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 a fascinating, 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 business accomplice Microsoft with the utilization of Minecraft Training.”
From City Arts’ successful proposal: “As a result of a big majority of kids play video video games commonly, instructing CS via online game design exemplifies CRT [Culturally Responsive Teaching], which has been linked to ‘tutorial achievement, improved attendance, [and] higher curiosity in class.’ The online game Minecraft has over 173 million customers worldwide and is extraordinarily widespread with college students on the center faculty 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 sport. By leveraging college students’ private pursuits and their current ‘funds of data’, we consider Inventive Coders is prone to improve pupil participation and engagement.”
Talking of UA’s EIR grant accomplice Microsoft, City Arts’ Board of Administrators consists of Josh Reynolds, the Director of Trendy 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 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 Training helps advance [K-12] laptop science,” together with through EIR program grants.