Minecraft Forums

Then what you are advocating is splitting children up based on their most effective learning methods. Students who can learn effectively through books and reading would be in one group (probably the most advanced because you can process information through reading extremely fast). Students who learn better through auditory lecturing would be another, students who respond best to interactive visual stimulation a third (and by far, slowest and most resource - intensive) group.

And your "whatever came before common core" was a fat load of nothing, there was no set of things that schools were supposed to teach kids, so it was extremely common for crappy schools to graduate 12th graders with straight A's who were only up to 9th grade competencies at another school. The common core was designed to establish meaningful benchmarks in education (by the time a student is done with 4th grade, they should know x and y, and should be able to do z, 8th grade has new benchmarks, ect).

Teachers who are pressured to "teach the test" only do so because their school never bothered to come up with curriculum that was up to scratch before they were forced to.

Quote from omeggga»

"What's this? People having fun AND learning?! Must be Satan's doing!"

I don't think anyone doubts that kids can learn using minecraft. The problem is that there are only so many hours in a day and so many days in a year, so minecraft might not be the most effective way to teach any given concept.

If kids can learn a concept in 2 hours of class time and book reading, but teaching the same thing takes 5 hours using Minecraft, then using minecraft is a waste of class resources.

I would really like to see some examples of minecraft being used in lesson plans to teach things (meaning the actual lesson plans and how they are used).

I love minecraft as much as anyone, but I also work with educational games designed to be used in the classroom. I don't really see how something would be faster or more effectively taught with minecraft than without, but I would like to reserve judgement until I see it in action. The whole point of an effective educational game is that it should be teaching students more than just the core piece of the lesson plan, reaching into things the teacher didn't think about covering, didn't know his or herself, or was not necessarily something they wanted to touch on in this topic.

Edit: I read the transcontinental railroad example from above. This can be an example of using MC to teach something, but I don't necessarily agree that this was a more effective tool than anything else (especially in terms of the time it takes the students to actually complete the project compared to other media). Think of this transcontinental railroad example compared to the Oregon Trail game someone else mentioned earlier: this example basically boiled down to students deciding to build West to East or East to West, with certain advantages going to both (some of them fabricated, like gold prospecting). The lesson was built around one concept to be taught.

Compare this with the Oregon Trail, where students were taught about just about every aspect of the settler (especially the nasty bits like dysentery, starvation, attacks from native peoples, and losing everything in a river). More advanced versions of the Oregon (and later Yukon Trail) games even had you pick your starting point and starting profession, where you could go farther West to start with or start farther East with more resources. The very starting point of these games was similar to the first choice in the transcontentental railroad MC game, but the pacing of the game and other aspects meant kids could do more and faster, soaking up more in the process.

MC can probably be used very effectively as a supplement or extracurricular (i.e. homework) because exploring or doing something in minecraft is a lot more engaging than looking at it on paper or in a book. The down side is that doing something in MC is going to take a LOT more class time than doing it in a book or simpler type of game.

I remember going to the British Museum in London and there was a resource set up for kids there on field trips where they were working to build the Acropolis from Athens in MC, then it was left up after the project for other students to visit and explore it. That was fantastic, but it took the kids the better part of the day to get things going.

From an educational perspective, they learned nothing about Greece until the project was nearly finished and they were talking about the uses of the building and why things needed to be decorated in a certain way. From an engagement perspective, it was fantastic because those kids (and even I who just saw it for a few minutes in the sidelines) will absolutely remember it.

Either way, there should be a central repository of educational scenarios and lesson plans for MC, which would both help communicate efficacy of each game set-up and help community refinement.

I imagine volcanoes have not been added because of balancing issues. They would be certainly cool, but at the same time how would they be implemented? a single lava source block on top? Then the volcano disappears as soon as that block is removed and turns into just an ugly hill. You could have multiple source blocks peppering the surface of the mountain, but then it is sealed as soon as someone dumps a bucket of water at the top. There aren't any natural structures that could so easily be rendered grotesque and/or pointless.

You could have a caldera at the top full of lava, but then you're basically asking for a lava lake at the top of a mountain, which isn't cool looking or impressive. You could also have obsidian rivers flowing out of it, or none, which is a question of how much obsidian we want sitting around on the open plains naturally spawning

It just occurred to me that now that we can make giant nether portals, it would be theoretically possible to drag a ghast into the overworld by hooking it with a rod, especially if you find one spawned in a tight space

Which sounds pretty interesting

I updated my old world into an amplified version of this snapshot, exploring has never been so exciting.

a junction between Forest Hills and Flower Forest in Amplified looks more like a fantasy landscape than I've seen pretty much anywhere. Amplified anything with hills has been absolutely fantastic landscapes (I have a mountain range from Desert Hills to Extreme Hills+ to Forest Hills) that make exploration and adventuring far more rewarding than ever before.

I thought the horse update killed the minecart for no benefit, but now I can take Epona out on a cartography expedition, then make my mine-tracks the best possible route between the most interesting landscapes

This really gave minecraft a breath of fresh air

Mod API anytime soon? All this other stuff, while nice, is just basically fluff. Taking stuff from various mods and adding it to the game isn't the answer Mojang......

Yes it is? Integrating community creations gives a much bigger creative team, rewards modders for great work, and is probably the best way they could possibly update vanilla. "Fluff" you're referring to is what 95% of the players consider "the entire game"