Hanging Out.

The first Minecraft Teacher Google Hangout happened over the weekend just gone. There were 9 participants in the hangout and more on the MinecraftEdu server that was being hosted by Temple University.

We were in the tutorial world that comes with MinecraftEdu, we had people ranging in ability from beginners to long term users. The Hangout can be viewed here https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9xClC7TJlGY 

We started with a bit of an explanation from Joel about the creation of the tutorial world. We then did introductions and discussed the new features available in the upcoming release. As the first Hangout I think it went very well. There were NPCs all over the place as people were exploring the Custom NPC mod.

Just after the hangout the new MinecraftEdu snapshot was released, it is still undergoing testing, but if you have purchased MinecraftEdu you can now download it from the members area and begin exploring the new possibilities that this release will give you.

Mathlandia is coming along nicely. It is ready for the first session with students, I am going to run it with the other teachers class on Wednesday and my own class on Thursday and I am super excited to see how it goes. Students hopefully will finish the activity with an hour and then will have about 30 minutes of 'free' time to begin to own the world, and make their house.

I have only built a very small amount of the world, and am hoping that students will want to help me build some more of the quest based buildings that I can add NPCs and activities to. I have not quite figured out how to make it 'self-serve' for the finishing of the quest activity. At this stage a 'supervisor' will need to check their work and then give the students the correct token for quest completion so that they can be rewarded for their work.

The tour and lesson video will be coming soon, so keep an eye on my youtube channel. Thanks for reading.