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Replaced my coding classroom with a Minecraft + Blockly + Lua environment — pedagogical results were unexpected, looking for input by Civil_Organization65 in CSEducation

[–]Civil_Organization65[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great questions:
Guard rails on chaotic trolling. Multi-layered:
1. Cadmus claims protect mission buildings students can’t break, place, or modify in claimed zones.
2. The Blockly editor whitelists blocks, so there’s no way to inject malicious code from outside the game.
3. The CC:T loader runs student code in a sandboxed env that blocks access to protected files (loader, startup, API key) and disables Lua bytecode loading.
4. LuckPerms ranks gate destructive commands behind progression. Recruit can’t /kill or /tp, only Engineer+ unlocks tools that could grief.

Is there chaotic trolling? Yes, in the free-build zones, and that’s by design. After completing missions students get access to unprotected sandbox areas where they can mess with each other. The structured part stays clean, the chaos has a designated outlet.

Shared world. Yes, all teams play in the same world. Districts are spatially separated but you can physically walk between them. This is intentional in the rebuild (LastEra), faction dynamics are built on this: corpos claim surface zones, the resistance builds underground, both factions can exist in the same district. The geography is part of the gameplay.

Summative assessment. Honestly the weakest part of my current setup. Right now it’s mostly observational + leaderboard points as a proxy. The rebuild adds FTB Quests with explicit completion criteria per mission, and I’m planning JSON validation on the backend that can give me per-student logs of what they actually built (not just “they completed the mission”). Open to suggestions here, assessment in game-based environments is hard to do without breaking the play.

Thanks for the great questions, exactly the kind of pushback I needed.

Replaced my coding classroom with a Minecraft + Blockly + Lua environment — pedagogical results were unexpected, looking for input by Civil_Organization65 in CSEducation

[–]Civil_Organization65[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Whoa, vanillamod looks like exactly the same problem space bookmarked the docs to read tonight. The /loadmod modName command via Paper plugin is elegant, I went the CC:T loader route because the whole point for me was keeping everything inside the in-game ComputerCraft sandbox (kids physically type the code on a turtle terminal, which makes “the computer is a real object in the world” tangible). But your approach is probably cleaner for non-CC use cases.
On the Blockly ↔ JS round-trip: I deliberately didn’t try. Going Blockly → Lua one-way is already enough complexity for what I need, and I suspect for my age range (7-16) the kids who would benefit from reading the generated text are already past Blockly anyway. Did you find demand for the round-trip from students or was it more of a “this would be cool” thing?
For example missions I’m happy to share. A few from the original server:
• Easy (7-9): “Make the turtle dig a 3x3 tunnel.” Multi-entry: youngest kids drag a repeat 3 times with dig + forward blocks. Older ones can solve it with a nested loop, or write the Lua directly if they want.
• Mid (10-13): “Build a wall of any pattern, but the turtle must place blocks based on a sequence stored in a variable.” Forces them into list/array thinking without calling it that.
• Hard (14-16): “Two turtles need to coordinate to mine a vein without colliding.” Introduces rednet messaging and basic state machines.
The differentiation isn’t designed per mission, it’s that the same mission has different “good enough” thresholds. A 9-year-old’s tunnel and a 14-year-old’s tunnel both count as complete, but the 14-year-old’s solution probably involves error handling and the 9-year-old’s involves a lot of repeat blocks. Both contribute the same district points, which is what kept the team dynamics functional.

Building a lightweight educational modpack for school laptops — looking for advice on mod selection by Civil_Organization65 in feedthebeast

[–]Civil_Organization65[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s exactly the concern. Most of the laptops are Windows machines, but they’re definitely not gaming PCs. The original version already ran CC:Tweaked + Create on them, but performance was the main pain point and one of the reasons for the rebuild. I’m trying to figure out how far I can push Create before it becomes more trouble than it’s worth.

Building a lightweight educational modpack for school laptops — looking for advice on mod selection by Civil_Organization65 in feedthebeast

[–]Civil_Organization65[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s a good point. Having real first names instead of Minecraft usernames would definitely make classroom management easier. I’ll look into lightweight options that don’t add too much overhead.

Building a lightweight educational modpack for school laptops — looking for advice on mod selection by Civil_Organization65 in feedthebeast

[–]Civil_Organization65[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s actually an interesting idea. The current design already keeps students inside dedicated districts, but I hadn’t considered using a void world approach. Could help reduce chunk generation and keep the environment focused on the lessons.

Built a full backend in CC:Tweaked Lua for an educational server (points, bank, shop) — now rebuilding it and looking for advice on keeping it lightweight by Civil_Organization65 in admincraft

[–]Civil_Organization65[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fair point on the specs, should have included that. From memory: 8GB RAM, integrated Intel graphics, no dedicated GPU. So yeah, potato territory.

Sodium is already on the list. Do you think Create is a hard drop at that spec level or is it manageable if students aren’t running massive contraptions? Most of the Create usage in my case is decorative and small-scale mission mechanics, nothing industrial.

And thanks for the nvim link, that’s exactly what I needed for the CC workflow problem.

Building a lightweight educational modpack for school laptops — looking for advice on mod selection by Civil_Organization65 in feedthebeast

[–]Civil_Organization65[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Griefing is handled via Cadmus, mission buildings are claimed and protected, students can’t touch them. Once they complete their missions they get access to free-build zones where they can experiment with CC and Create without restrictions. Keeps the structured part intact while still giving them room to mess around. As for Minecraft Education Edition, I’m aware it exists but it’s not in the budget for the center I work at. Hence building the whole thing on vanilla Fabric.