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Learn Python with Seymour Island in Minecraft Education

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Seymour Island is a Minecraft Education coding world, which takes up to 29 students through a series of eight coding tasks and five cryptography tasks. Seymour Island is a great transition task and great first experience with Python coding. It can be used with a wide range of student ages and abilities, partly due to the fact each task is available in both MakeCode blocks and Python.

The world starts off with the participants on the high sea with Captain Papert, where they eventually become shipwrecked on Seymour Island where they have to use the sewer system to get into the center of town. The participants can start their adventure and complete the coding and cryptography tasks in any order they like. The challenges are split into beginner, intermediate, and advanced tasks.

A multiplayer world allows up to 29 players to join a Minecraft Education world. All players must be from the same organization. In most cases, this means everyone has the same domain in your email address after the “@” symbol.

The multiplayer game guide is a great resource to learn more about how you can facilitate a multiplayer experience with your students.

Activity

You're going to try out Seymour Island for yourself! The first thing you need to do is to sign into Minecraft Education.

1. Select Play
2. Select View Library
3. Select Subject Kits
4. Select Computer Science
5. Select Featured Lessons
6. Select Seymour Island
7. Select Create World

Once you've spawned into the Minecraft world, you'll need to start the coding adventure by opening up the chat feature in Minecraft by selecting the T key and typing “/function teacher.” This gives you a teacher phone to control the game. To use the phone, select the 1 key to select the phone from your inventory then right click on the mouse.

 The teacher phone allows you to start the game, which teleports all the students from the lobby into the boats to begin their coding adventure. You can also teleport yourself to any of the tasks in the adventure and check on the student’s status will display an overview of the students’ progress in the chat. The student phone button allows the teacher to see what the student sees with their phone. This view is dynamic based on a number of factors in the world.

The tasks are color coded green for easy/beginner activities, orange for medium /intermediate activities, and red for hard/advanced activities by paths on the ground in the specific color to each task. Students follow these paths from the town square to find the task to complete. They're also able to use a map as well to help find their way around. This leads to a great student experience as they can work at their own pace completing activities in any order that they like, though we do recommend they start with the green tasks moving up to the red tasks.

There's also a cryptography puzzle side quest comprised of five different cryptographic ciphers, which involve scrambling/hiding secret messages.

Complete the first task, which is task 0. To get to task 0, select Teleport to… on the phone menu and then select ship (task 0). This will teleport everyone into the boats.

Once the adventure starts, the students will be located in boats where they'll complete a series of tasks to get used to using their Agent. The first task is to get used to moving the Agent so students have to write code to move the Agent from the diamond block to the gold block.

Let's consider how to complete this task.

• Speak to the captain to select the programming language. Select Python. Once you have selected Python, you'll be placed behind your Agent with the code window open ready to begin the task.
• You need to make your Agent (your personal robot) move two spaces to the left. You'll need to type agent.move(“left”) select enter and type agent.move(“left”) and the select the run button to get your Agent to move to the golden block.

Congratulations! You just created your first Python code!

Reflection

Consider your responses to the following questions:

• Why would you use Seymour Island to introduce students to Python coding?
• What considerations would you need to think through in order to facilitate a multiplayer experience?
• How would you choose student teams?
• What kind of classroom norms or agreements should you set before having students work together in a multiplayer experience?

Python with Azure Notebooks

Python with Azure Notebooks is one of the Python experiences you'll have in the Seymour Island lesson.

Python with Azure Notebooks has these components to help you code:

• Coding Activity explains what students are supposed to do; this is similar to the coding tasks in MakeCode Python.
• Main is your coding workspace in notebooks. This keeps track of your lines of code. Type directly in this space to begin creating your Python code.
• Run button runs your code. Running your code tests if your code performs as intended. This button is equivalent to the green play button in MakeCode Python.
• Reset Code button deletes your code in the workspace.
• Reset Activity button resets the Agent back to the beginning position, but it keeps your Python code.

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