STEM: Challenge for Students

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crlyttle
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STEM: Challenge for Students

by crlyttle » Post

I'm new to Minetest.
I'm developing lesson plans for a STEM program and came up with the following idea for a game.
Students would organize into teams of two. Each team would get a set of co-ordinates on opposite sides of a mountain and given the task of constructing a tunnel through the mountain. There is no time limit. Students will be given a few days to develop a plan and an opportunity to test it in a sandbox game.
To be fair, all tunnels should be the same length with similar slope. Terrain needs to be repeatable between invocations.

Has anyone done something similar, or have some ideas?

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Re: STEM: Challenge for Students

by DOOM_possum » Post

seems like a good BUILD, once it is completely finished, what technology would there be

crlyttle
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Re: STEM: Challenge for Students

by crlyttle » Post

Basically it would be an exercise in planning, teamwork, application of simple vectors, and orienteering. Also know and trust your instruments.
If I (or someone I can find) can create the game, a good (very advanced) exercise would be to create the City of David and have students mine Hezekiah's tunnel. Wouldn't it be great to recreate virtual tours of famous archeological sites?

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ywwv
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Re: STEM: Challenge for Students

by ywwv » Post

this is interesting. but it doesn't talk about the financial side of things. you could have groups of students form construction companies. other students could form planning companies that would hold capital and hire construction companies to complete tasks. they would bid for contracts to construct things and complete various tasks. in the end the construction companies would be scored on how much money they made. planners would be scored on how much money they saved and also on the work of the construction companies. the planners would be responsible for evaluating the work of and enforcing the contracts on the construction companies. the teacher would be the government and would run a civil court to resolve disputes between companies. the planners, holding capital, could contract any other player to do any task. if at the end of the bidding process players existed with no tasks, they would be randomly assigned to a construction company. the costs of all equipment and work would be automatically kept track of. so the construction companies would have a certain amount of money to buy equipment and hire workers. as negotiated by the contract as money paid up front + existing capital that the company has. (companies can have unlimited debt but it lowers your score) . so each individual worker would be rewarded for negotiating the highest compensation between construction companies. so the construction companies would also compete for workers.

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Re: STEM: Challenge for Students

by Blockhead » Post

The digtron mod would be good fun for building a tunnel through the mountain. Have your students work out the most efficient way to get the tunnel dug using as little digtron fuel as possible. Each block of the digtron takes fuel to move and each block dug takes a certain amount of fuel as well. Sloping tunnels are also possible with the digtron and would add some extra challenge as you have to make sure the digtron doesn't hit the top of the tunnel when travelling sideways.
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crlyttle
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Re: STEM: Challenge for Students

by crlyttle » Post

ywwv has a great idea. I did something similar once before. I had the students create a business plan, an organization chart, and self assign each a job. It worked great. A local venture capitalist saw the plan and offered $1,000,000 to fund taking it "live" as opposed to "virtual". That deal fell apart when the parents got to fighting over who got to be CEO. Even though one student wanted to head Facilities Operation & Maintenance, her parents insisted being the "janitor" was demeaning. They obviously had no idea what the job involved and weren't interested in finding out.

Currently I'm working on STEM using FlightGear and Minetest. But I would encourage someone to do exactly as suggested, perhaps oriented around real world civil engineering projects such as roads, tunnels, dams, or even city building. If someone wants to do this, I need Minetest versions of one or more WWII USAAF airfields for my games :}big hint :)

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