Trial Postponed

Well, my trial of MinecraftEdu with students today was postponed due to licensing issues, the issue being that I did not get licenses for the kids in time. Not to worry, at least it gives me more of a chance to build more maps to use with them, and to fix (hopefully) the graphical glitches that the school computers seem to be having with any version of Minecraft.

The 21 question map is coming along quite well now, I did restart it and made it linear instead of branching, so that makes it much easier to build. I have managed to build the starting area and the first rooms for all 25 student passages. I have also made a start on 5 of the second rooms.

I have had more ideas regarding maps to use with the kids, I am thinking, to bring them together and get them working as a team, of starting a survival server and limiting their resources, mostly space and lumber, and having monsters on and them needing to help each other out to survive and needing to collaborate and decide on the best use of resources. I could also make this a competition between a couple of groups, but I would like the whole class to become more cohesive, they are a bit secular at the moment and I think that starting a competition may just keep the status quo.

Another change that I am thinking is that instead of having the 'free build' world at the end of the 21 question map, I will put a sign there with the port number of the free build world, so that those who get to the end can disconnect from the question map and reconnect to the free build map. I would change this port every time I ran the question map so that the students had to get through the questions before being able to connect to the free build world.

Well I think that sums up the progress so far, I cannot continue to work on the 21 question map tonight, I did some more work on it at school today, and forgot to take a copy of it home with me. I cannot wait until the school server is accessible from home, we are having some trouble forwarding port 25565 through a TMG firewall, by all accounts it should be open but the firewall keeps disconnecting the requests as it is thinking the incoming ip has been spoofed. Yet more work for the technician and I to try and get done.

I probably should buy both my techies a few drinks at the end of the year, with the amount of requests I have gone into them with, and how responsive they are, they have been very supportive of all my little projects.

Time again for screenshots of the build, these were taken prior to todays work, so much more progress has been made. Let me know whether you like seeing the progress or if I am just wasting your time.

 This first one is the 'entrance' area, there are redstone torches to let the kids know which corridors are open. On means open, off means someone is already in that corridor and they need to find another one.

The very beginning of the first room, again these are all done now, but you get the idea. (I hope)