Developing programming skills with Minecraft and Python
- Homepage
- https://ngcm.github.io/PythonTool-Mod/
- Started
- 23rd June 2016
- Ended
- 23rd September 2016
- Research Team
- Alvaro Perez-Diaz
- Investigators
- Hans Fangohr
PythonTool mod
The game Minecraft has been extremely successful in the last five years, with over 106 million copies sold, making it the second best-selling video game up to date. Its educational capabilities have been exploited in a variety of ways already across the world. In this project, we try to improve the ways that programming can be taught to young learners, by employing a modification (mod) of the game.
To this end, we created PythonTool Mod, a Minecraft mod which allows visual and interactive in-game execution of Python scripts which alter the Minecraft world in real time. It makes use well established pieces of software, such as mcpi and RaspberryJam-Mod, and tries to improve and ease the programming experience. A non-traditional programming workflow using Jupyter Notebook is also proposed to complement the mod.
Detailed installation and user guides can be found in the project's website. A showcase video is available in Youtube.
Categories
Software Engineering Tools: Continuous Integration, Git
Programming languages and libraries: Java, Python
Computational platforms: Linux, Mac OS X, Raspberry Pi, Windows
Transdisciplinary tags: NGCM