Education in Minecraft

http://education.minecraft.net

by doppp • 11 years ago

55 24 11 years ago

education.minecraft.net

shiftpgdn• 11 years ago

Interesting that an official version of http://minecrafthomeschool.com/ is being developed. I have a much much younger brother in Minecraft homeschool with fairly positive results.

asgard10244• 11 years ago

That was a disappointment. I think education in Minecraft (-like game) is a great idea, but what they presented lacks imagination what it could be. They mention mathematics and history and problem solving, and I think for that, it is exactly the wrong medium, and let me explain why.

I really like to play with mods, especially the tech ones, I enjoy building automated processing systems and factories and bootstrap myself in the style of "The Mysterious Island". Here's a game I really wish would exist (and I think it will, eventually):

Realistic sandbox game based around technology and history of technology. De-emphasize the kinematics, and emphasize other types of physics such as statics, thermodynamics and electromagnetism, and also chemistry, material engineering, biology and geology.

Imagine a game where you could learn about almost any industrial process (including historical ones), ranging from agriculture through chemical engineering to computer-controlled 3D printing.

I wouldn't mind complexity too much. There are people who enjoy flight simulators which are quite complex. It should capture the spirit of common industrial processes, within the first order of approximation.

I think this would be a great game to understand how the modern world is built, on what basis, what it takes for economy to operate. So it would also be very educational in the economics aspect (actually changing focus from money to production would help people to understand economics a lot better).

Current Minecraft is not there though, even with mods. The basic physical laws are not preserved, and often realism is eschewed. It's quite hard to make such a game, because people who know the industrial processes well enough are rare, but I really wish it would exist. And I think it would be highly educational, but mostly in fields of natural sciences and technology.

kiba• 11 years ago

Actually, there's a game about building factories and automating the hell out of it.

It's called factorio.

But admittedly, it's not realistic, not even close. But I do spend the vast amount of my time thinking about logistics.

asgard10244• 11 years ago

I know Factorio, although I haven't played it very much. My thoughts exactly - it teaches kind of engineering, but the realism is lacking.

What I would like to see from the game is less focus on how are things laid out in space (that's a different puzzle) and more focus on what crafting materials to use and what their different tradeoffs are (physical and chemical properties, cost, processing complexity).

frik2• 11 years ago

A huge problem are the game engines. Traditional state of the art game engines have mainly static worlds for performance reasons (Unreal, ID Tech, RAGE, Valve Source, etc).

Voxel game engines like Ken Silverman's Voxlap (http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap/voxlap05.htm ), Infiniminer, Minecraft and Lego Worlds have a dynamic game world where everything can be changed. It's resource intensive and choosing the optimial world data structure is very important (avoid rendering invisible parts, infinite worlds, LOD). And integrating realistic infinite physics is too resource intensive. That's why you see little and only local physics.

From the graphical point of view the new Lego Worlds engine is really fascination! It seems it uses advanced geometric shaders to render all the tiny Lego parts on the fly. Does anyone know how it really works and which data structure it uses?

asgard10244• 11 years ago

Actually, I think the blocky world is good enough for the application I described. Getting geometry and kinematics right is not so important for the game. I think something like Minecraft with a rudimentary thermodynamics system, statics/continuum mechanics for blocks, and mixture system for fluids (including air) would be doable. I think what would be more important is to change the crafting system from specific items to be more based on what materials you use (kinda like Tinker's construct does it).

I even think the game doesn't have to be 3D - Terraria like world would be good fit too, if done right (probably allow several different layers at each tile - like background wall, plumbing and ambient layer for fluids).

platz• 11 years ago

Simulators are not games in the same sense though. The aim isn't quite entertainment, and results in a much different set of assumptions about what the player's expectations are. It's more than just complexity, there are issues about gameplay vs realism too. There is no expectation in a game you'll be willing to fly for 2 hours in a straight line, because it's bad gameplay, but people in sims do this, because that's what the realism requires.

asgard10244• 11 years ago

I wasn't making a comparison, I was just suggesting that people play flight simulators for fun which have enormous amount of complexity and detail. And I think the tedium can be alleviated (for example, the game could just track "effort" and require you to pay for it in food or medicines etc.) without compromising realism. It's not a problem because interesting part of realism comes from interaction, and complexity, and learning about it, not from the tedium.

k0doque• 11 years ago

There were game using similar learning mechanism before like robot odyssey.

I also had an idea similar of yours, maybe by stringing together some open source simulation package into a sandbox environment it could be achieved.

Pyrodogg2• 11 years ago

It'll be interesting to see how this new Microsoft/Mojang effort stacks up with prior partnerships that Mojang already has.

