FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Can anyone advise if there any extant plans to create a minetestedu, similar to:

http://education.minecraft.net/faq/

Also, as a novice, is it possible to run molcraft within minetest (arch linux installation)?

http://www2.hull.ac.uk/science/scienceo ... Craft.aspx

It's possible that someone makes mods or a whole Minetest distribution targeted at education, but I'm not sure if the developers would endorse those officially.

testr wrote:Can anyone advise if there any extant plans to create a minetestedu, similar to:
http://education.minecraft.net/faq/

Not any official plans but lots of ideas as can be read in several threads:
Minetest Could Be An Educational Tool
Education, minetest in the classroom
A teacher's perspective - this is great for class
[IDEA] Minetest for teachers
Using Minetest in a school
also in the wiki:
Mods:Learning
Minetest in der Schule (project started in German by a teacher)
or here:
Mining for Education
and many more threads.
Feel free to formulate your ideas, somebody might get interested and build a mod around that. The more exacter the description the easier it is to find out wether it can be done with minetest or not.

testr wrote:Also, as a novice, is it possible to run molcraft within minetest (arch linux installation)?
http://www2.hull.ac.uk/science/scienceo ... Craft.aspx

Simple answer: no! - as in not in an easy out of the box way.
Minetest is written in an different programming language (c++) and has a modding API that can read mods written in Lua. Minecraft is written in Java and the mods modify the executable code directly.
To work in Minetest the Minecraft mod would have to be recreated from scratch and might not be able to simulate the exact features of the Minecraft mod as the underlying game engine and the grafic engine are different. Just as bats and birds can be of similar size and both can fly and they even might have an common reptile ancestor but they are quite different from the inside and you can't pluck the feathers onto the bat - well you could but that might not work as expected and ... oh well ... not gonna venture further into this

The only thing that can be shared fairly easily is the skins for the avatars.(please don't try this with bats and birds) Even textures cannot be shared directly but need a considerable amount of work to be adjusted.

There are some scripts that attempt to convert maps or schematics from Minecraft to Minetest with some success but that is only the simple information of which block goes were. Mobs, NPC's, command blocks and the such are not converted at all and redstone structures are difficult as there are no redstones in minetest and the nearest thing, called mesecons, works slightly different and is no exact replica of redstones.
(uhm, and no wierd school experiments with bats and birds please)

I tried to do this in my school (the atraz 4 years). However I found problems run it on school computers.

I use it every day in my classroom and I'm working on a version with many different gametypes. I need to update it with my newer version but you can check out and follow updates at http://sandboxgamemaker.com The Modern City Builder gametype is what you'd want to use.

Of cause, the Education version of MC is easy to use for Noobs. That's why only the freak teacher use Minetest ... like me ... I created the german page for teachers in the wiki.

Molcraft is in my opinion not needed ... and I'm a chemistry teacher. I have so many other tools to display 3D molecules. My favorite is Jmol and its JavaScript Version JSmol. I use it on a wiki page and I have interactive handles to interact with the molecule. See http://chemie-digital.zum.de/wiki/Orbit ... beim_Ethen and http://chemie-digital.zum.de/wiki/Orbit ... eim_Benzol

And you can use http://molview.org/ to use it and have easy access for example to show the MEP of a molecule.

What I'm missing for school is a server-tool to administrate an online Minetest Server with an HTML-page like start and stop. Someone answered to a former question about that, I need to look at his idea.

And a mod like ComputerCraft would be a feature that would many IT-Teachers think about the possibility to minetest for school. That would be really great.