MinecraftEdu


 * Note: all information comes from the MinecraftEdu website and the TeacherGaming website

'MinecraftEdu' is a sandbox indie educational video game written in Java, developed by, published by Media, and lisenced by Mojang AB. It is meant as an educational version of Minecraft for classroom use. In the beginning, MinecraftEdu was developed by TeacherGaming which where three developers and three teachers, located in the United States and Finland. Later TeacherGaming expanded into a team of eight.

MinecraftEdu focuses on allowing the player to explore, interact with, and modify a dynamically-generated map made of one-cubic-meter-sized blocks. In doing so the student with the help of the teacher is supposed to learn a variety of subjects. The teacher can change settings to defy where students can place/destroy blocks and the world used on the server.

Purchase and avaibility
MinecraftEdu can be purchased for $18 per student(24 or less) or $14(25 or more) for the User license and $41 for the Server lisence. The server lisence can be bought as a one-time purchase. Once purchased, the game can be played by downloading the launcher. MinecraftEdu Hosting Beta is also available for $20/month and does not require you to pay the server software license again.

Hardware requirements
According to http://minecraftedu.com/faq#question_2-13 and https://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/articles/325948-minecraft-system-requirements :

Minimum Requirements:
 * A Windows, Mac or Linux computer (desktop or laptop)
 * 2 GB of RAM or greater
 * Intel Pentium D, AMD Athlon or greater processor
 * 200MB free hard disk space or more
 * Java 6 Release 45 or later (including Java 7 and 8)

Recommended Requirements:
 * CPU: Intel Core i3 or AMD Athlon II (K10) 2.8 GHz
 * RAM: 4GB
 * GPU: GeForce 2xx Series or AMD Radeon HD 5xxx Series (Excluding Integrated Chipsets) with OpenGL 3.3
 * HDD: 1GB
 * Latest release of Java 8 from java.com

Software Requirements:
 * Minecraft Release 1.6 or newer. Older versions will need to be updated to current versions
 * Please note that some users experience issues playing Minecraft while using a mismatched version of Java for their operating system (32 or 64 bit), while using certain versions of Java 7, or while multiple versions of Java are installed

Gameplay
The objective of the game remains the same as regular Minecraft, where players can build virtual realities in a sandbox-like environment. However, MinecraftEdu also has the goal of an educational use to teach a variety of subjects.

Differences from regular Minecraft
MinecraftEdu differs from the the regular version in a variety of ways, such as a tutorial mode, teacher options and exclusive Blocks/items.

Tutorial mode

 * MinecraftEdu comes with a tutorial world that teachers may select from the server menu, that goes through the basics of controls, placing/destroying blocks, teacher options, and more.

Mods

 * Forge
 * MinecraftEdu comes prepackaged with Minecraft Forge for easy mod installation.


 * ComputerCraftEdu
 * ComputerCraftEdu come prepackaged with MinecraftEdu and is an educational version of ComputerCraft made by TeacherGaming and Dan200(Author of ComputerCraft), meant to teach students how to code inside of Minecraft.

Skins

 * instead of having customizable skins, the student picks there skins from one of the default skins that come with MinecraftEdu when first joining a server or creating a world.
 * there are more default skins in MinecraftEdu than just Steve and Alex.