I have a talented student in my Y10 GCSE Computer Science class who has been asking for months if we can write some python code with Minecraft. Today he finally got a positive answer when he asked if we were going to try it out and he (and the rest of the class) left buzzing.

This is an attempt to document the process in case anyone is similarly pestered by students or if you want a fun challenge at the end of term. 

Aim

I wanted students to be able to

• visualise and understand how for loops work in python
• write python code that reads data from a text file
• understand how images are made up of coloured pixels
• understand the concept of using an IP address to identify and connect to another computer over a network

I also wanted a collaborative Christmas activity where students could see their own festive designs appear in a shared 3d Minecraft world wherever the player currently is.

This activity is aimed at a mixed ability Y10 class after one term of learning python. They’ve just begun to learn how to use for loops to iterate through a list of values. I wanted this activity to help them visualise what those skills could be useful for beyond the usual text based programming.

Preparation

I used a raspberry pi 400 plugged in to my large teacher tv display. Any other model of raspberry pi would work as long as it can connect to your school network. The default Raspbian operating system comes bundled with a version of Minecraft which runs on a raspberry pi. It only supports creative mode rather than survival but that’s ideal for what we want to do.

Full teacher and student instructions included in the download.