mcpi-sim

Minecraft Raspberry Pi API Simulator for python 2.7 (using pygame & openGL)

You can get a whole class of students all writing code that builds up a shared virtual 3d hollywood sign on a raspberry pi running minecraft.

You can get each student involved by writing code on their own desktop pc, then by changing one line of code, they can see their program run on the raspberry pi

Background

There are some amazing things you can do with a Raspberry Pi computer and they're causing quite a stir in UK schools, especially for teaching Computing.

I'm a teacher at Manor CE Academy in York. I teach Computing in a room full of desktop PCs. I really like the idea of students writing some python code which changes a 3d minecraft universe but I don't want to have to have a whole class of students huddling around just one TV screen. I also don't want to have to set up loads of raspberry pis around the classroom when I've already got lots of desktops.

This project is designed so that students can each write and test their own code at their own desktop PC to build blocks in a minecraft style universe. When they're happy that their code does what they want it to, they can change one line and instead of running on their own PC, it connects to a networked raspberry pi in the same classroom and displays their blocks in a minecraft universe that's shared between the whole class.

This can lead to some great fun team challenges as students help each other write and test code and race each other to get their code to display correctly before any other team...

Disclaimer

This project is for educational use only and is not designed to replace Minecraft or be a minecraft clone. It's not affiliated in any way with the Raspberry Pi Foundation or Mojang.

What do I need?:

This project is designed to be used with python 2.7 with pygame and numpy The easiest way to get both is by downloading portable python from: http://portablepython.com which comes with pygame and numpy

Getting Started:

Download and print the student instruction sheet from here:

The instruction sheet guides students through the following instructions:

1. Download and extract the source files.

2. Open mc.py in IDLE

3. Adapt and run (press F5)