Update 8th April 2020 – The team at Minecraft: Education Edition have posted a great PDF guide to multi-player gaming – check it out here.
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I’ve blogged a lot about Minecraft: Education Edition and what an incredible tool it is for teaching 21st Century skills such as collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity – not to mention coding!
Today I am blown away by the fact you can play across the internet using Join Codes
Historically, Minecraft: Education Edition was only playable across the Local Area Network (LAN) however with the launch of Join Codes this has opened up Internet play as well. Without further ado, I’ll show you how easy it is to play with the help of my good friend Dan Bowen:
Earlier this week I wrote a post collating a HEAP of amazing resources to help classroom teachers, IT Administrators and parents learn teach and effectively during this period of increased remote learning and self isolation – check it out here.
Adding Minecraft: Education Edition to the list of tools that educators and students can use in remote learning scenarios absolutely changes the game (excuse the pun!)
So What Needs To Be Configured?
As per the video above, simply sharing the Join Code is sufficient for the guest user to enter the world, however the host does need to take some steps to allow this. The official M:EE blog has some guides here, but it all comes down to something called “port forwarding” – honestly, it’s not as scary as it sounds!
To allow Minecraft:Education Edition to communicate across the internet, the host needs to allow their Minecraft application to forward port #19132 across the internet, thus allowing the guest to join to their world. The slightly tricky part here is:
- Every student/teacher will likely have a different router at home which will have it’s own configuration methodology.
- Never fear! The great website PortForward has step-by-step guides for just about every router under the sun, including my FritzBox!
- You will need the administrator username/password for your router to make these changes.
- You only need to make the change once, and then it should be fine for that device (if you intend to host worlds on multiple devices, you’ll need to configure the port forwarding for each device.
So what does this look like?
Here is the setting on my FritzBox:
The numbers in red ink above correspond to:
- My device name – this is my Surface Laptop and is what I’m configuring the port forwarding for (remember, if I was to do this from an iPad I’d need to also set up port forwarding for that device)
- My internal IP address associated with my Surface Laptop – these can change from time to time, so if it stops working, you may need to set the rule up again
- MAC Address – this is the unique hardware identifier of the wireless card in my laptop and is used to identify the laptop on the internal network
- The routing rules I’ve configured to forward ports
Note that I’ve set up TWO rules – one for TCP traffic and one for UDP traffic, but both on the same port #19132 (you don’t really need to understand the technology behind this, but you DO need to configure the routing rules correctly).
Note that there is a green dot to the left of my two rules showing the port forwarding is active and working correctly.
Internet Play With Minecraft: Education Edition Is A Game Changer
The awesome team at Minecraft: Education Edition made an announcement last week, providing both free resources for remote learning AND free access to Minecraft:EE through to the end of June 2020 – check out this announcement here.
If you’re new to Minecraft:EE I suggest you check out my Ultimate Setup Guide to Minecraft:EE that will include all the information you should ever need to get up and running.
As students and educators come to terms with self-isolation and remote learning, I’d also like to call attention to The Mindful Knight world and lesson plan:
Learning Objectives
- SELF-AWARENESS An individual has the ability to identify and name one’s emotions and their influence on behavior.
- COPING SKILLS An individual develops and demonstrates the ability to regulate emotions, thoughts and behaviors in context with people different than oneself.
- SOCIAL MANAGEMENT An individual has the ability to make safe and constructive choices about personal behavior and social interactions.
Final Thoughts
What are you waiting for? Get stuck into playing Minecraft: Education Edition across the internet – and use this time of remote learning to build something incredible.
Wondering where to get started?
Check out the 2020 Minecraft Education Challenge to engage students in creative problem solving – it’s an awesome way for students to remain connected with multiplayer Minecraft: Education Edition over the internet whilst remaining at home. The details are all here.
NOTE: even though Join Codes allow you to play across the internet, you can still only connect with other users inside your Office365 Tenant – i.e. your fellow students and teachers. You can not play inter-school at this stage.
Do you know options for Minecraft Education Edition hosting to allow students play in non lessons hours together? I’m currently stucked with this
Hi Vladyslave, this is what this post is all about. If you set up port forwarding on your home router then you can host a world in M:EE that others can join. Therefore, this allows students to play out of lesson hours together.
Yeah this is right now working scenario, I was thinking about some cloud solutions like hosting on GCP or AWS, it actually works on Windows Server 2016 🙂 but the price…
Glad it’s working for you Vladyslav
Thanks so much for this post! I have been trying to figure out what I am doing wrong for the last few days!
Question: when you followed the steps on portforward, do you leave the static IP address, or go back into settings and switch it back to manual? I don’t fully understand what I am doing, and I want to make sure I do everything correctly haha!
Hannah,
If you’re not confident making changes you do need to be careful – you don’t want to end up cutting off your internet access.
Routers have both an external IP address that is internet facing (these can often be static if your ISP provides one) as well as internal IP addresses (that your devices on your network get assigned – these are usually dynamically assigned by DHCP but some people do choose to manually assign these, although this is less common).
What the Port Forwarding is setting up is the ports on your INTERNAL IP address used by the device that is running Minecraft:EE, and allowing those ports to be open to the internet through your router.
If you’re not confident, suggest getting a techy friend to give you a hand or ringing your ISP helpdesk and seeing if they provide support for port forwarding,
Good luck!
Sam
Okay, so I did end up going and reading up a bunch on this. I understand what I am actually doing now, but for some reason, my kids are still getting a ‘can’t join world’ screen… 🙁
Hannah,
If you’ve got a second device available to you that you can use on a different network (e.g. hotspot on your phone) you can test whether your portforwarding has been successful by seeing if YOU can enter the join code for your hosted world. this is how I ultimately got it working and then tested with a colleague in another country.
Hi, great thread and I’ve managed to follow this and M:EE’s guide to set the port forwarding up. I do however find that it is patchy. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t. I’ve gone and tested, reset things and still the same…anyone else having the same problem? I Understand this is new and perhaps its due to this?
Hi Tak,
Glad you got it working …. sort of!
My experience has been pretty solid and robust but I’ve not done many, many hours of internet play. It is usually across the LAN / WLAN for me.