[IDEA] Minetest for teachers

[apienk]

MAJOR UPDATE: This is now a live project. Please go to https://github.com/apienk/minetest-edutest-ui.

You might not know that Minecraft is being increasingly used as a teaching tool, and to a great success. Education is likely the primary reason why M$ bought Mojang. There's even a special mod created just for teachers: MinecraftEDU, a little cheaper but still costs enough to be out of reach for many experimenting educators, especially in my country (Poland). The mod solves one big problem with using a multiplayer game in a classroom: control over students. It would be great to have MinetestEDU! Below are the requirements and the solutions I found so far. Please help to solve them all! Thank you!

Minetest features needed for EDU (ideally should all be available in GUI):

1. Teachers always have full control (SOLVED: This is easily done with permissions; I just /grant myself all and it's sticky for a world.)
2. Teachers need a way to quickly modify permissions for students (For this to work, commands like /grant all interact must be implemented, ideally bound to a key or GUI.)
3. Teachers should be able to teleport themselves to any student and to teleport any or all students to them (SOLVED IN PART: Some functionality is already in place in vanilla Minetest with /teleport command. A player with a bring privilege can teleport himself to another user. However, currently there is no way to teleport one or all students to the teacher or a certain spot. Note: named spots are possible with the Bookmarks Gui mod.).
4. Teachers need to assign griefing-proof working areas to individual students or groups of students while the rest of the world is protected (SOLVED: With the Area Protection mod one can set such working areas by first owning the whole landscape with /set_owner and then assigning sub-owners to particular spots with /add_owner.).
5. The area students can explore should be limited (SOLVED: The Map Tools mod, suggested -- and build -- by Calinou provides indestructible, invisible or visible materials that are perfect for barriers.).
6. Announcement system is needed to distribute assignments to all students (SOLVED IN PART: Chat and server messages are easy to miss if there is a lot of traffic. A GUI popup window would be better. As a workaround, vanilla signs or PilzAdam's reworked Signs can be used, but signs offer very limited space for text.).
7. Teachers need to be able to give certain objects to all students at once (SOLVED IN PART: The /give command works for individual players but not in bulk.).
8. Teachers need a way to clear students' inventories (Critical. Currently not implemented.).
9. Teachers might want to be able to freeze students (SOLVED: By the Freeze mod -- thanks for the suggestion, Amaz! Alternatively, students can be teleported to an unbreakable room.).
10. Individual students and the teacher need to have different skins (SOLVED: By installing the Wardrobe mod and placing a wardrobe node in a protected spot so that it can be used but not retrieved by students. Teacher's skin, or any "special" skins, can be protected by not including them in the wardrobe node.)
11. It would be nice to have textbox implementation for writing assignments. (SOLVED: The Write on Paper mod, with a small modification, can provide multiline textboxes in GUI.).

[Evergreen]

A lot of these things can be solved by creating a mod, these aren't things that should be default.

[apienk]

A lot of these things can be solved by creating a mod, these aren't things that should be default.

That is exactly what I meant. In fact, a simple mod to support bulk permissions, giving and teleporting would advance this idea by 70%. The next 29% is GUI. Other features are the remaining 1%.

[Calinou]

The area students can explore should be limited (Not implemented yet. Partial solution: Fences mod. But fences will not stop users if they are allowed to build or dig.).

Use unbreakable nodes from Map Tools. Or, if you absolutely don't want to use a mod, use the default:cloud node, which is fully white and unbreakable.

[apienk]

Thanks for pointing me to your maptools mod and thanks for coding such a useful addition, in the first place. It does just what I want. My method of choice is to set an invisible 'fullclip' wall 50 nodes down and up, with a single row of unbreakable white (I might modify it to a more vivid color, e.g. glowing purple) to mark the border.

I found the default cloud node to be not optimal as it has problems with clipping. Anyway, thanks for suggesting.

Note: I updated the first post with your suggestion.

[lightonflux]

Individual students and the teacher need to have different skins (SOLVED IN PART: By installing the Wardrobe mod and placing a wardrobe node in a protected spot. But teacher's skin is not protected.)

This can be partly solved with 3d_armor 's admin armor, which can not be crafted, only obtained with server commands. The teacher would have red armor and a neat shield.

If you don't want that students use armor, you can disable all armor (except admin) in the armor.conf file.

[apienk]

Thanks for the suggestion. I will test the 3D Armor mod.

EDIT: Unfortunately, this mod doesn't do what I hoped for. I don't need armor. But wieldview is a nice addition, I'll try to integrate this in my modpack. Thanks for pointing me to it. BTW, I tested the wardrobe mod and it can protect some skins -- you just don't add them to the wardrobe node. First post updated accordingly.

