Education Ideas

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greybeard
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Education Ideas

Post by greybeard » Thu Feb 13, 2014 5:01 pm

Calling any and all of the Minecrafters from The Ville!

I am a high school teacher in an alternative education setting (read the boys and girls who haven't much use for rules and regular classrooms). The principal agreed to let me run a class to use Minecraft as the engine for education. I have some ideas (enough to sell the class) about projects to do. For example, project #1 will be to build two buildings that are in a 2:1 scale. Another project will be to build a building that has an exact volume (say 100 blocks). Another idea is to build a maze from geometric shapes that all have an area of 48 blocks (a square with area of 48, a rectangle with area of 48, and so on through parallelograms, etc. ). Knowing that many brains are better than one, I would like to hear your ideas, comments, and suggestions. Thanks in advance for your creativity, thoughts, and help.

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Re: Education Ideas

Post by ADevilishPotato » Thu Feb 13, 2014 6:19 pm

I get the feeling that you have seen this, but there is this nice teaching wbsite: http://minecraftedu.com/page/

And this nice discussion forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum ... t-teachers
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Re: Education Ideas

Post by Inner » Thu Feb 13, 2014 6:20 pm

Nice finds Potato!

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Re: Education Ideas

Post by greybeard » Thu Feb 13, 2014 7:12 pm

Yep... Knowing some of the quality minds working in minecraft around here and their jobs, I was wondering what ideas people would come up with. Just thought of one that might work from you potato (aren't you working in forestry?). Can one design a project to estimate the amount of wood blocks in a spruce forest from the number of trees in a given area and the radius of the foliage? Isn't that how it is done in real life? Take a picture of a forest from a helicopter, determine the number of trees in a sample space, and determine the board feet from the width of the foliage, extrapolate it all into the amount of wood in the section being bid on?
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Re: Education Ideas

Post by ADevilishPotato » Thu Feb 13, 2014 9:06 pm

greybeard wrote:Yep... Knowing some of the quality minds working in minecraft around here and their jobs, I was wondering what ideas people would come up with. Just thought of one that might work from you potato (aren't you working in forestry?). Can one design a project to estimate the amount of wood blocks in a spruce forest from the number of trees in a given area and the radius of the foliage? Isn't that how it is done in real life? Take a picture of a forest from a helicopter, determine the number of trees in a sample space, and determine the board feet from the width of the foliage, extrapolate it all into the amount of wood in the section being bid on?
HA, if it was that easy I'd be out of a job...
No, it is done by going in on the ground, measuring the diameters at breast height (aka 4.5 feet or 1.37 m), taking the height, then running it through volumetric equations for the given species. Foliage amount influences the rate of volume added to the bole of the tree, but there is practically no correlation to current foliage amount to total tree volume. Mind you it falls in a certain range, but the amount of variability makes it far too impractical. You could have a hundred trees with the exact same board feet in them and have a 100 different widths, lengths, densities, etc. to the crown.

But what you could do is what is done in real life which is estimate to total volume of timber by taking sample plots. In the real world forest stands are too big to measure every tree, so you take a certain amount of sample plots that are representative of an area, do like a 10th acre plot, each tree would then be representing 10 trees, then multiply by the amount of acres you have to estimate volume. So in minecraft it would be like 10 hectare (1ha = 100m x 100 m = 1000 m^2) and within that you would plop down 10 1/20th ha plots (50 m ^2). This gives you a tree factor (what each counted tree represents per ha) of 2 since (1x20)/10 = 2 (the size of your plot/the number of plots (a different way to think about it would be that since you sampled ten 1/20th ha plots you sampled a half ha, so if you are wanting number of trees per ha, each count gets multiplied by 2)). Trees per ha (TPH) = the total counted plot trees x tree factor (eg: you counted 50 trees in the 10 1/20th ha plots, the TPH = 100 trees). From that you can estimate total # of trees by multiplying it by the # of ha (for this it would be 100 TPH x 10 ha = 1000 total trees).

