Notes

The Old Dominion University Of Virginia

One of the exciting projects the Curtin Library Makerspace is working on this year is to establish an online makerspace that uses Minecraft. We have bought a few licenses for Minecraft EDU, and will be exploring its potential as an educational environment for our library clients. We are also looking into ways to interact with Minecraft with a Kinect camera as well as a projector and wall in our library makerspace area.



I'm certain that you've heard of Minecraft - it's the second most viewed video game. Minecraft is an online game played in an environment that is 3D-generated. As a "sandbox" game, players can go wherever they want to go and do whatever they want such as designing and building structures out of textured cubes. The game's activities include exploration, resource gathering crafting, and combat. There are three modes of gameplay (survival and creative) and various third-party mods that can add more content.



Minecraft EDU is a special Minecraft version specifically designed for use in classrooms. It includes many enhancements to the original game to make it more useful and suitable for institutional environments. Minecraft EDU is a free learning and activity worlds. There is also a lively community that explores the educational uses and shares resources. Watch this video to find out more about Minecraft and Minecraft EDU as the 'Ultimate Educational Tool'.



There are a few Minecraft-based academic libraries. The Old Dominion University in Virginia, for example, have utilized Minecraft to build a replica of their library which you can explore and they've also created an online game. In actual fact there are some fantastic libraries that have been built in Minecraft and amazing projects such as the fantastic HullCraft at the University of Hull.



The Library makerspace has set up a MineCraft EDU account with 25 user licenses. They have begun experimenting with creating an online learning environment. There are a variety of possibilities for making modifications. For instance, creating quests that require players to navigate the world to complete a task could be a great opportunity to teach information literacy. BEAGO Additionally, developing a mod or using an API already in place, such as Trove's, could be used to search and discovering library resources from within the Minecraft world. We are also looking into ways to interact with Minecraft using physical gestures instead of the keyboard.



We have been working with Jiayi Zhu (a computer science student) through HIVE's summer intern program. Over the past 3 months Jiayi has been developing software for the Kinect Version 2 to allow people to interact with the Minecraft game using a range of gestures that allow them to walk, jump and pick up, move and destroy blocks, as well as open the inventory to select and place items. We hope to continue to work on this project throughout the year with an ensemble of computer science students, and also to create learning activities in MinecraftEDU that can be integrated into the program. We will soon provide more information on this project.


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