Minecraft

[Craig_W]

We have had a query here to help facilitate a Minecraft club. This club will only run at lunch times and is a student led idea with teacher supervision. It will only be installed in one room on site, which is not available to students other than 6th form during lesson time.

 

I have never played, looked at Minecraft or any other MMO game. Can anybody offer any advice for potential pitfalls of this idea, what do I need to consider? I am not wanting to get out of helping facilitate this idea, I would just like to ensure I am informed and my eyes are wide open.

[Sunnyknight]

Pitfalls? None... that i can think of anyway.

 

Disable EXE during lessons. Enable before school, break, lunch and after school.

 

They'll be happy and won't cause you problems.

[L3OUGH]

I agree with @Sunnyknight, I can't think of anything that would cause you any issues. Like he said lockdown the .exe during lesson times to stop the sixth formers having a jolly, that's the only thing I can think of.

[GTX]

You may need to setup a server for it.. Problem is if you have a few students saving there maps on the same PC, it may become a problem with how much free space is available on the hard drive. . I would suggest setting up a Minecraft server with protected land.

[Valyyn]

I experimented with this myself last summer.

 

To start with, you'll need to buy a Minecraft licence for each machine.

These guys:

MinecraftEdu :: Home

are re-sellers who give discounted rates to schools etc - they also have some quite cool looking custom versions for education.

 

Next, you'll pretty much need to set up a server - it doesn't need much on it or much overhead - I was going to use a VM with 1GB RAM if I recall correctly.

 

The problem I had was that for the server to work properly, it needs to basically report in to the main Minecraft servers (called the Heartbeat) and it won't run properly without, even if you just want it as a local LAN server*. My problem was that the Minecraft stuff was all blocked by the council and there was zero chance of them unblocking it, so I had to drop the whole idea.

 

(*If this has changed in the meantime, I'm more than happy to be corrected/updated as it would be awesome!)

 

Edit - Just to add, that since this fell through, I've been running a Kodu club instead that all the kids who wanted Minecraft are coming to and they're loving it. It's kind of like Minecraft in that they make their own world, but they can actually edit everything in this and make anything they want pretty much

http://www.kodugamelab.com/

Edited June 18, 2013 by Valyyn