[Sokomine]

Teachers should be able to teleport themselves to any student and to teleport any or all students to them (SOLVED IN PART: Some functionality is already in place in vanilla Minetest with /teleport command. A player with a bring privilege can teleport himself to another user. However, currently there is no way to teleport one or all students to the teacher or a certain spot. Note: named spots would be great.).

What do you mean by "named spots"? The teacher could teleport to the desired designation and then bring all students to his current place.

Announcement system is needed to distribute assignments to all students (SOLVED: Chat and server messages are enough.).
Teachers need to be able to give certain objects to all students at once (SOLVED IN PART: The /give command works for individual players but not in bulk. Potentially, scripting could work here.).
Teachers need a way to clear students' inventories (Critical. Currently not implemented.).

Someone also wrote (or intended to write) a mod for taking a look at the inventories of players.

Teachers might want to be able to freeze students (Not critical. Currently not implemented.).

This might be more critical than you think. It's difficult to do in Minetest - and still sometimes needed. A griefer may happily run circles around you, never reacting to anything you see or do - but freezing him will suddenly get a reply from the player.

All this sounds as if you're in need of a small mod for the teacher that supplies a nice gui with tasks as "send pop-up-message to all", "get all players here", "freeze all players", "give this stuff in here to all players", "clear all player's inventories", "add/revoke priv xyz for all" plus the same for individual players.

[Don]

Instead of freeze you could use the jail mod. Modify it a bit and make it a "back to class" mod. Send the students back to class when you need there attention and then when you are done release them and they return to where they were.

[Amaz]

If you do want to freeze students, there is a mod that does that!
https://github.com/PenguinDad/freeze

[apienk]

Teachers should be able to teleport themselves to any student and to teleport any or all students to them (SOLVED IN PART: Some functionality is already in place in vanilla Minetest with /teleport command. A player with a bring privilege can teleport himself to another user. However, currently there is no way to teleport one or all students to the teacher or a certain spot. Note: named spots would be great.).

What do you mean by "named spots"? The teacher could teleport to the desired designation and then bring all students to his current place.

I mean locations. Actually this is already possible with the Bookmarks GUI mod. Updated.

Teachers need a way to clear students' inventories (Critical. Currently not implemented.).

Someone also wrote (or intended to write) a mod for taking a look at the inventories of players.

That would be great. Could you please paste a link? I have trouble finding it.

Teachers might want to be able to freeze students (Not critical. Currently not implemented.).

This might be more critical than you think. It's difficult to do in Minetest - and still sometimes needed. A griefer may happily run circles around you, never reacting to anything you see or do - but freezing him will suddenly get a reply from the player.

There is a workaround: teleporting a player into an unbreakable glass cage ;) Actually, MinecraftEDU allows a teacher to freeze all students not as a punishment but as a preparation for activity, for example to make them start at the same moment. But this can be done with a bigger glass cage ;) or with remotely operated doors. Just needs more effort.

All this sounds as if you're in need of a small mod for the teacher that supplies a nice gui with tasks as "send pop-up-message to all", "get all players here", "freeze all players", "give this stuff in here to all players", "clear all player's inventories", "add/revoke priv xyz for all" plus the same for individual players.

This sentence perfectly describes my goal.

Instead of freeze you could use the jail mod. Modify it a bit and make it a "back to class" mod. Send the students back to class when you need there attention and then when you are done release them and they return to where they were.

Thank you for the suggestion but the key features of the Jail mod are also provided by the Map Tools mod.

If you do want to freeze students, there is a mod that does that!
https://github.com/PenguinDad/freeze

Thank you! Wow! I didn't know it is possible to modify physics for individual players. Updated.

[apienk]

Any suggestion for a mod that would display chat messages in a multi-line popup window?

[12Me21]

Education is likely the primary reason why M$ bought Mojang.

LOL... I don't think so... Probably it was because 18,926,537 people have bought Minecraft, and they were making tons of money off of it.

[Sokomine]

I mean locations. Actually this is already possible with the Bookmarks GUI mod. Updated.

I still think it's easier to go to that place manually (using any teleportation mod you like) and then calling the students with a command to you.

Someone also wrote (or intended to write) a mod for taking a look at the inventories of players.

That would be great. Could you please paste a link? I have trouble finding it.

AFAIK it was thefamilygrog66. I don't know if he turned his idea into a mod, but it's certainly doable. We discussed a possible shortcut for this some time ago on IRC. The shortcut did not work, making it slightly more manual programming work to display the result.

There is a workaround: teleporting a player into an unbreakable glass cage ;) Actually, MinecraftEDU allows a teacher to freeze all students not as a punishment but as a preparation for activity, for example to make them start at the same moment. But this can be done with a bigger glass cage ;) or with remotely operated doors. Just needs more effort.

