Minecraft

We've decided to make an effort and using Minecraft educationally in our school. A few teachers are using it in their classrooms, but so far, it's each kid using his own copy locally on his own machine, and there's no in-world collaboration going on at all. This is a decent start, but we'd like to have communal, collaborative worlds.

So, we've set up a Minecraft server on our Virtual Reality system. Right now, it's not open to the outside world; it's only accessible from within the school network. We installed both versions 1.6.4 and 1.7.2 of the server application (.exe), and we're finding that 1.6.4 works better. Clients have to make sure to set their preferences to act as 1.6.4 to connect. This is working fine.

Chelsey has gotten us started by laying out a grid of streets around which we'll build our community. Each block is 25x25 in Minecraft blocks. We're hoping this is big enough to do some building on. If not, we'll adjust somehow.

There's a center block that will be the spawn point, where the user will be presented with instructions and rules for the world. We haven't drawn those up yet, but we're thinking of things like "don't destroy anything outside your own block," "no profanity or harassment," etc.

The first ring of eight blocks around the center "park" will be "public" buildings: places controlled by the Tech Team, and used for communal meeting spaces, etc.

The rings of blocks further out will be "private" blocks, where users will be able to claim an unclaimed block, put up a sign, and start building.

The first thing we noticed was that it got pretty dark as night fell, so our first project was to install street lights. Matt and Brady did this by putting up some poles on the streets with Glowstone at the tops. Andrew is currently working on the central "park" area.

More soon...

We're having a weird little glitch in the NF Village world where there's a small area that, if you're not an operator (op), you can't place or destroy blocks. If you place a block, it just disappears immediately, and if you destroy a block, it comes right back. I've set Andrew as an op, and that's fixed it for him, but not for anybody else trying to build in that area. Not sure how we'll deal with this, yet. It's a small area.