MinecraftEdu

# Background

MinecraftEdu was an educational version of Minecraft developed by TeacherGaming and licensed by Mojang Studios. The team started with three developers and three teachers in the United States and Finland and later grew to eight.

It is the largest project I have taken part in. I co-founded the company and worked as the CTO and lead developer until the product was acquired by Microsoft.

# In-game features

Worked on a partly obfuscated Java codebase, where implementing new features often required a lot of detective work. Features included a custom login experience for servers, admin and build tools, teacher and student roles, custom blocks for education and much more.

Several features that first appeared in MinecraftEdu, such as translations and creative mode, were later implemented in Minecraft itself.

# Launcher

The MinecraftEdu Launcher was created before Minecraft had its own launcher, and it inspired the Minecraft team to create one later on. Teachers and students used it to configure their client, choose the version to launch, update the game and manage mods.

# Server tools

The Server Launcher made it easy to start a MinecraftEdu server with a saved world and settings, and to save worlds to or download them from the World Library. The Server Tool was used to save worlds, modify them and manage the students on the server.

# Web services

I also designed and built the web services around the game: the MinecraftEdu Wiki (MediaWiki), the World Library where educators shared their worlds (Drupal), and MinecraftEdu Hosting, a service for buying and managing cloud-hosted servers, built together with E-Line Media (PHP, MySQL, jQuery).

# My role

Co-founder, CTO and lead developer. Designed, developed and maintained the in-game features, launcher and server tools, and designed and built the web services.

# Links

• Wiki (Wayback Machine)
• World Library (Wayback Machine)