I didn't intend it to be a punishment - more a call for attention :-) Young kids may find the world around them very exciting - and might not even notice that their teacher is desperately trying to tell them something. Freezing a player does grant you that player's attention :-) They usually start calling for help then and listen to what you have to tell/ask.

All this sounds as if you're in need of a small mod for the teacher that supplies a nice gui with tasks as "send pop-up-message to all", "get all players here", "freeze all players", "give this stuff in here to all players", "clear all player's inventories", "add/revoke priv xyz for all" plus the same for individual players.

This sentence perfectly describes my goal.

Most of it is doable without too much effort. Someone's got to write it, and the "nice" aspect of the gui might be the most critical part. It's not too much fun to design formspecs in Minetest. There's some planning to make it diffrent (better) in future releases.

[bobomb]

[*]Teachers need a way to quickly modify permissions for students (For this to work, commands like /grant all interact must be implemented, ideally bound to a key or GUI.)

[*]Teachers need to assign griefing-proof working areas to individual students or groups of students while the rest of the world is protected (SOLVED: With the Area Protection mod one can set such working areas by first owning the whole landscape with /set_owner and then assigning sub-owners to particular spots with /add_owner.).

There is also Node Ownership mod: viewtopic.php?id=846

I also took the time to build a "Lesson Room" once and my solution was to save it as a worldedit schem so that if the kids ruined it I could just re-spawn it with a worldedit command. speaking of worldedit, it is a very educational tool in and of itself, as it forces kids to learn a 3D Cartesian coordinate system, and enter basic commands which follow a function [param1] [param2] convention, teach basic geometry such as cylinders, radius, etc. https://github.com/Uberi/Minetest-World ... utorial.md

I think if you had a mod, or even a game that included a bunch of mods, it would be no big deal to treat your worlds in a disposable way, which is probably necessary as worldedit is very destructive and there is no rollback command (though there is a //deleteblocks command which eliminates everything and calls mapgen again). maybe you could create a mod where the "classroom" is spawned by the mapgen, like villages and trading posts in Novatux's "mg" mod, then if you //deleteblocks in an area where there was a classroom it will redraw where it belongs. https://github.com/Novatux/mg

[*]Announcement system is needed to distribute assignments to all students (SOLVED IN PART: Chat and server messages are easy to miss if there is a lot of traffic. A GUI popup window would be better. As a workaround, vanilla signs or PilzAdam's reworked Signs can be used, but signs offer very limited space for text.).

Signs are annoying in that the message can be erased very easily (clicking escape).
I am going to develop a popup messaging / announcement mod soon unless i find something else already done... i also find that the chat messages get lost in the traffic, kids in particular don't read that stuff. messages need to pop up in their faces. Also a list of online players would be nice so chatting by name doesn't require knowing all the aliases. Basically the chat interface everyone is used to with skype or phone texting should be implemented in minetest for our purposes. Here is something: viewtopic.php?id=6273

[*]Teachers should be able to teleport themselves to any student and to teleport any or all students to them (SOLVED IN PART: Some functionality is already in place in vanilla Minetest with /teleport command. A player with a bring privilege can teleport himself to another user. However, currently there is no way to teleport one or all students to the teacher or a certain spot. Note: named spots are possible with the Bookmarks Gui mod.).

as for bookmarks, the compassgps mod is the best thing I have found so far. check it out viewtopic.php?f=9&t=9373

I also think that the mesecons viewtopic.php?f=11&t=628 have a lot of educational potential. Building a rudimentary binary calculator from mesecons would be a great learning experience.

I am working on a mod with some moderate educational merit, it is a cellular automata mod which would be a way of experimenting with different C.A. rules, and of course learning about 3D Cartesian coordinates. https://github.com/bobombolo/automata

there are also programmable turtles: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11098

and a missing Turtle Graphics mod: viewtopic.php?id=6997

and I am also working on a Periodic Table of Elements mod.

I think that a "Quiz Block" would be ideal, something where the player can't get a certain item from a chest without answering a question. Another approach could be the idea of Quests viewtopic.php?f=11&t=11265 or Achievements viewtopic.php?id=4870

I think the most educational thing of all is making a minetest mod!

[apienk]

If you're interested, this idea is now being implemented. See the first post. Big thanks to Isidor Zeuner for the edutest-chatcommands mod which prompted me to learn Lua and provided crucial functionality for this project. Also thanks to Sfan5 and Rubenwardy for coding hints.

[zeuner]

I just noticed you wrote yet another UI mod using my edutest-chatcommands backend. Great to see it's useful to you. However, I was wondering what's the direction of the project (in comparison with the edutest frontend I published for the chatcommands). Maybe we could be able to coordinate efforts towards a common codebase for usage targeted at education. At least, edutest seems to support some things I see on your TODO list (internationalization, PvP control).

