Grant,
I read your building tower's tutorial and I really like the idea of motivating
programming for children with something like Minecraft, which seem to like.
Since we already have a decent outreach program for this level, please consider
creating a Minecraft-Racket bridge. Our approach to teaching programming
emphasizes transfer of skills between programming and math. Traditional
programming skills do not transfer, because of low-level obstacles ('x = x + 1'
just isn't an equation and when you solve it you get '0 = 1') to high-level
obstacles (what's a 'while' loop in mathematics).
So we prefer a functional approach because it definitely benefits children and
it scales all the way to serious software.
One way to go about this is to hook up Minecraft to what we call the
2htdp/universe teachpack, specifically the world form. There are two
strategies:
-- modify 2htdp/universe so that handlers can output Minecraft commands (and
the world-universe library interprets it for them) + add a handler that can
deal with signals from Minecraft
-- leave 2htdp/universe alone but set up a world that communicates with a
local universe that can receives S-expressions from the students' world and
interprets them and turns signals from Minecraft into messages for the world
I have used the second strategy to connect a brain-wave headset with world
(big-bang).
Another way to go about it is to connect Marketplace (a Racket-embedded
programming language) to your Minecraft API. See the package server.
Marketplace is available from there. This is probably easier and it is good
enough for one of us to do the rest.
Let us know about your progress and we can also help evaluate your
World/BigBang tutorials.
Nice work!! -- Matthias
On Jul 30, 2013, at 2:34 PM, grant centauri <gcenta...@lincolnix.net> wrote:
> hello all,
>
> i wrote a programming tutorial which connects Common Lisp to the Minecraft Pi
> edition, attempting to illustrate recursion through the process of building a
> tower.
>
> after publishing it on my personal site, I realized no one was likely to
> ready it, and even if they did, it seemed unlikely that CL would be a good
> choice for my audience.
>
> I have been considering rewriting the tutorial in Racket (someone from this
> list pointed me to an already written library for the API), but I am pretty
> isolated in my pursuit of programming. I work with children at a montessori
> school, and have been learning programming as a hobby in the hopes of
> offering rudimentary skills to kids who might be interested. Minecraft +
> Raspberry Pi seemed like a good option to try something out. It would be
> nice if some of you programmers and educators out there wouldn't mind
> reviewing my current article and maybe offering some critique so I can
> improve on it? This list seems to be the best programming community I can
> find so I thought I would ask. Sorry it is in a foreign dialect, but it is
> fairly simple.
>
> here it is on the web:
>
> http://www.lincolnix.net/gcentauri/build-tower.html
>
> thank you for considering!
>
> -grant
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