Minecraft, the popular block-building game owned by Microsoft, has released a series of free downloadable educational sessions to help children learn at home as schools around the world close due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The new education section has been added to the Minecraft Marketplace, which also features other add-ons that can be used in the game.
Minecraft has partnered with the NASA to produce content which lets players explore the International Space Centre. The educational content also includes sessions on learning how to code with a robot, a ‘tour’ of the human eye, virtual visits to famous landmarks in Washington DC and discovering what it’s like to be a marine biologist.
10 new “worlds” have also been added, which lets users explore subjects like renewable energy, ancient Greek history and creative writing.
Minecraft say that the new educational content can be “played” alone or with friends or parents.
The worlds are available now and are free to download until 30th June 2020.
Microsoft Teams added more than 12 million daily active users last week, bringing the total daily active users to 44 million.
The company shared the figures in an announcement made on Thursday 19 March. The huge jump in daily users is down to the increase in home and remote working triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. With many offices closing down amid the outbreak, more people than usual are now working from home, meaning collaboration tools like Teams have become hugely important.
Microsoft also shared that 20 of its Teams customers had more than 100,000 employees using the platform, an increase of six from the 14 previously announced companies with that many users.
The new numbers mean that Teams has more than doubled its active daily users since November 2019, when the figure stood at 20 million.
Microsoft has announced is it halting Windows preview releases in May amid the COVID-19 crisis.
The decision has been taken to allow the tech giant to focus on security updates, in response to the challenges which are arising for customers because of the pandemic.
Microsoft will stop distributing optional non-security releases for all Windows client and server products in May, ranging from Windows 10 v19090 to Windows Server 2008 SP2. They will carry on distributing Patch Tuesday security updates, but preview releases will not be shared. These releases, known as C and D in Microsoft’s release terminology, were due to occur in the third and fourth weeks of Ma and exist to allow Windows customers to test non-security related fixes before they arrive.
Of the delay, Microsoft said: “We have been evaluating the public health situation and we understand this is impacting our customers. In response to these challenges, we are prioritising our focus on security updates.”
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