Minecraft in the classroom

[Oolong]

What are your experiences like, using Minecraft in the classroom? I found it difficult to get the kids to work through the worksheet introducing the Python API from the Raspberry Pi site; my general sense was that it was too easy for them to get distracted in general Minecraft mucking around. It also seemed an awfully long thing - more of a workbook than a worksheet, at 13-odd pages.

But I figure I may have been approaching it wrong. Have you had better luck?

[MarcScott]

Hi Oolong,

First off, thank you for the feedback on the Getting Started with Minecraft resource, it's always valuable to us.

The resource in question was not really designed for use within a classroom environment. It is there as a guide to the Minecraft API, with examples of activities that you could attempt with students.

If I had enough requests, then I would certainly look at making a more structured Teach resource, with lesson plans for teachers and worksheet style activities for students.

For now, I recommend that you cherry pick activities from the resource, and then adapt them to your needs. Maybe show the students how to layout blocks using loops, and then have them build structures in as few lines of code as possible. Or perhaps make teleportation blocks that transport you to different parts of the world when you hit them.

If you come up with any ideas for resources, and would like to share them here, then that would be excellent.

[scotty101]

I'd be willing to help create resources for the classroom.

I ran a workshop with one school's computing club with some old worksheets that I got at the Cheltenham Science Festival but they are no longer up to date with the current API.

[morphy_richards]

I made a very short and sweet classroom intro lesson for mcpi resource based on the foundation's worksheet. It's nothing much. It's just an idea that might help get you started, I used it with my year 8's to get them thinking about Minecraft python projects.


I've shared it here on CAS resources
http://community.computingatschool.org. ... urces/4322

[RST8]

What are your experiences like, using Minecraft in the classroom? I found it difficult to get the kids to work through the worksheet introducing the Python API from the Raspberry Pi site; my general sense was that it was too easy for them to get distracted in general Minecraft mucking around. It also seemed an awfully long thing - more of a workbook than a worksheet, at 13-odd pages.

But I figure I may have been approaching it wrong. Have you had better luck?

I've had very mixed experiences with yr4-6, some are easily distracted, some leap in and want to explore the code.
I wrote a bunch of stuff for an after school club and pick different examples depending on the group.
You might have more luck with slightly older children, although there will always be some that just want to play.

I've been using scratch more recently for the younger kids and have found it easier to keep them on track

Yesterday I had a morning of year 5s for a series of shorter 25min sessions, tasked with introducing them to binary, the jsw.py example proved very useful and several of them were able to see the shape of the character in the code before I ran it, but were still impressed as the character walks across the screen.

Those that want to learn coding is a subset of those that want to play Minecraft.

https://github.com/joedeller/pymine

Joe