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Foreword

On March 27, 2019, Microsoft announced that the copyright of Minecraft Minecraft Education Edition in mainland China belongs to Jingdong Group and is managed and operated by Jingdong Cloud.

So far, this product widely used in other countries has finally entered the domestic market. So, what kind of product is this? Can it change the way children learn?

To talk about Minecraft Education Edition, you have to mention its big brother Minecraft Minecraft. This is a classic sandbox game with a history of 10 years. This is a world of pixel cubes. Players can mainly do two things, “construction” and “destruction” in the three-dimensional space of the game. Combining and putting together building blocks like Lego makes it easy to create cabins, castles and even cities.

Meet Minecraft Education Edition

The domestic educational version introduced this time is actually based on Minecraft: BedrockEdition, which is the most authentic official version often said by players. It provides children with a relatively healthy learning environment, and also adds a step-by-step, from shallow to deep programming curriculum, allowing children to learn programming through a relatively familiar story background.

After entering the page, we can see that Minecraft Education Edition provides programming courses in two major directions, which are relatively simple, graphical programming courses with complete instructions, and advanced Python courses that directly write code. If you’re new to Minecraft, the Education Edition also offers a one-hour programming lesson similar to the novice mode. We strongly recommend everyone to get started from this courseIt will help you understand the basic operation of Minecraft Education Edition as soon as possible.

In the story of “One Hour of Programming: AI Benefits Mankind,” you will be transformed into an artificial intelligence trainer. Through graphical programming, you will navigate and guide the agent robot through the forest to collect evidence that caused the fire. Help the robot learn how Predict where fires might occur. Eventually, the capabilities acquired by the robot were used to remove those substances that could cause fires, eliminating hidden dangers for the village.

After entering the mission, we can see that the entire map is still familiar with the MC style. You can find buildings made up of pixels and a cyberpunk-style fire truck. Moving forward, there will be a closed door, and we need to talk to researchers. After approaching, you can click the right mouse button to trigger the message window, and then we receive the first task to open the door by programming.

According to the researcher’s prompt, we press the shortcut key C to open the code generator. The generator is a two-column layout. The “toolbox” on the left contains modules that may be used in this task. These modules can be reused. On the right is the workspace. We need to select a module from the toolbox and drag it into the workspace to form a complete workflow. After we have edited the workflow, we can click the play button below and the program will perform the operation according to the settings.

Next we enter the second level. This task requires us to control the agent robot to move. First we still need to press C to open the code generator, drag the agent movement module, and change the movement distance to 3 steps. Click Run and the task is complete. At this point, we have learned the basic operations of graphical programming tasks. Here, let ’s review together, WASD controls the movement of the direction, the right mouse button is used to confirm or initiate a dialogue, C key opens the code editor, drag and control the workflow, and the number keys are used to change related parameters.

The third level, the difficulty increases. We need to control the robot to move to the dry bush and analyze the data. Pay attention to the moving distance and analysis direction here.

After completing the first three levels, we need to climb the ladder to the top of the tower. Here you can overlook the entire map, which is convenient for us to complete some complex joint tasks. Talking to the technician, we learned that we need to control the agent robot through the maze and get a better operating perspective near the edge of the building. Don’t worry, it will not fall. Here we choose the “short path” to start the task. First, we need to analyze the task logic.

The lower left corner is the starting point. The robot needs to go forward 6 steps → turn right to go 2 steps → go forward 4 steps → finally analyze the shrubs. OK, we start programming according to this idea.

In summary, the design of the guidance course is still reasonable, and the operation logic is also gradual. Just to take care of the acceptance level of the lower grade students, the initial level setting seems simpler. When we completed the previous task, climbed the high tower through the maze, and came to the Fire Research Center, we found that the next setting has begun to approach the basic rules of the AI ​​industry, and also challenged the students’ cognitive level.

For example, the task of “helping the agent robot to understand the plants at risk of fire” is very similar to the artificial intelligence development process in our real life, and can be considered as a simplified version of the “manual labeling” work.

This type of task seems simple to operate, but for students to truly understand the purpose and meaning of the task, the teacher needs to explain it in more depth.

After we complete the training tasks later, we will see a slightly humble helicopter. Talk to the firefighters next, and he will lead us to the fire hazard area. Then our final task is to clear the dry shrubs in this area before the lightning storm, form a firewall, and stop the fire from spreading.

Press C again to open the generator. We need to make the agent robot move forward all the time, and at each step, determine whether there is a dry bush in front of it, and if so, destroy it immediately.

After completing this, the one-hour programming task is all over. You can choose to receive other advanced graphical programming courses after receiving the certificate. I also hope that JD Cloud will bring us more interesting and interesting stories while updating the course.

Conclusion

Children enjoy a free experience in the process of programming. This freedom not only comes from the diversity of works, but more importantly, in the process of programming creativity, creation gives children the right to imagine.

Minecraft Education Edition uses graphics to diverge thinking, establish memory links between teaching scenes and images, colors, etc., make full use of the functions of left and right brains, and use the rules of memory, reading, and thinking to help people in science and art, The balance between logic and imagination opens the infinite potential of the human brain, simple yet practical.

At present, technology and innovation are developing at a high speed. The entire society has gradually entered the era of artificial intelligence based on computer science. The core of this is programming thinking. Therefore, we believe that the future citizens of the world can’t live without programming thinking even if they are not engaged in computer development. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is just around the corner. What future will coded programs take us to?

Understanding the power of programming is a better understanding of the future.