Our Tools

We developed a series of tools to give teachers greater control over their classroom environment. The first is a Quiz Block that allows teachers to ask questions to students in a Minecraft world. A teacher can enter the world, place a block, enter a question (and its answers), and then any student afterwards can click on the block to be given a question. All the students answers to a specific quiz can be viewed within the Lesson Review Tool, which is described below.

Lesson Review Tool

This tool has two major components under the same program: the world viewer and the metric readout.

1. The World Viewer is a modified version of X-Ray* to view worlds/lessons after they have been completed. Our version highlights the blocks placed by specific students to help the teacher see what exactly occurred during the lesson. This could be useful for determining whether a student was participating in the world, whether a group was evenly collaborating, or if a specific student was just causing trouble for everyone else.
2. The Metric Readout is, simply put, a readout of a students activity during the lesson. This shows the types of blocks that were placed, removed from the world, or destroyed (destroying a block placed by another student). This readout also shows the teacher how students answered each Quiz Block questions were answered correctly or incorrectly.

*The Minecraft X-Ray program allows Minecraft Players to open their world and specifically search for different types of minerals. This is useful when trying to find elusive and rare materials within the game world, or if you want to just explore a cave network.