This paper reports on an empirical study of 1,114 popular and 1,114 unpopular Minecraft mods from the CurseForge mod distribution platform, one of the largest distribution platforms for Minecraft mods. There exist several examples of games with an extremely active and successful modding community, with the Minecraft game being one of the most notable ones. One way to balance the increasing gamer expectation and development stress is to build an active modding community around the game. It is becoming increasingly difficult for game developers to manage the cost of developing a game, while meeting the high expectations of gamers. This has helped in refining the game and further longer term testing will take place with the target age group. The game has been tested in a school situation on children of all levels with varying results. Both have enabled us to overcome pitfalls in our approach to designing the game that will give pointers to others wishing to make learning outcome specific mods. We have piloted the game with a number of children, without experience in using Minecraft as a game, as well as those with extensive experience. ![]() The solution is quite creative and uses game component development that is familiar to players of Minecraft. The design practice has highlighted a number of issues that are of value when using Minecraft to teach any subject specifically when trying to create mods. Minecraft is very attractive for this design as a large proportion of children are familiar with the basic gameplay, the gameplay is attractive to both males and females and with the use of mods learning outcome specific tools can be created. ![]() This paper outlines the way in which we have been using a Minecraft mod to create a collaborative game for teaching maths to UK primary school children (age 7 9). It is thus possible to check the design fully before launch, including developing server based applications. The authors of Minecraft make the full source code available for download to enable off line development and testing. Minecraft mods can be developed freely with a system development kit (SDK) that can be downloaded. This is where the concept of developing mods becomes very valuable. ![]() However, to get the players to engage with more abstract learning concepts can be quite challenging. The creator mode is most useful in developing ideas for game play. The tool has been observed to attract children in their exploration of the game environments. Game components can be linked together allowing their effect to be experimented with easily and thus offering great potential for investigating childrens use of the tool in educational settings. The use of Minecraft as a tool for teaching has become increasingly popular recently.
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