Educator Tools is a classroom management toolkit for Minecraft Education that I build and maintain at Shapescape. It gives teachers the controls they need to run a lesson inside the game: moving students around, holding their attention, setting tasks, and shaping the world, all without leaving Minecraft to do it.
It is free and open source, and that decides a lot about the project. But the more interesting decision is what the tools are organised around. A classroom is loud and fast, and a tool that needs a manual mid-lesson is a tool that gets closed. So the toolkit is built around what a teacher actually does in the moment, not around how Minecraft works underneath. This case study is about that choice, and about the one feature where it goes furthest: Letter Blocks.
Built around classroom actions
Every tool in the box maps to a classroom move a teacher already makes, and carries that name rather than a technical one. Focus Mode is the “eyes on me” signal. A timer is time-on-task made visible. Locking players is a safe boundary. None of them ask the teacher to think about commands, entities, or coordinates.
The map below pairs each tool with the teaching reason it exists and with what the student actually experiences. Pick a tool to see both.
A single button stops the whole class to give instructions or handle a transition, then hands control straight back.
The screen dims, your message appears, and movement pauses. When you release it, every student is returned to the exact spot and state they were in.
The pattern repeats across the box: each feature is named for the classroom need it answers.
Controls a teacher reaches for mid-lesson
The features map to classroom actions: pull everyone into focus mode, start a timer, hand out an assignment, keep a group inside an area. Each is something a teacher needs while thirty students are doing thirty different things. Focus Mode even restores each student to the exact position and state they were in before it fired, so using it costs the lesson nothing. Every command a teacher does not have to type is attention that stays with the room.
Student autonomy on a dial
Custom nicknames could have been a free-for-all or a teacher-only field. Instead the approval flow is a spectrum: the teacher assigns every name, or students request and the teacher approves, or students set names freely. A teacher picks the point on that dial that fits the age of the room. The same feature respects preferred names and pronouns without forcing one policy on every classroom.
Letter Blocks
The piece I am happiest with is Letter Blocks: a set of blocks carrying letters, numbers, and symbols that students place to build words, equations, and signs. It turns an abstract skill into something you build with your hands.
Type a word or an equation below and watch it resolve into blocks, the way a student would lay them out in the world.
Each tile is generated the way the pack builds it: the real AzeretMono-Black glyph, centred and composited over the block texture. The set runs to well over a hundred characters, and the themed backgrounds are the More Letter Blocks extension at work.
In the classroom that simple act has a lot of uses. The documentation collects activities by subject and age: spelling races and sentence construction for language arts, building “3 + 4 = 7” for early maths, vocabulary walls for science, dated events for a history timeline, the same word in two languages side by side for language learners. The blocks double as an assessment surface, too. A teacher builds a question, students build the answer below it, and a checkmark or cross block marks it.
Adding to the lesson
Letter Blocks add to the lesson a teacher already wanted to run, they do not replace it with the tool. A spelling activity is still a spelling activity; the blocks just make it physical, visible, and shared across the class. The aim was a manipulative, the hands-on object a teacher reaches for, rendered in a world students already want to be in.
How the alphabet is generated
Under that classroom-facing feature is the one place this case study touches code, because the way the alphabet is made is what lets it reach so many lessons. The set of characters is not hand-drawn art. It is declared as data: one entry per glyph, addressed by its Unicode code point.
// scope.ts: the alphabet is data. Each glyph is one entry, by Unicode code point.
{
id: "main_letter_set",
font_size: 48,
font_path: "fonts/AzeretMono-Black.ttf",
letters: [
{ char: "A", safe_name: "A", group: "letter" },
{ char: "B", safe_name: "B", group: "letter" },
{ char: "Ç", safe_name: "C_cedilla", group: "diacritic" },
{ char: "+", safe_name: "plus_sign", group: "symbol" },
// ...over a hundred in total
],
}A build step reads that list and renders each glyph from a single font file onto a 64 by 64 texture, composited over the block background, one PNG per character. Each “letter block” is a real Minecraft block whose face is a generated image.
// generateLetters.ts: render one glyph from the TTF onto a 64x64 block texture.
canvas.loadFont(fontData, { family: customFontFamily });
ctx.font = `bold ${fontSizeUsed}px ${fontFamily}`;
ctx.fillText(char, x, y);
const buffer = finalCanvas.toBuffer("image/png");
fs.writeFileSync(outputFilePath, buffer);Getting a glyph to sit dead centre is the fiddly part. The script draws the character onto a scratch canvas, scans the pixels to find its true bounding box, then offsets the draw so the visual shape, not the font’s metrics, is what gets centred. It renders at four times the size and downsamples for clean edges.
Languages come from the character list
Because the glyphs come from a font and a list, the set runs to well over a hundred characters: the Latin alphabet, digits, punctuation, currency, and a long run of accented letters like à, ç, ñ, and ü. That is not decoration. It is exactly what the multilingual and language-learning activities need, and it arrived by adding code points to a list rather than by drawing each texture by hand. The same generator powers the More Letter Blocks extension, which adds themed backgrounds without touching the core.
Open source, and documented
The toolkit is free, open source, and documented in full, with the docs written so a teacher can pick it up without me in the room. It keeps growing through contributions, and the same shape holds throughout: the menus exist so a teacher never types a command, and the glyph generator exists so a spelling game works in any language.
