Course Outline

Redstone is the most interesting bit of Minecraft. It provides a way to build your own circuits and mechanisms, automate everyday Minecraft life and at the same time learn about real-life computer science.

This course has two main aims. The first is to teach students basic IT and hardware: by the end of the course, they will understand binary numbers, how to use them in boolean logic, the components of a modern computer and how to build them. The second aim is to give students an end-to-end, fully-fledged perspective of how to build and manage their own server, ranging from somewhere simple to practice their brand new redstone knowledge to a monetized, complex, multiplayer-oriented scenario.

On a journey from simple mob traps and wheat farms to command block cellular automatas and an advanced calculator, students will acquire a breadth and depth of Minecraft knowledge they never knew existed. They will cover redstone topics such as RAM memory, Input/Output mechanisms and 7-segment displays, all of which can be applied to a real life PC, how to code their own plugins in Java and configure them via the markup language YML, the Unix shell interface and much more.