Carpenter Blocks mod

If you know Minecraft, you know that there are hundreds of mods. (Mods is short for Modifications and refers to anything that changes the game content from what it originally was). One of my 7th grade students, Mitchell, has been asking me to download the Carpenters Block mod for months. Being new to Minecraft, and not very comfortable with all things coding, I have resisted. But, I finally relented. Let me tell you, it was a VERY painful process involving lots of emails to our tech department and a few class periods where Minecraft was down and we were on cool math.com or math playground.

We finally got to try out this mod today, and it is AMAZING!! Minecraft is a block based game, so anything with angles or curves beyond a square just don't exist. Well, with Carpenters Blocks, they do exist! Basically, you get wooden structures- blocks, wedges, stairs, doors, and more. As well as two tools- a hammer and a chisel, and with these you can make slanted blocks, curved blocks, change the materials in blocks, and rotate blocks. This is essential for our World Religions unit where students are making arches and domes.

To illustrate this, here is a picture of a traditional block created arch next to a arch created with a carpenters block wedge block-

So cool, right?!

So, what did we do when some of the computers were running MinecraftEdu and some weren't?

This-