STEM Activities: Making Computers in Minecraft
Replicating Gameboys and Turing Machines in Minecraft from Robotics & Beyond
Hi! I’m journalist Caroline Delbert and this is The Toolkit from Robotics & Beyond 501(c)3. Our goal every week is to give you some videos, projects, and products that help kids (and parents) get inspired by science, technology, engineering, math, and creative design.
This week in issue 8 we’re going to talk about Minecraft. Minecraft is the single highest selling game in history, but it’s also an incredible open-ended (“sandbox”) tool for creative people of all ages. (A neat new “Matheminecraft” game lets children learn about Euler cycles by avoiding rising lava. It’s available in English now!)
Short list:
Ages 5-8: Build a fantasy castle
Ages 8-12: A working Gameboy in Minecraft
Ages 12-15: Minecraft Turing Machine
Bonus: Marble racing tournaments
The Open Possibilities of Minecraft
Within video games, different genres include very different gameplay. Some, like the 2D Mario games many of us played on classic Nintendo consoles, involve sidescrolling and platforming, meaning the game rolls in the same one direction and you jump around onto and off of platforms. There are open world games, like Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Grand Theft Auto. And then there are sandbox games like Minecraft, where players can do almost whatever they want without a lot of overarching structure.
Because Minecraft is built on a 3D grid of interactive same-size blocks, it’s also very suited to programming and computing. Inside your computer, at the very bottom-most level of logic, tiny circuits are zapping flashes of electricity to communicate messages. In Minecraft, you can imitate this on a macro scale by using alternating colors of blocks and other elements.
Ages 5-8: Minecraft Fantasy Castle Time Lapse (6 min)
Sorry about the bleep-bloopy classical dubstep (I never blame anyone for their royalty-free tunes), but this time lapse video from a YouTube Minecraft specialist shows a gigantic European-style castle being built from the ground up, including a buttressed cathedral and everything. The results would impress even whimsical King Ludwig II, whose fairytale castle Neuschwanstein inspired the ones at Disneyland and Disney World.
Ages 8-12: Giant Working Game Boy in Minecraft (14 min)
Unspeakable Plays is a dedicated Minecraft channel, and host Nathan has a lot of energy as he explores a real “Intendo” Game Boy someone has built in the game. The games are even booted up by dropping in a cartridge. I wish the games were really playable instead of just animations, but the only way to play most Game Boy games now is through Nintendo’s re-releases for Switch or 3DS, or a homemade Raspberry Pi version.
Ages 12-15: Universal Turing Machine implemented in Minecraft (13 min)
YouTuber neonsignal has made a Turing machine out of Minecraft blocks and parts. A Turing machine is a century-old thought experiment by the computing philosopher Alan Turing, and it helps you decide what a piece of hardware or coding language is capable of. It’s a tape, in this case made of blocks, that slides back and forth so a pointer can indicate different data positions and operations. What’s really cool and inspiring about this build is how the redstone elements are “wired up” into circuitry that works the same way physical circuits do. (Check out this shorter video of a working Minecraft calculator, too.)
(Last week’s most popular video was: Morphing paper fish hat!)
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Wow that’s cool! This video of the Marble League, a marble-racing competition, is very sweet and funny while also being very self aware and, maybe overly?, postmodern. I also love their stand made of Lego bricks! Once the marble action starts, it’s awesome.