Classes Start SOON!!!

I am very excited, I don't remember ever being this eager to get back in to the class room at the end of holidays. I have had a lot of ideas that I want to try using with the students in MinecraftEdu. Most are just quick, easy to make maps that teach a specific concept, ones that I think are hard to grasp. I hope that these virtual interactions will help the students understand the concept, and also remember the learning that occurred in game.

I have made absolutely no progress on my cell tour, I just keep putting it off, I think I was a bit overly ambitious with the size. I wont abandon it completely, but I have had other projects that I was thinking about and needed to do some work on. One was the sequential answer system, I now have a working model, including a 3 strikes and you are 'dead' function.

I attempted to record a tutorial on how to build one of these systems, it took a long time, so it is the first time I have had to split a tutorial into parts, 5 in total. I am not sure how clear the tutorial is, and if someone could reproduce what I have built by watching the video (or if anyone would want to). So if you get a chance to watch the 5 part tutorial your feedback would be very welcomed as to how easy you think it would be (or was) to reproduce a system like the one in the video. Part 1 is below.

I have had a play on someone else server since my last post, and I came across none of the redstone glitches I was having on my own school server. This leaves me with 3 options, the first is that the Minecraft update 1.1.0 had a lot of SMP redstone update bugs fixed. The second being that my server needs a bit (read lot) more resources, i.e. more RAM (most likely). The third, which is most unlikely, is that there are glitches in the Edu mod.

So I am waiting to see what happens when the Edu mod is released with 1.1.0 compatibility and if I still have the redstone glitches I will allocate more RAM to the server and hope for the best. Otherwise I will have to hassle the devs to try and work out what the issue could be.

That is pretty much all the news I have, I am hoping I will be able to do more Minecraft educating with the students over the next 9 weeks and keep you guys updated on our progress, instead of just rambling about what I have done, I will be able to get back to showing you what students have created in the wonderful world on Minecraft. As always thanks for taking the time to read.