Kids have been calling my creation Cookie Island. I’ve been calling it, “That’s The Way The Cookie Crumbles”. This is the world that we have begun working in. I created it using a program called World Painter. It is a PhotoShop/MSPaint-type program that allows you the ability to circumvent the entire random world generation algorithm. I made this land by hand, ya’ll.
Why? Don’t you have other things to do? Don’t you have kids? Yes, and they were very upset with me for a few weekends when I worked this thing out. I wanted to create a very specific world that would that would teach a little about coding, trading, the value of resources with some math mixed in. I’m hoping this gives new players a chance to work with experienced ones and learn about how MC works while playing it. The experienced players have another layer of difficulty and understanding to achieve through this as well by trading what they have with others. Hopefully this will keep everyone learning something regardless of where they are at but at the same time playing together and with a common goal to achieve. Teamwork! Students will be in small teams of 3 players and separated by border blocks – they are unable to cross these hidden boundaries. The kicker is that each area is a different type of biome that is rich in a specific resource. They come in 2 categories, renewable and non-renewable.
Renewable resource teams:
- food/flowers
- animals
- trees
Non-renewable resource teams:
- iron ore
- redstone/coal
- diamond/emerald ore
Each area has something that all other teams desperately need. Each team must trade with other teams in order to survive and thrive. Their challenge is to build an awesome area, do whatever, but try to make it so that you can actually live there. Teams must follow some basic guidelines in order to qualify to enter their creation up for a vote. Within a few weeks of our last session, I will open up each day’s server (there are 3), turn building off so that everyone can explore all of the team’s creations. Each player votes for the best. The team that win gets an actual prize.
Each area also has one or more interesting landforms:
- one big volcano
- cenotes
- sea arches
- grottos
- sea/ice caves
- rivers
- mesas with a pyramid thrown in (eh why not?)
- beaches
- caverns
- trenches
- ponds
- waterfalls
I wanted to make this world myself so that I could further define the world and have control over where things will grow. This entire world is going to be dependent on the food region. Everyone has access to water, except for the area in the middle – they have all of the iron but everyone needs iron buckets to collect and transport the water that they need. See how this works? The area that has diamonds think they are rich! rich! rich!, but they have no other way to support themselves – no dirt – no plants – no food. I also made parts of the world completely dense and void of any caves (a common feature in Minecraft world generation) so that the teams could easily program their robots (turtles) to do all of the mining for them without a lot of if/then statements. This area has all of the non-renewable energy sources (coal and redstone) and a bunch of sand and cacti but no way to grow food or keep livestock. The forest region is beautiful with an array of tree species (redwoods, birch, pine, oak and jungle).
Sounds complicated but Minecraft (and the real world) are complicated and these kids quickly figure all of it out. I wanted to insert some reality into the game so that they could translate it into just one aspect of how our world actually works. Some countries are very fortunate and are blessed with climate, terrain and energy resources that make civilization building easy while others are not and it all comes down to where they are on the globe. After explaining ‘this is kind of like the real world guys’, I had one student say ‘HEY! This is nothing like the real world! I don’t have everything I need in my area.’
Heh heh… exactly kiddo! We all have to share what we have. All of us. How we go about doing that? Let’s find out!
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