User:Fire2738/sandbox

Hi Everyone, I'm going to talk about Minecraft being used as a Learning Tool

The Main Idea I want to get minecraft used for educational purposes. I don't mean having a bunch of kids on computers playing minecraft survival, I mean a bunch of kids on computers learning things, and testing them out, looking at how they work and improving them.

How a class might work At my school we had an unofficial Minecraft Program. We had a teacher who played a little bit of minecraft and also new a lot about electronics and programming. He got together groups of about 6 and we would be sat down in classes with him. He taught us all sorts of things about electronics; starting from basic terminology and then about logic and making machines that would work and interact with people or the minecraft environment and learning about binary. He also taught us about space and rockets (but that's something else entirely). As we learnt more we were given harder projects. We started off with small projects like an AND gate powering a door, to an XOR gate for a light in a room (turns on and off from 2 inputs), to contraptions like a lighthouse or piston doors. And finally we were given big projects. The teacher would print us out the blueprint for an electrical component and we were to make it in minecraft, we weren;t to make it the quick way, or from Youtube; we had to make it exactly as it was, using the logic gates and wiring exactly as it actually worked. One major project we had was an 7-Bit Display system that worked from 4 levers; each controlling one byte (it could display 1 - 9). Later, we expanded on the 7-Bit Display, we added a binary adder and subtracter to it so that it would count down or up. Once this was done we had all sorts of fun with it. We took a schematic of it and used it for all sorts off purposes, including a pig race where it would count down, the gates would open and it would show which lane was leading. Although the 7-Bit Display was a bit buggy and laggy it still worked as well as a real one.

--Fire2738 (talk) 09:42, 2 November 2013 (UTC)