Minecraft

I recently got around to trying out the new-ish Python mode for coding within Minecraft: Education Edition, and whilst it is refreshing to be able to write code, the lack of a code library to be able to refer to made learning the Minecraft-specific commands somewhat difficult. Enter code introspection, which is the ability to look inside classes and methods from within Python to list them and see what is available, or to show their docstring and discover their arguments. ...

This is the first year that Digital Technologies has been a mandatory part of the Australian curriculum through to Year 8. Whilst the subject area contains a number of different topics, the one that generally comes to mind (helped in no small part by our politicians and media 🙄 banging on about ‘coding’ this, and ‘coding’ that) is programming and algorithmic thinking. Since our education sector has a fairly comprehensive set of licenses to all things Microsoft, we have Minecraft: Education Edition licenses for all of our students and staff. While I am not that big of a fan of Minecraft’s system of switches and redstone wiring (I prefer my programming higher level and less clunky), I do quite like plugging in external programming through Code Connection, as I’ve written about before in toying with core sampling. ...

Background I’ve been using Minecraft Education Edition with Code Connection in my Year 7 classes this term to teach programming principles, which has been a blast* (i.e. I spend a lot of time trying to encourage students to write programs rather than run around building stuff themselves). The Agent Code Connection comes with a ton of interesting tutorials to get started with, but I’ve been writing a few things for myself to try out different features, two of which are the Agent and the Builder. The Agent is a code-controlled character that can build from its inventory, attack and destroy surrounding blocks, and do basic sensing of its environment. The builder is an invisible constructor which is used for raising structures fairly quickly; it doesn’t have an inventory and can’t interact with its environment beyond placing blocks. ...