25.06.2023 12:00

What Minecraft Teaches – Physics, Chemistry, and the World Around Us

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Hello!

Can we consider Minecraft as a platform for self-education?

Minecraft is one of the most popular games of all time, which provides many different features to its players. We are looking for new materials, use different features, like gaming desktop under 500, build different structures, thereby learning new things.
Let’s see what the game teaches us and how it is more interesting than the school program.

Turning Sand Into Glass And Other Real-world Knowledge

Physics in Minecraft does not always correspond to reality, but you can learn some properties of objects. It is important to pay attention to detail: for example, melting sand in the furnace, the player in Minecraft gets glass and burning clay – pottery. As in life. Given that many children start playing Minecraft as preschoolers, this knowledge can really be new to them.

Recipes in Minecraft are almost always logical. Even without knowing exactly how a particular item is assembled, you can experiment with the ingredients on the workbench. The game now has a built-in encyclopedia, but before you had to Google to get more knowledge. This is a long and not very interesting, and therefore it was always worth trying a couple of options at first by instinct – even if I forgot how to make a shovel, it was easy to come up with, because it is a long stick and a knob of the right metal.

Dangerous Experiments With Dynamite

It’s unlikely that you can work with dynamite or lava in a real school lab. In Minecraft, however, they are not as dangerous as they are in reality. My first encounter with dynamite was in a temple in the desert, and I learned two lessons at once. First: if you step on the pressure plate, it can activate the explosive mechanism. The character dies, loses all loot, and ends up on the respawn point. Second, historical: looting mummy tombs is dangerous.

On some Minecraft servers, dynamite is one of the most common security systems. If you went into someone else’s garden to steal potatoes, you may not come out of the field alive, having bumped into a stretch with TNT. If you find a seemingly attractive object that doesn’t have an owner, you shouldn’t touch it: maybe the intruder wants you to be interested in it. It all sounds like a commonplace truth, but on a subconscious level, it works just as well as announcements about the need to call the police, having found an abandoned bag in a subway car.

Redstone Is The Head

The main source of energy in the world of Minecraft is Redstone. This is the wire for all experiments with the mechanisms and at the same time their batteries. Redstone can be used to automate anything and is also used in recipes to craft the red torch, compass, clock, repeater, electric and push rails, and other mechanisms. Using Rarestone, craftsmen create realistic clocks, make roller coasters, and other amusements.

As you begin to explore the possibilities of rare stone in classic Minecraft, you’ll grasp the real complexity of this children’s sandbox. Rare stone circuits are analogous to the circuits of the real world. They are easier, safer, and more economical to manipulate than any other laboratory setting.

If you understand classic Minecraft circuits, you’ll have no problem understanding a good half of the eighth-grade physics textbook. Direct electric current, alternating current, capacitors, Ohm’s law, Kirchhoff’s rules – memorizing all that will be easier than building a huge farm.

You can learn how to use Redstone competently either by yourself, which is much longer and more boring or with the help of guides. The Minecraft videos on YouTube are both a meme and a phenomenon. With what love teenagers share their knowledge with each other, write guides on various features and invite them to play on their server! Minecraft is already inferior to other titles in terms of global attendance, but it’s still ahead of the curve in terms of viewability.

One Wagon, Two Wagons

Few of us will have the opportunity to participate in the construction of a real railroad. If you, like me, have an adventurous life and want to try literally everything, welcome to Minecraft.

First, building railroad tracks will involve Redstone and electrical circuits, as this is the basic course for a young Minecraft fighter capable of more than “building houses” and racing creepers with a stone sword. Second, planning a convenient railroad track system is a really difficult task that requires calculation.

Usually, in Minecraft, you have several frequently visited points. On one of the last servers we played with friends, they were: my forest home, my friends’ mansions, two trading villages with NPCs, a shortcut to the beach with day and night bungalows, and an underground farm for experience on the skeleton respawn. Running to all these points on foot is tedious. Calculating where to build the subway so as not to break anything and spend as few resources as possible is a task for true Minecraft heroes!

The easiest way is to take as a basis the two most popular subway schemes in Russia – Moscow and St. Petersburg. If you have the ability to place a circular line between important points, then it’s time to start digging. St. Petersburg’s long lines are more convenient to do but much harder to ride. Remember that, as in real life, groundwater can interfere – and that’s your global engineering challenge.

Advanced Level Physics – Useful Mods

There are thousands of useful modifications for Minecraft that take the game to the next level. The most interesting for experimenters and fans of mechanisms are the classic BuildCraft and IndustrialCraft. With them, the oil will appear on the map, and in the list of recipes for crafting – rig, pump, distiller, and other real machines.

If classic Minecraft is middle-grade physics, with these mods players go straight to high school. The pinnacle of your server’s industrial progress will be building a nuclear reactor. Of course, you will not get the knowledge to build and run a nuclear power plant in real life, but the basic skills and understanding of the power of this type of energy will still be acquired. At thirty years to make such “discoveries” is much more boring than at ten, so if your child is fond of Minecraft, it’s time to advise him of these modifications.

Minecraft – A Social Game About Creation

Even if you think that acquiring practical knowledge in Minecraft is very difficult, because it requires a special kind of mind, it is very difficult to find arguments against the social side of Minecraft. There are quite a few, I will briefly tell you about some of the most obvious ones.

Playing together, children learn the skills of sharing responsibilities – one digs diamonds, the other kills pigs. Not every adult can boast of this skill in real life. If you’re unable to quickly agree with your friends on who will take on certain responsibilities, practice in Minecraft. My big-aged friends managed to argue while planning a house within the first ten minutes.

An unexpected observation, but Minecraft long-distance teaches you to be frugal with resources. Users who have been playing survival mode servers for months begin to experience a shortage of minerals close to home. Players are forced to move farther and farther away from the respawn point and take longer and longer to return.

The Minecraft world is always infinitely generated, but the beloved home and vegetable gardens built in the first minutes of the game remain at the same point from which all the diamonds, coal, and other resources are dug… Considering that our planet does not have many infinitely renewable resources, some shortages may bring to mind the need to be frugal with nature.

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