Minecraft in the sea modpack movie#

Much debate followed about where the ideal point would be. They recognized that, at some point as you moved up the sphere, this ratio flipped and you lost much more area for only a small decrease in materials. He bolted to the board and drew sketches illustrating that if they bisected the sphere closer to the top, they would save considerably on materials, but the area it enclosed would be only slightly smaller. He understood that everyone in class - including me as an observer - had assumed the glass dome would be the top half of a sphere, split at the midpoint. 'Hey, I just realized something!' he said. The group was stymied until one student, who had been quiet up to this point, practically shouted as he rose from his chair. The students wanted to maximize the area under the dome, but they realized that the higher the dome was, the more resources it would take to build it.

One moment in particular powerfully illustrated the beauty of letting students drive their own learning. As it turned out, when I sat back, I left room for the students to step up to offer suggestions and debate ideas. I had to have faith that they would employ good thinking without direction from me. The riskiest part of this assignment was letting the students design their own solutions.

Minecraft in the sea modpack movie#

Many students captured video from their various perspectives, and one student edited them together into a movie showing the climactic moment when the dome dropped into the ocean. This project took a couple of weeks and involved all students in various phases of the project:

When the dome is completed, burn the wooden platform, allowing the sand dome to drop to the bottom of the ocean, where it can be covered with glass. Their final plan was brilliant: Build a wooden platform on the surface of the ocean and construct a dome on top of it out of sand. Others researched strategies on the web for staying underwater for extended periods of time and conducted tests to see which seemed the most feasible.

Some students formed a scouting party that traveled the map, looking for the deepest area of ocean. I built in time during class for students to work together and to present their discoveries to the group. We divided into teams to design guiding activities to answer the questions.

What is the safest way to work underwater without running out of air?.

What's the best location on the map for the dome?.

How deep does it need to be to be completely underwater?.

How much glass is required to enclose a given area?.

In a class discussion, they came up with some useful guiding questions, including: We used the challenge-based learning framework, which offers a great process for project-based work. Next, students had to figure out how they were going to build the structure. Still others provided security against the random skeletons and creepers who showed up from time to time, threatening to derail the work. Other students dug sand, built the platforms and created the scaffolding that supported the dome. One student set up his general store as a clearinghouse for supplies, while another created a shared document that listed the supplies they needed to collect. Some naturally emerged as leaders, while others were content to be followers. The group of 20 students immediately set out to devise a plan, with every student taking on some aspect of the work.

It had to have plenty of trees, flowers and other natural elements.

All elements had to be mined or donated from existing supplies.

I asked students to work together in our shared world to build me an office completely underwater according to these criteria:

Computational Thinking (CT) in EducationДЄt Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii, where I teach high school computer science, I gave my students an assignment to play Minecraft together, hoping it would build community and encourage teamwork in our face-to-face classroom.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education.