Minecraft EduElfie: The Periodic Table 2.0

Yesterday I spent a bit of time tweaking the periodic table I built in MinecraftEdu for my blind student. The 'lips' I put in to separate the different elements were making it tricky to read the braille so mostly I just removed them and made them recessed instead, as I still want to differentiate between the different elements on the table. So today I printed it off, gave it to the student and asked for some more feedback, straight away he gave me some more tweaks to do.

The characters are too close together, both horizontally and vertically was his main complaint. Another tweak was that some of the height differences, due to the different groups, make it too hard to read still. So after messing around with the old version a bit trying to make more room between the cells vertically I decided it would be easier to start from scratch.

So I now have a new version, which is going to be a bit bigger than the previous but should be easier to read. Also the height mapping I did has been rejigged so that there should only be a 2mm difference between any 2 adjacent groups. (That was true until I actually mapped the heights in game and had a look, there is one place where the height difference is too large. No easy fix, so I shunted the element down a bit after consulting with the Chemistry teacher to make sure it wouldn't break everything for him).

So now I have the time consuming task of putting the braille in, typing the elements symbol and number on my iPad, and then making the same symbols in MinecraftEdu.

Here is a picture of V1 and V1.5 side by side. The black one is V1, the while is v1.5.

Now to the animal cell, I have spent a lot of time tweaking my texture pack, not necessarily for the cell, but for the next 'part' of the cell map. I now have all 20 amino acids and the 5 nucleotide bases all set up as blocks in game. I have also started creating some machinery that will help me teach the process of transcription and translation to my students.