I leave you with this picture of my pixelated students interacting with their turtles building a house. So I have to keep in mind that if a kid didn’t make much progress with programming, it was because their learning was happening in another area. On some days, you will learn anger management. But in Minecraft, you have to stay flexible with your goals. I love it when lessons are nice and tidy and you have a certain goal and you’re laser-focused on that goal. You learn other things too, besides programming – and it’s what makes Minecraft such a confusing, but enriching, world to play in. The group discussions helped me understand the programs a lot, and I hope to see the robotics kids being more adventurous with their coding as a result of the lessons.
COOL TURTLE PROGRAMS COMPUTERCRAFT CODE
We took another look at the code to match what the turtle did with the code. Then I opened Turtle Canyon and found each of the turtles with the programs in the document, and we ran them. Kids used the link above and analyzed the programs, and made predictions about what they do. What should the guidelines and expectations be for a Minecraft robotics project? I am making the class more academic by including lessons like this one. I will create a final project assignment. I’m still working out how I am going to assess their knowledge of robotics principles via Minecraft. This is a graded class and so I have to approach it differently. I am currently teaching some turtle lessons to my Robotics class, justifying it by telling myself “they’re virtual robots”! This has some advantages over real robots – no parts to throw or break, for example.
COOL TURTLE PROGRAMS COMPUTERCRAFT MOD
This program uses move and place blocks to build… four walls? ComputerCraft is a Minecraft mod that adds programmable robots to the Minecraft world. Nested “Repeat” blocks in the graphical turtle language in Minecraft. Many of the kids “died” multiple times and just kept trying to use their turtles to solve the puzzles. As a busy teacher, I was happy someone else took the time to create them and that they were so engaging and interesting for the kids. I had my class do the Turtle Island mission (which took four classes) and Turtle Canyon (which took two). But the ratios are weird, and it was tremendous fun working out exactly how many logs per scaffold were needed. They had the same fuel value as a wooden plank, but you'd get 16 of them per craft.
I could see them as a unique introduction to programming and computational thinking. One of my favorite builds ever was using a single crafty turtle to turn logs into IC2 wooden scaffolding for fueling generators. Since I’m a CS teacher, one interesting teaching tool that jumped out at me was the ComputerCraft mod (See a Video here) and the Turtles. I wanted to use the class to explore the question “what can you learn from Minecraft?”
For example, teachers have classes on knitting, beading, Lego robots, ultimate frisbee, fly fishing, creative writing, and film. Our enrichment period is not graded and is intended to be a time when teachers and students learn something interesting together. My Minecraft class is a 40-minute period every other day, for a semester. I haven’t posted about my Minecraft class / experiment in a while, but this has been a really interesting class to work with.
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