FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Hello everybody!
I'm a teacher, and I've been thinking about using minetest in the classroom for a while. This year I will finally start using it with a group of students, and was wondering if any of you wold like to help me with ideas and/or activities for my students.

I already read these threads, wich have great ideas and a great mod for reading and math:
https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10722&hilit=education
https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?id=4237

My first idea is to integrate some school contents with minetest activities.
For example:
-Have the students measure the classroom, and then create a minetest model with aproximate dimensions.
-Recreate their community, and prepare a virtual tour, where they must explain what each institution does.
-Create buildings, assigning tasks to each member of the group (gathering, mining, crafting, designing, building, etc.)
-Recreate a story previously read by them with minetest buildings and characters, maybe make a video and adding sounds afterwards.

I'm preparing a tutorial world, so the class can learn the basics of the game, I'll set it up on a server as soon as I can, so you can make some suggestions.

I just thought some of you might be interested in this experiment, maybe we can share ideas, or maybe I can get some help from advanced users/programmers. Please let me know what you think! (my english may have some mistakes, sorry about that!)

Thanks a lot....

Nice!

Good to know that more teacher is using Minetest in education.

PS : There is a sub-game that explain the basic of Minetest engine: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=10192

you may be interested in these threads:
Minetest Could Be An Educational Tool (search this thread for more links and some more ideas)
Glowing letters A-Z + 0-9 (neon)
Alphabet [alphabet] (using Braille)
minetest-teaching Alphabet and equations

Cutepie Mod if you need to place smileys

Naughts and Crosses for some fun with digilines.
turtle graphics and Turtles (robots) [turtle] [WIP] or
L-System Tree Utility
and don't forget the endless possabilities with the technic-modpack or mesecons or the Lua-controler

btw here is another tutorial project. It may contain other mods of interest for educational purposes.

just to name a few

Thank you srifqi and twoelk!!!!

I didn't find the tutorial projects before, great! Also the glowing letters, smileys, technik-mod, etc are great for the class. I'm sure I can use those for my students.

Thanks again! Any more ideas are very welcome....

It is definitely easier than using Minecraft that you have to pay for. I am using Minetest to make an Emerald city for a digital arts assignment for school.

I think it's a good Idea, to recreate things with minetest.

minetestcr wrote:-Have the students measure the classroom, and then create a minetest model with aproximate dimensions.
-Recreate their community, and prepare a virtual tour, where they must explain what each institution does.

Minetest models should be 2:1. It looks better (more real) und is easier.
Don't forget, in Minetest everything is at least 1m big.

minetestcr wrote:-Create buildings, assigning tasks to each member of the group (gathering, mining, crafting, designing, building, etc.)

I think, thats not a good idea! Effort and difficulty of this task are to different. The groups should better find a solution for themselve.

minetestcr wrote:-Recreate a story previously read by them with minetest buildings and characters, maybe make a video and adding sounds afterwards.

That sounds like fun! But are there mods for this in minetest? Please tell, how you do this, when you found a solution to do this!

minetestcr wrote:I'm preparing a tutorial world, so the class can learn the basics of the game, I'll set it up on a server as soon as I can, so you can make some suggestions.

I'm curious about it and will look, when it is online.

Tmanyo wrote:I am using Minetest to make an Emerald city for a digital arts assignment for school.

That would be interesting to see....

solars wrote:I think it's a good Idea, to recreate things with minetest.

Minetest models should be 2:1. It looks better (more real) und is easier.
Don't forget, in Minetest everything is at least 1m big.

thanks for the advice....

solars wrote:I think, thats not a good idea! Effort and difficulty of this task are to different. The groups should better find a solution for themselve.

You are right, maybe they should work on small groups so everyone does a little part of each task.

solars wrote:That sounds like fun! But are there mods for this in minetest? Please tell, how you do this, when you found a solution to do this!

I'm planning for the students to build the scenery, and then, use a screen recorder, using a minetest client as camera/cameraman with fly privileges to make the shots.

solars wrote:I'm curious about it and will look, when it is online.

I'll let you know, although, the tutorial subgame (pointed by twoelk and srifqi) is pretty good, maybe I'll use that one instead.(https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=10192)

concerning the tutorial have a look at these power tips. You will have to scroll down a bit and open the spoiler.
Although some are very specific to this server, most may be usefull beyond that. Wuzzy wanted to keep the tutorial to the basic stuff so things like the "sneak elevator" are not explained in his tutorial.

