theodp writes: Among the many 45 winners of this 12 months’s Training Innovation and Analysis (EIR) program competitions is Inventive Coders: Center Faculty CS Pathways Via Recreation Design (PDF). The U.S. Dept. of Training is offering the nationwide nonprofit City Arts with $3,999,988 to “use supplies and studying from its Faculty of Interactive Arts program to create an enticing, game-based, center college 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 companion Microsoft with the utilization of Minecraft Training.”
From City Arts’ successful proposal: “As a result of a big majority of youngsters play video video games commonly, instructing CS by online game design exemplifies CRT [Culturally Responsive Teaching], which has been linked to ‘tutorial achievement, improved attendance, [and] larger curiosity in class.’ The online game Minecraft has over 173 million customers worldwide and is extraordinarily standard with college students on the center college stage; the Minecraft Training 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 present ‘funds of information’, we imagine Inventive Coders is prone to enhance pupil participation and engagement.”
Talking of UA’s EIR grant companion Microsoft, City Arts’ Board of Administrators consists of Josh Reynolds, the Director of Fashionable Office for Microsoft Training, whose City Arts bio notes “has led a number of the largest game-based studying activations worldwide with Minecraft.” City Arts’ Gaming Pathways Academic Advisory Board consists of Reynolds and Microsoft Sr. Account Govt Amy Brandt. And in his 2019 ebook 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 Training helps advance [K-12] laptop science,” together with by way of EIR program grants.