To get volume would be easy as well since MC trees are discreet values. To get it, you would need to count the amount of wood blocks in each count tree, then multiply that by the tree factor (eg: say each of the 50 trees yielded 4 wood = 200 m^3 of timber x tree factor of 2 = 400 m^3 volume per ha x 10 ha = 4000 m^2 total).

If this is confusing or you want better clarification: http://forestandrange.org/Virtual%20Cru ... index.html <-following the lessons here is a great place to learn forestry 101.
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Re: Education Ideas

Post by The Domer » Thu Feb 13, 2014 10:04 pm

VIEW CONTENT:
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Re: Education Ideas

Post by Soup Nazi » Thu Feb 13, 2014 10:04 pm

High school level? I could create a few lesson plans involving redstone to explain the basics of how electronics work. I'm in the electrical engineering field, and would love to help out!
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Re: Education Ideas

Post by greybeard » Sat Feb 15, 2014 3:34 pm

Soup Nazi - That would be awesome. Electrical Engineering is not my field. I can load different worlds easily on the server. If you create a world with explanation and a project in creative mode, save the world, then I can load it for my students.

Potato - That is great info. Double checking: So I could set it up for them to grid off a forest (which I can create in creative mode to make sure that it is large enough). Randomly choose 10 1/20th ha plots to determine the exact number of wood blocks in and use that information to determine the TPH and then use the number of ha in the forest to determine that total amount of wood blocks in the forest?
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Re: Education Ideas

Post by Gizanked » Sat Feb 15, 2014 4:42 pm

There are many things that the command blocks will be able to do in the new updates. Different" test for" commands to make the duplicating games and such. I may have to find some videos on it once I get on my computer tonight.
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Re: Education Ideas

Post by LadeeeDuke » Sun Feb 16, 2014 12:38 am

Awesome stuff. I don't have ideas, but would love to hear yours so that I might incorporate some of them into my homeschooling curriculum.

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Re: Education Ideas

Post by Guardian » Sun Feb 16, 2014 7:31 am

What subjects are you looking to teach? The whole reason minecraft probably the biggest education game tool is because essentially it's one of the easiest to use level designers out there and has a lot of uses especially with mods. So really possiblities are endless.... which is why in order to suggest anything I'll need you to narrow it down.

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Re: Education Ideas

Post by Soup Nazi » Tue Feb 18, 2014 4:51 pm

Working on a test world for redstone math and basic engineering principles. If you or your kiddos would like to test it out, maybe we could have it put up on a server for a while this weekend. Also: WHERE DID ALL THIS NEW REDSTONE STUFF COME FROM!
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Re: Education Ideas

Post by greybeard » Thu Feb 20, 2014 10:22 pm

Guardian - The door is open to me at this point in time. I am looking more at the math/science aspect, but there are many others. Indeed, what helped me sell the idea to try it is that the possibilities are endless. Any ideas or suggestions are appreciated.

I have a lesson going on ratio (building two of ??? that are in ratio to each other). I am working on a forestry/statistics project at Potato's suggestion to determine the number of amount of wood in a forest by sampling the amount in smaller randomly selected areas. Soup Nazi is working on some math and engineering projects (Big shout out to Soup Nazi). If you have ideas - great. If you have ideas you want to develop into a world - great.

The basic layout is to give some information (I built two structures in creative mode that were exact replicas of each other in 1:2 scale) so the kids could see what it looked like. Gave them information on signs to help them understand. Then gave them a project to work on. I save the worlds, then load them onto the server for the kids.

Soup Nazi - Have friends up this weekend, but would love to try it out if I can find some spare time. I can set the server if you want or send the address.
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Re: Education Ideas

Post by Soup Nazi » Fri Feb 21, 2014 10:35 am

I'm in no way finished, but you can see what I've been trying to get done.
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Re: Education Ideas

Post by Soup Nazi » Fri Mar 14, 2014 10:44 pm

Ok... kind of done with the proof of concept.
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