Success! (sort of)

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 They're old, they're outdated, they're beautiful.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.

This Year's Minecraft Project: Manifest Destiny

This is from a handout I'm sending home with kids next week. We'll see how it goes.

MANIFEST DESTINY MINECRAFT

This year in Humanities class students will learn about America’s expansion from a small group of colonies on the east coast to an expansive nation that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the coasts of California.

Students also have the option to experience this journey in the game of Minecraft. Students will play on a model of the North American continent built to scale. This model is a geographically accurate replica of an untouched America and includes rivers, mountains, and biomes for the different regions of the country (desert, plains, forests, etc). There are no cities, towns, or roads.

The students’ goal throughout the year will be to “civilize” this land. They will develop paths, towns, and stable food supplies all with one goal in mind – to be the first to reach and settle on the Pacific coast. The student(s) who reaches the coast first will receive a prize, yet to be determined.

Mr. Thalkar will run Minecraft sessions once a week after school and host a server that students can access from home if they have a personal Minecraft account. This server will only be accessible to NewLA students. Mr. Thalkar will maintain logs to keep track of who access the server, when they are on, and everything that is typed in the game. Please see the back of this form for a Code of Conduct that every participating student must sign.

THIS PROJECT IS COMPLETELY VOLUNTARY AND WILL NOT COUNT AS A GRADE OR EXTRA-CREDIT. It is simply an opportunity for students to have some fun with Minecraft and compete against their classmates for the opportunity to win a cool (TBD) prize.