Thanks for your question Andres, you summarized it nicely there. We have scenarios for a variety of STEM domains that are mentioned in the video. The challenges are sometimes specific, and at other times open to interpretation. One of our aims is to present kids with messy challenges that are more in line with some real-world problems where we may lack information or need to do additional investigation before solving them. 

Lua is the language used in ComputerCraft and it is pretty solid as a first language (or first non-block-based language). In our camps, we don't require Lua experience and trying to figure out how much Lua knowledge is enough to start getting into the science aspects of the problems. We have an integrated curriculum that helps build up competencies in the context of mini science problems. Last year we were able to bring kids up to a fairly solid level of skill in about 4 hours of camp, spread out over 3 days. 

I will note also that this question (coding first or science first) is a big issue being addressed in the STEM+C community. We felt that given our goals of allowing kids to leverage their Minecraft expertise, they needed to see the power of coding and turtles right away so they could understand the additional scope of what would be possible.  

Thanks again! I'm curious to learn about how you're using Minecraft - it has been encouraging to see a growing number of videos in the Showcase that use it as a learning environment.

I remember using Lua a while ago, very nice language, originally created in Brazil :-)

About my own use of Minecraft, last year I was exploring the possibility of running epidemic simulations inside a minecraft mod to complement experiential outbreak simulations we designed for an educational program on infectious diseases (started several years ago before covid). I realized that we needed to modify internal aspects of the game in order to create a "viral" agent that spreads among players. But maybe it's feasible within your framework?

We were really happy to see how fast the kids picked up Lua and did some very cool things (and I did not know it was invented in Brazil, very cool!).

We have often found it challenging to do everything we want to in Minecraft. For example, tidal behaviors are pretty central to many of Dr. Comins' what-if scenarios, and we cannot do those justice in MC. We also do not want to require any mods because it would make it harder to get on our server, so we rely heavily on specialized plug-ins (all of our code is open source and freely available).  

Pandemic modeling is an interesting application of Minecraft, and other than the back-end tracking we do (e.g., to detect when contact occurs between players, for example), I'm not sure how difficult that would be to implement. I do highly recommend looking at Blockdown, though - I have not played with it, but it appears to be an impressive Mojang effort to help kids learn the value of social distancing and to understand the nature of pandemics.

Thanks so much for your thoughts Michael. You make a great point and one that we have been discussing on this and other Minecraft projects. One of the drawbacks of Minecraft is that there is no built-in notion of resource constraints or consequences of actions that may impact the environment in some way. There are games out there that have made progress on the question (e.g., https://play.eco/). Our approach thus far is to at least constrain the player in terms of resources that are made available and include this aspect of design in our educational materials (e.g., talk about the importance of it, reward solutions that minimize impact based on human judgements of solutions).  Dr. Jeff Ginger is a collaborator and co-presenter, and I'm sure will have some additional thoughts since he has brought it up several times.  Thanks again.

We recently implemented this curriculum at a Middle School located in California named the Western Center Academy thanks to the assistant principal Michael Horton. We saw a lot of success during our stay there and were happy to hear that many of the kids continued to use the mods we used to teach programming while at home. Many of those kids came from underrepresented communities and we had a nice split in genders. We were so happy to see this.

Right now, we are reaching out to the same school to get a new batch of students to improve on our old curriculum. We are also looking to work with the previous students we had to explore more advanced topics in programming in hopes to see some new creative solutions to STEM problems.

We are also hoping to work with a local community center in Illinois that helps provide educational opportunities to less privileged kids and get them introduced to programming in Minecraft as well.

As for our outreach program, we currently have children volunteer to be part of the program and have seen great success with that. We are usually looking for opportunities in informal contexts to get kids working on this project to help it feel a little more natural and inspire interest in these subjects.

In the future we are hoping to develop the resources on our website https://publish.illinois.edu/stemc-minecraft/ to help instructors explore these topics in their areas.

Hi Brian and Chad!  Great project. Keep us posted on the resources and if they get published! 

Thanks Judi, will do!

Thanks for watching and commenting, Elizabeth!  I checked out your video and thought it looked great... If I am remembering correctly, I believe I spoke with Cody about it at the STEM+C Summit in the before times and remember being excited to see how your work with Minecraft would evolve. 

In my group at Illinois, we emphasize informal learning and do a ton of summer camps, some after school, and build tools for learning at home. So the emphasis on standards is not quite as central, but nonetheless relevant. We also chose to focus primarily on coding skills in this early phase and to find out what kinds of solutions kids would come up with given their (typically) vast knowledge of Minecraft and emerging understanding of programming. That said, we did align our goals with the K12CS Framework in a pretty straightforward way, and also point to NGSS for the science/engineering topics we cover. I also did some work in my dissertation (from 2004) on the development of coding skills and we draw from that to some extent. 

About supplemental learning materials - the most we have done so far is having our campers do research online for related problems/solutions, but it is not a large part of our curriculum just yet. The idea of bringing in other kinds of hands-on activities (like building rockets) is definitely something we have played with and are open to continue exploring.

It's a great point about breaking flow and in our other MC project we have experienced this often!  We even integrated some of our knowledge instruments into the game using a plugin called SurveyPlus since getting kids to switch to a web browser to fill out forms was definitely a downer for them.  If you have any tips to share, we'd love to hear them!

Thanks Jeremy, glad you like it!  I have to give credit for that line to Sharita Forrest, an Illinois News Bureau reporter, who used it in a story about our project when it was funded. It has always stuck with me - it is a great reminder of how important the work we are all doing as a community is. 

We are working out the content and scenarios now, collecting data on how kids learn Lua and apply their science understanding. So still many kinks to work out and surprises to be had by seeing what kids come up with. That said, we have moved our work to a server which will enable collaborative and remote work, as well as constant access. Ultimately we'd seek to move it to a more structured setup (with onboarding) like we have on WHIMC.

A second part we are pursuing is in collaboration with Minecraft: Education Edition. They have many tools similar to ComputerCraft and a well-established audience and foothold. Not all, but many of our scenarios could translate to that platform and so we hope to pursue that in the coming year as well.

thanks again!

exciting stuff. stay in touch!