FAA K-12 Airport Design Challenge in Minecraft
faa.gov
faa.gov
I've actually received emails from two academic professors/teachers (collegiate level) who used the game in some form/fashion, as a tool within their courses.
If anyone has an educational use-case for SimAirport, I'd love to hear about it. I'd also be willing to consider providing "site" licenses, or figuring out a license that would work for you, for any solid educational use-cases -- feel free to contact me directly, email is on profile. :)
Now, I just need to figure out how to find time to play it.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-t...
The winning airport design will probably be an ex-airport, returned to nature as a forest, or repurposed as a solar/wind farm.
The tragedy of the commons is real, regardless of how irrational or selfish it may seem.
I sort of suspect the answer here, as with all things, isn’t command but alternatives. Hydrogen and EV aircraft are nascent. Nuclear air craft exist, and can be built with modern miniature reactors that are entirely safe.
The problem is funding goes more towards killing varied brown people than improving technology.
The "war on terror" is mostly wound down now. But the point you're making is not correct; most advanced technology, especially aerospace, emerged from military research grants.
I agree a lot of advancements came from the military but what an absurdly inefficient way to achieve that. Most of the military expenditure is on personnel and infrastructure. Military R&D is a pittance, not directly released to civil use, and inefficiently allocated. Even DOE investment is primarily towards war making and nuclear arsenal upgrade, research, and maintenance. The primary DOE fusion research is done as a slight of budget for nuclear war making rather than energy generation. The spin off tech from defense spending is a drop in the bucket of what could have been achieved had that funding been open civil research towards strategic goals like sustainable energy independence.
All this said I’ll grant that the relative global stability imposed by the US on the world has ushered in a period of discovery unrivaled by simply providing a world where global societies weren’t being repaved every 10 year, with the repaving being contained to proxy war zones. This is not without immense value - and almost certainly staved of many very bad scenarios. The trick will be maintaining that stability over the next 50 years. It’s not obvious to me we can sustain that. But what we have had was bought with that defense spending.
It would be even more amazing if we ended up in a world where we basically open source public infrastructure projects so that anyone could contribute ideas and/or solicit public comment on new concepts before we invest billions of dollars of public money.
It also immediately comes to mind that Microsoft develops MS flight simulator - could proposed airport innovations be paired with it to test how pilots feel about changes to layouts or e.g. how new runways may affect air traffic and other patterns?
Very cool.
Since it's illegal for the U.S. government to copyright things†, I guess it's up to each individual student to decide on a license.
† Sadly, this is not true for state and local governments.
This is a great idea. You could change the layout in the game and then monitor pilot behavior through e.g. VATSIM to see if it makes operations too confusing or if they can adjust easily. And if hobbyists can figure out, it should be safe for trained professionals to work with.
What’s a good age to show a kid Minecraft? My son is five and loves LEGO and broadly anything construction, I’d be curious to know at what age it might be fun to show him Minecraft.
He’s not bad at playing some simple platformers et al on the PlayStation but for some reason Minecraft feels maybe a year or two off. Curious what folks here think.
At 5 or 6 they'll likely need a fair bit of support, but that's a lot of fun too.
Lego is awesome for teaching kids to think in so many different, wonderful ways.
If you want to teach your kid how to cope with failure, disappointment, and minor lacerations, get him an Erector set.
I’ll have to get some for my son for him to experience the same trauma I did.
We’ve been playing for about a month, just an hour or so before bed. He’s starting to get interested in crafting. He loves to smelt, so I built him a dedicated space to grab ore and store the bars.
We play whatever he wants, so sometimes we’re playing Mario Kart or the like. But more often than not, he comes back to Minecraft.
If you don't like the new changes, they have pretty much every version ever released available to download and play in the launcher.
Not to mention her keyboard and mouse skills are great now.
Until then, social media, instagram, Snapchat, discord, etc. are a net negative.
I don't understand how building a piece of software that Apple is willing to publish on the App Store makes your daughter emotionally prepared for social media.
I don't have any problem with gatekeeping minors' access to social media (although I would be much more liberal in this area than you) but this metric seems absolutely bonkers to me. My heuristic from my own personal development would be that the earlier I was able to make some commercially viable software the later you should push my access to social media... my coding ability was never an indicator of my defenses against the common ills of social media for kids as I understand them!
Probably depends on the kid, but I would have hated it and it would have likely made me not want to engage at all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology)
You have so little autonomy or trust and respect as a kid, that period of life sucks.
My personal experience is that they pick it up very quickly - a couple of months - and then quickly go on to blow your mind.
Minecraft is so much better than the digicrack that passes for actual “educational” games. The Prodigy products are an abomination, those people should be ashamed of themselves.
And of course, everyone's favorite: The Oregon Trail and subsequent sequels from MECC and later The Learning Company.
It's a shame that market simply isn't viable anymore. Those games played a big role in nurturing my love for computers.
And I also feel like in general the educational value of games like Minecraft, BotW, etc is often undersold - partly out of stigma surrounding the medium as a whole, partly because they’re often teaching skills that are difficult to directly measure.
I have no doubt that when he’s a bit older, things like Cities: Skylines, Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Kerbal, Outer Wilds, Rimworld, etc will continue to entertain and educate.
You’re probably more than good to let them play Minecraft in some form, just remember that while what they’re doing will probably look quite foreign to you, it doesn’t mean it’s not intellectually stimulating & beneficial to somebody that young.
I've honestly never taken to most of the things my parents suggested (or god forbid, forced), it just wasn't fun unless I was the one holding the initiative.
To explain and demonstrate: My love for computers ultimately stems from my mom and dad's computer just sitting on the desk, ripe for piquing my curiosity. I probably would have gone down another path in life if they instead shoved it in my face.
Next they can move on to TERPS procedure design! haha
[0] https://www.caa.co.uk/data-and-analysis/approved-persons-and...
For whatever reason, docs like that one are something he just loves to both read and produce. Diving in deep to a topic, finding every rough edge, corner case, undefined bit of behaviour and getting consensus from involved parties. I think I'd rather bash my head repeatedly against a brick wall, but somehow he finds it a lot of fun.
It's a shame most of that magic wears off in the high school level FRC competitions. It's still fun and a great learning experience, but people take it way too seriously. Our team would go up against NASA-sponsored robots or people who borrowed Toyota schematics for their drivetrain. After a certain level, it becomes less about what the kids are capable of and more about who has the most connections/highest funding.
Of course, the fun was never the winning for either program. It's just funny to me that Legos did such a good job of gatekeeping those meddlesome adults, and now Minecraft might do the same.
The kids presenting IAD do a pretty good job breaking down the airport for their age! I'm impressed.
At what age did you allow your kid to start playing? When they start school and learn about them from others?
Also had zero tolerance to things like iPads, phones etc in our home. When out at grandparents/friends etc then fine, but never, ever at home or in the car, on a plane, in a restaurant etc. Seeing families sit down at a restaurant and then they just chuck the 4 y/o an iPad for the entire dinner makes me sad.
I don’t plan on giving my kid unfettered access to the internet but I really enjoyed using computers as a kid and I think it’s a big part of why I ended up being an engineer today.
Hell, hacking video games when I was an early teenager is how I developed an entire career in vuln research and exploit dev, and eventually started and sold a cybersecurity company. Video games literally handed me my career because I had fun breaking them.
You never know where interests will lead. You just want to stay away from “FarmVille” and similar games that make it impossible to do anything but play the game.
my partner and I at the time ultimately decided not to submit. but we (well, mostly me) put a lot of R&D time into it