Education in Minecraft
education.minecraft.net
education.minecraft.net
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.
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.
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).
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?
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).
Real infinite physics like draing a water dam and flooding mines is CPU intensive (there are such mods too) and changes the gameplay (reversing a flood means pumping out the water). In 2D it's a lot easier and several such physics playgrounds exists (even with basic fluid physics). E.g. Phun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phun ) and some games based on 2D physics engines like Box2D.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
Starting about 13:30.
More info: http://news.xbox.com/2015/07/games-announcing-minecraft-wind...
"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.