[apienk]

I decided to write another UI because:

1. edutest depends on unified-inventory which, to me, is much too messy -- my https://github.com/apienk/minetest-edutest-ui uses the default sfinv formspec instead
2. I believe having all options on one formspec is more efficient for users
3. I'm a novice Lua coder, my skills are very limited, didn't want to spoil your code

I might be wrong in my assumptions. But it is always good for users to have a choice; that's why (Github) forks were invented, weren't they? My plan is to develop my UI further unless it turns out users don't like it. I'm also ready to join forces wherever it makes sense. Any new developments separate from the UI will be published as new mods, so that it is easy to incorporate them in the upcoming EDUtest modpack -- our common goal. :)

Thank you again for edutest, @zeuner!

[sofar]

I took the liberty of checking your code for obvious security issues, and sent you a pull request with some cleanups. In the short review I gave it, I found it to be fairly decent code, and I couldn't find any issues. Enjoy.

[apienk]

Merged. Thank you, @sofar!, for looking at the code and suggesting luacheck -- very helpful!

[Aerozoic]

Maybe i missed something but i can't find any more info about this and i'm a bit confused. Is MinetestEDU/EDUtest two different projects? Is/are they being discussed somewhere else? I found minetestedu.com but it doesn't really give any answers. In the readme of your github link above it says that it's an extension of the MinetestEDU/EDUtest project. What does that mean? Also it says that it is a modpack but doesn't seem to actually include any of the mods listed. Is there an actual modpack? And finally, in the github readme it looks as though you've solved the clear inventory issue but it is not marked as solved in your original post. Has this actually been solved?

Here is a link to the inventory hack mod that was previously asked about which allows you to take items out of other player's inventory: viewtopic.php?t=12440

[apienk]

Thank you, Aerozoic, all your questions are valid and important. Please find answers below.

Maybe i missed something but i can't find any more info about this and i'm a bit confused. Is MinetestEDU/EDUtest two different projects? Is/are they being discussed somewhere else? I found minetestedu.com but it doesn't really give any answers. In the readme of your github link above it says that it's an extension of the MinetestEDU/EDUtest project. What does that mean?

In fact, neither MinetestEDU or EDUtest are my projects. The name MinetestEDU you can find in my original post is the simplest, obvious copy from MinecraftEDU and you will find it used in many unrelated projects specifically because of this fact. MinetestEDU.com seems to be a commercial initiative to teach kids Lua programming with Minetest. Minetest4edu (https://github.com/minetest4edu), using names MinetestEDU and Modpack4Edu, is a group of German teachers trying to use Minetest in educational context, but not doing any active code development. EDUtest (https://github.com/zeuner/edutest) is a project to develop a GUI for (principally German) teachers using Minetest in classroom. My project is a spin-off from EDUtest but I don't feel shy to use the name MinetestEDU in parallel because it hasn't been claimed and is so obvious. It might be better to find yet another name, though, for clarity.

Also it says that it is a modpack but doesn't seem to actually include any of the mods listed. Is there an actual modpack?

My project is not a modpack yet but it will be eventually. Now it relies on users being able to download the mods separately by themselves. Actually you can think of EDUtest as one base solution with two alternative, very different GUIs. My GUI (https://github.com/apienk/minetest-edutest-ui) is using several mods, all listed on the Github page, but will also work without them – the script checks if the mods are installed and hides some buttons if they aren't. If you'd like to test this, please go to https://github.com/apienk/minetest-edutest-ui and follow installation instructions there.

And finally, in the github readme it looks as though you've solved the clear inventory issue but it is not marked as solved in your original post. Has this actually been solved? Here is a link to the inventory hack mod that was previously asked about which allows you to take items out of other player's inventory: viewtopic.php?t=12440

First, excuse me for not updating the initial post, I will do it very soon. My GUI uses invmanagement mod (https://github.com/Sirvoid/InvManagement) for clearing players' inventories. The GUI also allows instructors to lookup players' inventories. I didn't use invhack because it's not on Github. Besides, invhack has a bug: when you take an item from player's inventory, it looks like the item was copied not moved -- it does not disappear from the formspec.

[Aerozoic]

Thanks for clarifying, it makes much more sense now. Your project looks great, nice work!

In your github readme i noticed PVP control is in your todo list. This mod requires unified_inv but maybe it could still be useful to you if you can tweak it for sfinv to fit your needs: https://github.com/UGXaero/UGXrealms/tr ... /pvpbutton

[apienk]

Thanks for pointing me to pvpbutton. It will be easy to adapt it to sfinv. However, I'm looking also at PVP Plus mod: https://github.com/MT-Eurythmia/pvpplus. Not decided yet which one to use.

Merry Xmas, everyone!