Guess Who's Back.... Back Again... Back Again... Back Again...

OK, so it feels like this is the 20th time I have said I am back into it and working on stuff, and then I fall off the face of the blog again and come back x months later saying the same thing. I cannot promise this time is any different, sorry folks, but I can say that I am in the best 'mental shape' I have been in years and I no longer see educational Minecraft as a pain point. I am excited by it again, and am actually looking forward to creating some more things.

I have spent the last few years avoiding everything educationally Minecraft related. I have kept up with my Minecraft skills by creating content for the Markeplace, and some non-educational live Minecraft events. That being said I am slowly transitioning back in the place I specialise in, as there have been a couple of really cool educational things over the last 6 or so months that have helped 'heal' my mental anxieties around the Minecraft education space and almost 'reset' my feelings towards it.

So, am I back forever, who knows, but I am back for now, and I have plans to create some 'next level' stuff for M:EE to support teachers in their classrooms (did someone say custom economy?). The first project however is to re-start the customising Minecraft tutorial series from 2018 that I never finished. Things have changed so much in the intervening time and I have learned so much since then. 

Also, as part of a Masters assignment last year I scoped and planned a sequence of videos to take people from not knowing anything about customising Minecraft to being able to create custom entities that suit their purposes. As part of that I did record one video of the series and received some pretty powerful feedback about how I could improve my videos and make them more enjoyable, applicable, relevant and useful to those who are looking to learn the stuff I am sharing.

Recently this has come to the fore again as there are an increasing number of educators looking for this kind of content, so I feel it is time to go back to my 'old self' and start sharing the 'how' I do things again. So, the old 'genetics' project from a few years ago, that involves custom entities, behaviours and everything that I need to do to create that is going to be the backbone of the tutorial series. 

The old version of Drosophila!

I am hoping to even be able to extend it into the functions side of things because I still feel they are completely underutilised in the M:EE space in terms of creating interaction based on where students are, and what they are doing.

I also have been seriously considering getting back into streaming my creative process when working on content, either for Marketplace or educational stuff that I plan on releasing, but my internet has been terrible lately, and I am hoping that will be resolved in the next couple of weeks.

Another project, in the near future, is to re-create my old transcription/translation map for a teacher at my current school to use, we were going to have that going in the next few weeks, but since we are back into remote learning here, we are going to hold off. What was really cool though, was I found my old world and managed to get it to the latest version of M:EE without losing any important data. It took some doing because a lot of the sequences/blocks in that world were the original MCEdu blocks, that didn't swap over to M:EE very nicely, so currently my genetic code is all in what I would call "Log Format" 

I really didn't want to lose the old genetic sequence, as there was countless hours put into getting that right.

That's it from me, nothing really super exciting to share at this stage, except stay tuned, here, my YouTube channel and Twitch channel. Things are going to start happening!