Thanks for the tips twoelk.

Hello everyone!

I created a world with a few instructions to use in the first class with the students. What would be the best way to:
1- protect nodes / areas that should not be broken (basically any type of wool must not be broken),
2- distribute the world to the students (I'm planing on copying the world folder to each computer).

Any ideas. Thanks!

Rubenwardy pointed me in the right direction to solve this one. Answer and files posted on this thread: https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?p=171893#p171893

minetestcr wrote:'m planning for the students to build the scenery, and then, use a screen recorder, using a minetest client as camera/cameraman with fly privileges to make the shots.

So the studens might represent the characters that are part of the story? If you want static ones, you might also take a look at my mob_traders mod. It adds mobs that look like player chars. They stand around all day and can also be set to the diffrent animations (sit, lying, mining, walking, walking&mining) of the player model.

minetestcr wrote:1- protect nodes / areas that should not be broken (basically any type of wool must not be broken),

Maybe the protector mod would be most suitable for that case. It protects 5 nodes in each direction of a special protector block placed. I don't like this mod much because it is difficult to fit it into larger creations, but it is admittedly easy to use for inexperienced players.

minetestcr wrote:2- distribute the world to the students (I'm planing on copying the world folder to each computer).

Either that, or run a server where they can join. That'd have the additional benefit of beeing able to teach your students that destroying other people's creations is not so good. Running your own multiplayer server may be much more fun for the students, but also require more work on your part as they certainly will come up with...creative...ideas of annoying their teacher :-)

Also don't forget to disable fire (you really don't want the creations to burn down) and disallow the placement of lava sources.

It might be a good idea to use worldedge to set a size for the world. If you set the size to something small then the students won't be exploring all class. World edge lets you set an edge and when you walk to the edge you get teleported to the other side. You can set the size at the top of the init.lua file.
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=10753

Don wrote:It might be a good idea to use worldedge to set a size for the world.

Thanks Don! Your answer will help me with another project I have.

Wuzzy helped me understand my own question, all the worlds have the same size, what I need is to use singlenode mapgen, and then generate a limited square of land, the rest of the world would be air.

I for one would really be interested in an experience report to hear how this went. What was the class size, how old were the students, did they have any prior technical instruction, etc.

I am using Minetest to teach my early-elementary kids about circuits, logic gates, and binary arithmetic, and it is going well so far. I hope to move on to programming soon.

technomancy wrote:I for one would really be interested in an experience report to hear how this went. What was the class size, how old were the students, did they have any prior technical instruction, etc.

I am using Minetest to teach my early-elementary kids about circuits, logic gates, and binary arithmetic, and it is going well so far. I hope to move on to programming soon.

Hello technomancy.... your project sounds great, maybe you'll share your experience too.

I'm working with sixth grade students (12 years old), I have four groups of 15 students each. We started by simply playing the game, some of them knew how to play, and they helped the ones that didn't. I have introduced simple concepts like servers, ip addresses, commands, cyberbullying... They have been learning about the game basics. The y also have learned about the rules (no killing, no stealing, etc.). They worked cooperatively to build some structures, and they share pieces of information with each other.

Now we are moving to the next stage: they must build our school, so they have to go and take pictures of the classrooms and offices, they have to measure, and find an approximate scale factor to build in-game. When it is finished, they must "sell" their model to the board. They will present the finished work, and tell about the process. The model will be used as a virtual tour, they will also make a video showing the evacuation procedure, so teachers can show it to other students....

That is what we have done so far, I'll let you know any other ideas we develop.

minetestcr wrote:Hello technomancy.... your project sounds great, maybe you'll share your experience too.

#nocomment

minetestcr wrote:I'm working with sixth grade students (12 years old), I have four groups of 15 students each. We started by simply playing the game, some of them knew how to play, and they helped the ones that didn't. I have introduced simple concepts like servers, ip addresses, commands, cyberbullying... They have been learning about the game basics. The y also have learned about the rules (no killing, no stealing, etc.). They worked cooperatively to build some structures, and they share pieces of information with each other.