See Teacher Gaming LLC and their Minecraft Edu project http://minecraftedu.com/

They recently released a collaboration with the author of the ComputerCraft mod, @DanTwoHundred. The offshoot is called ComputerCraftEdu. It adds a slick visual programming interface to the lua-powered 'turtle' robots added by ComputerCraft.

Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KwAr2gqgXg&feature=youtu.be

garraeth• 11 years ago

Video about Minecraft in education: https://youtu.be/qvPY3_bBfZM

Starting about 13:30.

dmVI• 11 years ago

Minecraft mods are a GREAT way to introduce kids to programming. Take a look at the awesome work learntomod.com have done. We recently held a Junior Hackathon, http://jhack.co.nz, based on Minecraft this weekend (in Auckland New Zealand). It was a MASSIVE success and the kids had an absolute blast!

bite_victim• 11 years ago

Uhm, I just went and had a look at learntomod.com. Are all of the kids these days software engineers? The "Blocks" language / tool looks waaay to complicated, how on earth are kids learning that?! This video for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFi2Xr5uQow well that would be a perfect candidate for a college level class, I believe, in teaching how to use visual programming software.

And even if kids somehow really grasp what is going on in there, aren't they damaged in some profound way when they will actually have to deal with code? I remember the shock and horror my colleagues had when in college we went from a visual Java builder software to actual coding in the data structures course.

And also, learning JavaScript as a beginning language? With all of the callbacks / asynchronous paradigm traps? Wow, that is really incredible for a kid to understand!

acbart• 11 years ago

I suggest reading up on the block-based literature, it's very interesting stuff. I focus on introductory programming experiences for non-CS-major undergraduates. Some of that research involves block-based languages. The scaffolding is extremely helpful in getting them to write working code quickly, and that's a valuable trade-off with "real" coding. Of course my goal is to transfer them into real coding (we use Mutual-Language Transformation a la Matsuzawa and embeddable code snippets a la Weintrop).

However, from what I've read of work with younger learners, you'd be amazed at the level of complexity their code can reach. Just because you're young doesn't mean you can't write big complex programs. Of course, when they're older they'll look back on much of their work and say, "Oh it's so bad". But that's just what learning means.

As for "damaging" learners - banish the thought. Short of actively lying and gaslighting students, I've always found learners to be extremely robust. In fact, technology and context have relatively little impact on young students long-term compared to positive, excellent interactions with educators who know what they're doing. It's more important for students to have successful experiences that are fun and make them think, "Hey, this does stuff! Like, real stuff!" There are many nuances to that statement (gender is particularly fascinating), but I've found it's mostly true. Learning is all about constructing experiences on top of experiences, and your introductory experiences will always have degrees of artificiality and scaffolding. Understanding evolves with time, effort, and feedback.

shiggerino• 11 years ago

Giving cigarettes to kids.

_jomo• 11 years ago

Redstone is very useful to learn about and visualize electronics, for example logic gates and how to create useful circuits with them, this can include connecting simple "light switches" or a whole computer with CPU, RAM, etc.

Seeing how they work actually helped myself a lot. When we were talking about logic in class a year ago, we showed the teacher how you can do this in Minecraft and he really liked the idea.

It really does take some time to learn enough about redstone to be able to come up with your own designs - partly because redstone is very weird when you take a closer look - but I think it's worth it, at least for logic / problem solving in general.

There already are a few servers that focus on Redstone only, lots of smart (and young) people there.

Filligree• 11 years ago

Redstone is neat, but try it with a mod such as RedLogic. It gives you the basic logic gates——and, or, xor, timers, pulse formers, etc.——which makes it all much simpler to get started.

It does mean you can skip much of the "physics of redstone", but I don't know how valuable learning that is in the first place. The physics of Redlogic is a fair bit simpler.

sklogic• 11 years ago

I think I gotta try adding a Minecraft backend to the QFlow toolchain. This could be a lot of fun.

Zekio• 11 years ago

I really wish Microsoft, will some day push Mojang to rewrite Minecraft in a different language.

Pyrodogg2• 11 years ago

They are. At Minecon today they announced a beta for the Windows 10 version of Minecraft. It's a port from the Pocket Edition version of the game.

More info: http://news.xbox.com/2015/07/games-announcing-minecraft-wind...

hobarrera• 11 years ago

I guess gp should have said

"I really wish Microsoft, will some day push Mojang to rewrite Minecraft in a different language while keeping it portable."

From the article, it looks like the rewrite would not affect linux/*nix users. If I get paranoid, I'd say they might even drop the "old" client at some point.

jacalata• 11 years ago

I was recently at the Auckland Museum and they have an exhibit showing a recreation of the Gallipoli Peninsula as it was for the ANZAC campaign that had been built by local school students - https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/education/activities-and-comp...

Education in Minecraft

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