My students are smarter than me.
We have a cart of old (5+ years) MacBooks. I struggled with them for a few hours and couldn't find a way to get Minecraft to run. The OS, I believed, was too old. And it is, kind of.
Last week one of my students brought me a piece of paper with 18-step directions for getting Minecraft to run on the computer. Several of them involve writing a batch file from the console. I didn't really believe him, so it joined the large stack of random papers scattered around my desk. He asked about my progress multiple times a day and so, eventually, I figured I had to try so that he would stop bugging me.
I tried it. And it worked.
The student and one of his classmates stayed after school for two hours on Monday and installed Minecraft on all of the other computers -- we now have 22 beat-up MacBooks that run Minecraft 1.4.8 and MinecraftEDU 0.984. They're old, they're outdated, they're beautiful.
Tomorrow the eighth grade math teacher is starting a stairwell and roller coaster project on Minecraft for the kids to practice ratios. We're talking about creating a cross-curricular project. More details to come.
Hopefully, many more projects to come.
