theodp writes: Among the many 45 winners of this 12 months’s Schooling Innovation and Analysis (EIR) program competitions is Inventive Coders: Center College CS Pathways Via Recreation Design (PDF). The U.S. Dept. of Schooling is offering the nationwide nonprofit City Arts with $3,999,988 to “use supplies and studying from its College of Interactive Arts program to create an enticing, game-based, center faculty CS course utilizing [Microsoft] Minecraft instruments” for 3,450 center schoolers (Sixth-Eighth grades) in New York and California with the assistance of “our trade associate Microsoft with the utilization of Minecraft Schooling.”
From City Arts’ successful proposal: “As a result of a big majority of youngsters play video video games often, instructing CS by online game design exemplifies CRT [Culturally Responsive Teaching], which has been linked to ‘educational achievement, improved attendance, [and] larger curiosity in class.’ The online game Minecraft has over 173 million customers worldwide and is extraordinarily fashionable with college students on the center faculty degree; the Minecraft Schooling workspace we make the most of within the Inventive Coders curriculum is a well-recognized platform to any participant of the unique recreation. By leveraging college students’ private pursuits and their current ‘funds of data’, we imagine Inventive Coders is more likely to improve scholar participation and engagement.”
Talking of UA’s EIR grant associate Microsoft, City Arts’ Board of Administrators consists of Josh Reynolds, the Director of Fashionable Office for Microsoft Schooling, whose City Arts bio notes “has led among the largest game-based studying activations worldwide with Minecraft.” City Arts’ Gaming Pathways Instructional Advisory Board consists of Reynolds and Microsoft Sr. Account Government Amy Brandt. And in his 2019 guide Instruments and Weapons, Microsoft President Brad Smith cited $50 million Okay-12 CS pledges made to Ivanka Trump by Microsoft and different Tech Giants as the important thing to getting Donald Trump to signal a $1 billion, five-year presidential order (PDF) “to make sure that federal funding from the Division of Schooling helps advance [K-12] laptop science,” together with by way of EIR program grants.
