Minecraft Day 1, Thursday 30 May - We're under way!

Today the 12 successful applicants for being part of the Kiwiana Theme Park project met and we organised our Charter, our groups, group names, and player names. Players organised their own groups of up to 3 players. We abandoned the idea of mixed groups across classes and year levels as students weren't keen on the idea. 

Students felt they didn't need to sketch out a plan with their group, and wanted to get straight to work in the game........ Hmmm, not a good idea, and some will be going back to the drawing board before they play again because chaos reigned once the game was under way.

Next we had a look into the map that one of our amazing students (DOXINWHAT) had created for us. Areas were marked out for each group. He'd spent about 4 hours on the work at home and had done an impressive job.

We had about 45 minutes to see if the client version of MinecraftEDU worked on the laptops with our iMac server. One computer didn't seem to work, but we had enough to use. Some students had remembered to bring a computer mouse - well done!

In spite of everyone designing, agreeing to, and signing the Charter, some players started to create havoc straight away, and one has already received a 'warning'. As agreed by the players, a second warning would result in a ban from play of one week (actually a session of 1 and a half hours, because we can only meet once per week). A third warning would result in a complete ban. Some students were disappointed that we were playing in Creative mode for our first experience at school, and that we had no creepers or Nether etc. They obviously weren't listening before they signed up. This is the way it's going to be though, as we get to grips with how this might be used in our school.

Carol didn't manage to get the Teacher account running, but worked it out later with DOXINWHAT. So any problems next time will result in all players being frozen on the spot and then we'll see who is doing what! It's a pity to have to be thinking that way right from the start though, but it's all about working as a community and behaving appropriately, whether online or not.

The senior group of 3 students (L & Pixels) managed to get quite a bit of construction done (an L & P bottle), but are going to rebuild it as they're not happy with it. DOXINWHAT did a quick flyover before shutting down the server for the day. You can see some of the havoc created, and that not much was achieved in the 30 minutes or so that we had to get started. Next week things will be different!