Liverpool's FACT gallery is hosting a showcase of Cloudmaker -- a research project using Minecraft as a collaborative design tool in classrooms.
The project is being developed by FACT and Liverpool John Moores University with the aim of making a teaching resource which uses the Mojang game as part of a collaborative design platform.
According to principal investigator Mark Wright of LJMU, "The goal of Cloudmaker is to provide tools and teaching materials which make it easy to use Minecraft within as a platform for collaborative design between young people."
The brief for the project was for students to create a model of a brown field urban site adjacent to their school using three forms of interaction.
The first was collaborative design which meant making the model by using Minecraft normally, building it block by block, and then creating a 3D printout.
The second was to use Scriptcraft (a javascript-based language) to build programatically, not one block at a time.
The third was to create a Minecraft of Things, where real-world objects are connected to the virtual world of Minecraft. Using a circuit built on a breadboard and a host computer using Python and the pyFirmata serial library, they were able to program interactions between the game world and real objects. "A cool example of an interaction between a real world object and Minecraft using this framework is our bathroom pull cord night/day switch. The cord hangs down in front of large screens of a Minecraft world. If the cord is pulled, the Minecraft world toggles between day and night by sending the 'time set' command to the server," said Wright.
The showcase will allow visitors to see the results of the research as well as creating their own models and using the Minecraft of Things interact with the game.
The showcase will be at FACT until 18 March.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
