Firstly, let me apologise for the title of the post. I was feeling somewhat creative and flippant, and well.. unfortunately this is what happens.
To business, the latest update of Minecraft: Education Edition brings with it massive functionality that we can use to 'smooth the waters' and begin to develop really supportive 'things' for teachers (and students) to use in their classrooms. This functionality, with no pun intended, is actually the /function command.
Just the yesterday I released the first public version of my 'Classroom Management Pack' and while still under active development, it is very, very neat in my humble opinion. It takes all of the suggested 'fixes' for classroom management concerns from community members that I recorded and published in September last year, but it also adds in a freeze all players option as well as a few other new tweaks I learnt along the way. Check out the video here:
None of this would have been this 'easy' without functions being available. Essentially what a function is, in the simplest terms I can think of, is a series of Minecraft commands that are run 'all at once, but in order.' It is super simple to get started with, and I will have a tutorial and supportive documents to help you out in getting started yourself 'soon' but in the mean time, start thinking about all the things you could automate.
I know using these functions took my latest project from 1000+ command blocks down to maybe 300 or so. It also makes editing things much easier, as they are just plain old text documents where if you find a mistake, you don't need to edit it in every command block but 'find and replace' has become my new best friend. I even found a find and replace in all files option in Notepad++ that I used on a few occasions to do bulk changes across the entire map, saving me hours of command block editing, even if I were to do it in MCEdit.
But what I am really excited about, is that I think this functionality could really support teachers in a much more active way than classroom management, and that is in 'building' as ridiculous as that sounds. One of the biggest limitations I have had with M:EE as opposed to the old Java MinecraftEdu is the inability to have 'worldedit' functionality in-game. I much rather being in-game building things as it gives me a much better perspective. However I have been 'resorting' (sounds so bad, but really it isn't) to MCEdit, and while that is also super powerful, and has a place in my workflow for creating worlds, it would be awesome if I didn't have to export out of M:EE every time I wanted to do a simple import of a schematic.
Now I don't think I have the capability to do a complete 'worldedit' pack, but I am going to have a stab at it, but before that I do that, I am going to create a 'build pack' where there are some solid, functional builds ready to import to a world, while in world. This would not be a 'simple' thing to add to, the way I understand it right now, but I remember ages ago, that Shane used to have the same 'start layout' in each and every map he made. This could be a reality again, if you wrote the function to create that build, then you could just have the 'build pack' in each world, and type the command to build that start location almost instantly.
Imagine you could have a function to build the structure, prepare all the scoreboards for one of my complex scoreboard builds (ECAS or ECAAS) to do multiple choice answers in-game, and the teacher only needs to run the 'create' command and then copy/paste the appropriate commands into the appropriate command blocks. This removes, what I believe to be the biggest barrier to using these kinds of things in multiple lessons, and that is using MCEdit to import schematics into a world. Don't get me wrong, it is possible, it is just not something that teachers necessarily have the time, or inclination to learn.
Anyway, exciting times ahead, thanks as always for reading, if you want to follow the progress of the 'build pack' (I will try to update here as often as possible) follow me on Twitter @EduElfie. If you have any comments, or questions please leave them in the comments below, reach out on Twitter or ask in the Mentor Discord: https://discord.gg/7fSQBdx
To business, the latest update of Minecraft: Education Edition brings with it massive functionality that we can use to 'smooth the waters' and begin to develop really supportive 'things' for teachers (and students) to use in their classrooms. This functionality, with no pun intended, is actually the /function command.
Just the yesterday I released the first public version of my 'Classroom Management Pack' and while still under active development, it is very, very neat in my humble opinion. It takes all of the suggested 'fixes' for classroom management concerns from community members that I recorded and published in September last year, but it also adds in a freeze all players option as well as a few other new tweaks I learnt along the way. Check out the video here:
None of this would have been this 'easy' without functions being available. Essentially what a function is, in the simplest terms I can think of, is a series of Minecraft commands that are run 'all at once, but in order.' It is super simple to get started with, and I will have a tutorial and supportive documents to help you out in getting started yourself 'soon' but in the mean time, start thinking about all the things you could automate.
I know using these functions took my latest project from 1000+ command blocks down to maybe 300 or so. It also makes editing things much easier, as they are just plain old text documents where if you find a mistake, you don't need to edit it in every command block but 'find and replace' has become my new best friend. I even found a find and replace in all files option in Notepad++ that I used on a few occasions to do bulk changes across the entire map, saving me hours of command block editing, even if I were to do it in MCEdit.
But what I am really excited about, is that I think this functionality could really support teachers in a much more active way than classroom management, and that is in 'building' as ridiculous as that sounds. One of the biggest limitations I have had with M:EE as opposed to the old Java MinecraftEdu is the inability to have 'worldedit' functionality in-game. I much rather being in-game building things as it gives me a much better perspective. However I have been 'resorting' (sounds so bad, but really it isn't) to MCEdit, and while that is also super powerful, and has a place in my workflow for creating worlds, it would be awesome if I didn't have to export out of M:EE every time I wanted to do a simple import of a schematic.
Now I don't think I have the capability to do a complete 'worldedit' pack, but I am going to have a stab at it, but before that I do that, I am going to create a 'build pack' where there are some solid, functional builds ready to import to a world, while in world. This would not be a 'simple' thing to add to, the way I understand it right now, but I remember ages ago, that Shane used to have the same 'start layout' in each and every map he made. This could be a reality again, if you wrote the function to create that build, then you could just have the 'build pack' in each world, and type the command to build that start location almost instantly.
Imagine you could have a function to build the structure, prepare all the scoreboards for one of my complex scoreboard builds (ECAS or ECAAS) to do multiple choice answers in-game, and the teacher only needs to run the 'create' command and then copy/paste the appropriate commands into the appropriate command blocks. This removes, what I believe to be the biggest barrier to using these kinds of things in multiple lessons, and that is using MCEdit to import schematics into a world. Don't get me wrong, it is possible, it is just not something that teachers necessarily have the time, or inclination to learn.
Anyway, exciting times ahead, thanks as always for reading, if you want to follow the progress of the 'build pack' (I will try to update here as often as possible) follow me on Twitter @EduElfie. If you have any comments, or questions please leave them in the comments below, reach out on Twitter or ask in the Mentor Discord: https://discord.gg/7fSQBdx
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