Minecraft training

Today's the day for attending a Minecraft training day at the University of Manchester!

Fact finding session thoughts begin.

Before going in my thoughts are:

1 I've seen my lads playing this game and it looks pretty simple. It seems to be a bit like Lego on steroids.

2 So you can construct great structures. I can see how this could be used to aid some sort of design process. Something akin to VR but  using blocks?

3 What I want to find out is can it be used for non construction training. Say for example safety engineering training, risk assessments and the like?

Okay here we go:

What a brilliant day! Got much more out of it than anticipated. Especially when the Internet connection dropped out giving more time to bombard the organisers with questions.

In answer to Q3  above the answer is yes. We had ideas of building for example a level crossing and injecting in guidance on design standards to aid knowledge based learning. Another idea was to inject failure rates into parts of the design to aid appreciation on safety and reliability effects.

The big idea was however to look to get youngsters involved in the railway arena through the design of their local station. Then to look for improvements and risks associated with the design. Needs a bit of through on exactly how to make this entertaining but we all though that it would be doable through the primary school tech programmes.

All in all - very impressed - off to learn how to programme in Python!