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I'm teaching a class on Sunday and my wonderful but occasionally rebellious students love to quietly play Minecraft during class. Is there a way I can disable the Minecraft application during class time?

My students range in age from 8 to 12. I'm taking them through game design with Unity 3D so they are getting a little scripting experience in C#. Most of them have some basic programming ability. I know a couple of the students around here have set up Minecraft servers at home.

The students use standard accounts on our computers which are running OS X 10.8. We have never employed parental controls in the past but I'm open to that as an option if it will work.

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  • You need to block the 23.21.227.220 which is the Minecraft server
    – Ruskes
    Commented Mar 20, 2015 at 18:25
  • That would prevent multiplayer play outside our LAN, but not students enjoying single player, or someone starting up a server in-house.
    – Keith
    Commented Mar 20, 2015 at 19:08
  • Maybe you should explain to us the hacking capability of your students. Like starting up a server in-house. Are those Guest accounts or full admin accounts?, are those run under parietal control and so on. Do you allow the downloaded version ?
    – Ruskes
    Commented Mar 20, 2015 at 19:11
  • What's the downloaded version?
    – Keith
    Commented Mar 20, 2015 at 19:35
  • Do you have any device management capabilities, such as Apple Remote Desktop or Casper?
    – willWorkForCookies
    Commented Mar 20, 2015 at 19:38

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Parental controls allows you to exert more control over standard accounts and could restrict that app easily for you. In practice, I prefer other levers.

Whether it's worth the time to setup vs. getting out and moving around the class (or having an assistant sit in the back of the class and keep an eye on screens) is debatable.

Assuming you don't already have an MDM/imaging workflow and this is just a bunch of computers that you go to one by one to manage I'd just move the Minecraft app outside the student directory and set up ssh keys / use Apple Remote Desktop to place a link to the app in each user's ~/Applications folder if and when you want them playing that app or game.

That method is very useful for other problems, has low cost of tools and might be a nice introduction to things like munki/autopkg/etc... for improving the management of this lab of Macs.

You can also leverage Apple Remote Desktop to monitor all the screens in the classroom. I'd take an old iPad and use Duet Display so that my Main screen(s) were devoted to the work I was doing as opposed to cycling through screens to see who needed their screen locked due to minecraft violations.

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  • I've turned on parental controls and that seems to be working ok for the moment. Eventually I do intend to use an imaging workflow, but one step at a time.
    – Keith
    Commented Mar 31, 2015 at 4:30
  • Awesome - feel free to ping me in comments if you have more questions / get going with imaging or workflow tools.
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Mar 31, 2015 at 14:14

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