Epic Minecraft Event @fact_liverpool

Geek Heaven this week at @fact_liverpool for their Cloudmaker: Making Minecraft Real

LJMU and FACT have been working with young researchers at The Studio School to investigate how online game Minecraft is supporting social creativity and design. Pop along and build your own Minecraft style structures using a robot, explore our interactive Minecraft world and see what we’ve done with 3D Printing! This WEEK!!!!!!!

The blurb kinda goes like this

Cloudmaker aims to brings the excitement and popularity of Minecraft, a fantasy adventure game with more than 33 million young players worldwide, into the classroom and turn it into a powerful learning tool.The goal of Cloudmaker is to provide tools and teaching materials which make it easy to use Minecraft as a platform for collaborative design between young people. The tools will combine the online gaming environment Minecraft and the latest generation of 3D printing and interaction technologies with a physical making and learning environment. A key innovation of Cloudmaker is to create many new ways to span the gap between Minecraft and the real world using these technologies.

Through a process or working together called 'co-design' the project partners will explore the best way to make a rich and challenging learning environment, which aims to encourage young people to collaborate through both digital and physical interaction and learn about community issues through a design and build process.

Our 'Young Researchers' from The Studio School in Liverpool have been working closely with the team to test some of the ideas and process's that will go on to form a learning resource for others to use. Through the project they have learnt about the design process by used 3D printing, Minecraft and programming to consider how to redevelop disused buildings and land near the school.

This exhibition comes at the halfway point of the Cloudmaker project. It is an opportunity to further our research by making our work available for visitors to try and give us their feedback.

In the FACT Connects space visitors will be able to engage in activities, which explore different ways we can leap the gap between Minecraft and the real world: .......

So that is the Blurb - it doesn't make it sound that exciting but from the people involved and the tweets that are being exchanged plus with Minecraft being the meme of the moment especially in teaching circles this is one to look out for. THE WORLD HAS GONE PIXEL MOVING MAD. Not that that is a bad thing with education extablishments using minecraft for everything from teaching geography, engineeering, maths - it sounds like an education panacea.

So find out what local geeks Adrian McEwen, Patrick Fenner and Ross Dalziel have been up to all this week before the kids take over this weekend. Other Geeks may have been involved in this production.