Looks like they're enjoying it. Nice to know that!

minetestcr wrote:Now we are moving to the next stage: they must build our school, so they have to go and take pictures of the classrooms and offices, they have to measure, and find an approximate scale factor to build in-game. When it is finished, they must "sell" their model to the board. They will present the finished work, and tell about the process. The model will be used as a virtual tour, they will also make a video showing the evacuation procedure, so teachers can show it to other students....

This includes math and economy. The idea of "tour in Minetest" is great! Hope there will be mod for this!

minetestcr wrote:That is what we have done so far, I'll let you know any other ideas we develop.

Such amazing. Thanks for using Minetest!

Hello srifqi...


Thanks for the message. It has been a great experience for the students. I think there is a lot of potential in minetest as an educational tool.

I will post more information as we advance with the project.

Hello.

This is an update on the use of minetest in my technology class. I told my students "you have to build the school"....
then, they started planning how to do it, they formed in groups (I didn't tell them how to work), they went to the different classrooms and offices to take pictures and went back to build. Some of them assigned tasks to themselves: some had to gather materials, and others had to build. There were a few leaders that assigned tasks to their classmates, and supervised the quality of the model.

They also learned what an IP address is, what a server is, and what a server administrator can do if they don't "behave" in a digital space.

We didn't have enough time to finish the entire building (maybe we'll continue next year) but we managed to build a good part of it.

Some of the students will work next year with the model to create some videos about the evacuation plan and distribute them to students and staff as a mean to educate people about safety procedures in the school, and maybe use this project for science fair.

These are some "pictures vs minetest" so you can see and compare what they built:







questions, comments and new ideas are very welcome.... thanks

You have some future architects there!

If you build the school two (or more) times as big as in reality, you can easier rebuild it, e.g. thin walls (0.5m), l guess the walls of the school aren't 1 metre thick.

Maybe you could even teach them how to use Photogrammetry, if a program for putting imported buildings from photos automatically into minetest is finished and works well, you could easily have everything you took photos of in minetest, but without improvisation depending on situation of course

minetestcr wrote:We didn't have enough time to finish the entire building (maybe we'll continue next year) but we managed to build a good part of it.

That looks very good already! A perfect replication usually isn't possible due to block size, but it is certainly very similar and well done. And way better than what you sometimes see done by inexperienced builders. Your students did a good job :-)

I'm using minetest in the classroom as well so I find this thread very interesting. Currently they are testing out mods so that we can do a "realistic city" where they have to manage clean water, food, zoning, etc and do to this I want them to even set up Government inspired by the Government of the city we live in.

Thanks for all of the great ideas and links in this post too, I need to check them all out! Take care :)
-Mike

EDIT - I'm also curious, did you ever explore that story idea? Did you do any other scenarios/activities beyond the recreating the school? I'm so interested in insight!! :D

benrob0329 wrote:You have some future architects there!

Thanks! I'll tell my students your comment.

Hybrid Dog wrote:If you build the school two (or more) times as big as in reality, you can easier rebuild it, e.g. thin walls (0.5m), l guess the walls of the school aren't 1 metre thick.

Maybe you could even teach them how to use Photogrammetry...

Interesting ideas, I will be trying that, tahnks!

Sokomine wrote:That looks very good already! A perfect replication usually isn't possible due to block size, but it is certainly very similar and well done. And way better than what you sometimes see done by inexperienced builders. Your students did a good job :-)

I'll tell them, thanks!

TheReaperKing wrote:I'm using minetest in the classroom as well so I find this thread very interesting. Currently they are testing out mods so that we can do a "realistic city" where they have to manage clean water, food, zoning, etc and do to this I want them to even set up Government inspired by the Government of the city we live in.

Thanks for all of the great ideas and links in this post too, I need to check them all out! Take care :)
-Mike

EDIT - I'm also curious, did you ever explore that story idea? Did you do any other scenarios/activities beyond the recreating the school? I'm so interested in insight!! :D

Hello, it's so wonderful that teachers take a chance and try new things... The city idea sounds great, it would be nice to if they build, for example, hospitals, fire departments, markets, etc., and at the same time research about the importance of those in a community, maybe even visit those places to interview people and then come back to the class and build it...

I tried to make a video about the evacuation plan, but we didn't finish, right now the students are in vacation period, we'll continue with the project after that. I'll post any other experiment here, and I hope that you (and other users) share your experience with minetest in the classroom here.