Category: ICT

Minecraft in Education / Classroom / Learning

Posted on by John McLear

UPDATE: It’s not just me who thinks Minecraft is great, so does Leon!

Minecraft is an online game, the free version isn’t multi-player.  Minecraft can be played in your web browser (when it’s up).  Minecraft requires Java (not the usual flash software).

Minewhat?

Minecraft is a first person survival game.  You must manipulate elements/resources to survive and construct your own world.  During the day everything is fine and peaceful, you spend this time constructing and crafting a safe environment because at night is when the dangerous beings come out to attack you.  Admittedly this may be a bit scary but as its 8bit and its not exactly grand theft auto graphics I’m sure it can be classed as “U” rated or at most “PG”.

So, where is the education value?

Well, mostly in the crafting section of the game.  Trying to persuade you that control and/or the day/night thing is educational would be a bit far fetched and I try to treat my readers with respect.  The crafting part of the game basically asks you to merge certain elements to create new materials.  For example, you turn wood into planks, planks into sticks then craft 2 sticks and one piece of coal together to create a match.

This game is a baby puncher.

Don’t expect for this game to be easy, in fact it’s tough!  Watch below for a video on how to survive your first night!

Minecraft has been buggy so they released a free single player download version, how nice of them is that?  This is the current download link.  I haven’t played the multi player yet, I’m not sure on the child protection issues surrounding this.  I guess like any other MMORPG (of sorts) it will have the ability to chat etc.  Private educational collaborative servers could be an option though?  In the mean time I’m getting in touch with the developer to see if we can get some free educational access so we can try it out in a few schools.

What do you think?  Is this more a primary or secondary tool and other than geography what subjects does it complement?


A week in the life..

Posted on by John McLear

I haven’t been very vocal lately, because I have been busy…

Satpin

I have been working on Ian Addisons new project now called Satpin (something to do with phonics according to Miss Pitkethly).  My Javascript skills have improved massively doing this project which I have enjoyed thoroughly.  Javascript is awesome.  I need a decent tutor though, I am cobbling my way through stuff using “John” logic which isn’t good enough.  Once the project is complete/stable I will be releasing it open source (it will require a LAMP stack).  I am spending masses of attention to detail on this project, more than I have ever done.  I’m focusing 99% of my efforts on UI.  I decided to make it writeable by anyone which will upset some people but oh well..

Wind power

I have been finishing the electrics on my wind turbine, which is now up and running (hopefully okay).  It’s been a while since I did any component level work and Sparky helped me which was good.

Apache load balancing

We spent a few hours working on how to improve load balancing on our main apache cluster.  We are considering casandra if we grow any quicker than our current projections.

Shib constipation

Mid week I struggled and I’m still struggling massively with a Shib SP deployment.  I’m running the same config as another deployment but I am getting errors.  Think this is a job for team john and tom to get sorted properly.  We are doing it so we can work with the Swedish equivalent of JISC for their Etherpad deployment.

Classdroid

We got classdroid working properly, well, sort of.  Turns out Android isn’t as cool as I first thought.  Well, android is..  Turns out motorola/lg etc. are idiots and install custom software including custom camera intents that breaks a lot of the phones functionality.  Thankfully google will fix this with any v2+ updates.  The LG Optimus is due V2.1 this month so I am willing to wait a few weeks instead of trying to squash a documented/fixed bug.

PHP

I helped Challenge CLC with a touch of PHP this week, super easy stuff.  It is always good to collaborate with people, especially when I am so comfortable helping out in PHP.

Etherpad

I did a few more edu installs of Etherpad, nothing exciting here.  Wrote a new way to integrate with the scribblar API.  Stefan has the code if anyone wants it.   Important thing to note, why the Hell are so many Americans and now Africans getting me in to do Etherpad deployments yet there are so few EU deployments going on?  Is their something about Europeans and our lack of encouraging collaboration in the work/edu place?

Finally.  Happy Pirates day!  Now gimme your loot.

Classdroid on the iPhone

Posted on by primaryt


I keep getting asked if Classdroid is coming to the iPhone…

It is complex so I wanted to write a specific blog post.

Firstly, I don’t like the iPhone. I don’t like how its marketed, how it’s sold, how it’s app store works, how the community support is supposed to work, how the licensing model works and what impact it has on the tech industry as a whole. “We need substance, not glitter” is probably the best way to put it.

Now you know how much I dislike the iPhone it will be of no surprise that I love Android, but this isn’t about love/like/dislike. It’s about economics. I would need to charge $5 per device or so and sell 400 copies of Classdroid on the Appstore and still wouldn’t break even.

Classdroid must remain free and open source to encourage others to use it, if you don’t know about crowd sourcing and how that develops applications then here is a quick example of why open source is good…

Before Classdroid got to market someone had made language support for traditional/simplified Chinese. That would of taken me hours to do, but it’s now done just by some guy I don’t even know. Classdroid includes parts of the WordPress open source App so we were able to make it, test it and publish it quickly without writing too much code.

Stop ranting and tell us when it’s coming to the iphone!

It’s coming to the iphone as soon as:

a) Apple allow iphone apps to be developed on something other than Apple devices.
b) Apple reduce/drop the ridiculous 100$ annual SDK fee.

OR

c) Someone who does done apple/ios development reads our source code and makes an apple version then publishes it under their name (that is fine with me). The code must remain open source, that is the only prerequisite.

So that’s it, Basically I would need about $1100 just to start coding.. It’s not worth it for a handset that is losing market share month after month.

If you really still want Classdroid for your iPhone then ask about, see if someone you know, knows an iPhone developer who will be happy to help out. If so then get in touch or point them at the source code.

Simple Link site creator

Posted on by John McLear

You may recall a few days ago I posted some concept pictures of a very simple link interface for use in early years/ks1.  Anyway here is an updated look at the admin interface:

There is a live demo site here (it is currently massively broken but at least you can see it)

My todo list: http://john.primarypad.com/ianlink

This service isn’t ready and it may never actually get released but I figured you might like to have a look to see what I’m playing with 🙂