraftEdu, which we came to fall in love with through our work with BlockBuilders. It doesn’t have the same ease of use and the teacher screen doesn’t have the same functionality at all. Please, oh please bring FREEZE back! But with everything in the arts and culture world, you adapt and use what you have and for the most part Minecraft:EE has been great. The functionality of the now subscription version is good and for our MinecraftCLUB and MinecraftLAB activities, it seems to be going the job well. Minus some slowing of the servers during busy workshops.
I’ll be honest I’ve been wanting to write the above back story of our history with Minecraft:EE for a while. There must be other arts organisations out there who, with the desire to engage with audiences through digital tools, will be looking at Minecraft. In all honesty I would have struggled to write it WITHOUT SHOUTING IN CAPS TO EXPRESS MY FRUSTRATION AND RAGE before last weeks lock out. Yes, it was frustrating. No, we weren’t able to resolve it within the session. No, there was and has been no explanation for it. Minecraft:EE were contacted through their educational forums and although we were directed to the business store, this was three days later. What it taught me is actually giving young people an opportunity to explore other things together was also highly creative and rewarding. Some sat and played online games together, two actually came together to watch their favourite Youtuber give a tutorial on building in Minecraft. Neither of them knew they like the same channel until this point. It was this ease of “hey things don’t always work, but we can still do things together” that made me realise that there’s no reason to get mad at Microsoft, there were still rewarding moments to be had as a group away from Minecraft.
So this week we’re back on working on our project for the FORMAT International Photography Festival’s theme of ‘habitat’. Wish us luck!
John Whall - Digital Participation Curator
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