I’ve been running a Code Club at Fleetville Junior School in St Albans for the past four years and we have a whole load of fun programming and making things with computers.
About a year and a half ago, I introduced some Minecraft challenges to the club and soon discovered that it was the genie that can’t be put back into the bottle…
But what a genie! The students have been programming virtual turtles to build and dig their way through challenges, culminating in designing and building huge bridges across an endless ocean (see their videos). They can’t get enough of being in Minecraft — even if they’re not allowed to kill each other or blow things up!
For the follow-on project from the bridge building, I wanted to give the students the chance to create something without programming — so I asked them to build a model of their school in Minecraft. They loved the idea!
I wanted the students to build the model themselves, but they needed a guide to help them get things to scale. I figured that a flat map of the school buildings sitting in the Minecraft world would be a good place to start.
Google Maps has a good detailed view of the outside of the school, but this wouldn’t help with the interior rooms. Luckily the school had a PDF architectural plan of the school that they were happy to contribute.
I took a screenshot of the Google Earth aerial imagery of the school and its grounds and then combined the image with the architectural plan in a drawing program.
The next step was to convert the image into a Minecraft “schematic” file — this is a file that can be imported into a world using the WorldEdit mod. There’s a great little program called Spritecraft that does exactly this job. You’ll need the (paid for) Full version of Spritecraft to export as a schematic, but all the money goes to a children’s charity.
It took me a little while to adjust the image to give a good output in Spritecraft. First of all, I had to adjust the architectural plan to make it a bit more chunky — those fine lines just didn’t make it into the block-based world of Minecraft. Filling in the walls and removing the door symbols helped a lot, as did setting the windows to a contrasting colour (don’t forget that some students might be colour blind).
Secondly I had to choose a scale… I measured the outside of the school using Google Maps (right-click on a starting point and choose “Measure Distance” then left-click on the end point) and compared this to the number of pixels across the school in the image. Although Minecraft is all set up to use one block to one metre, using this default scale made the school corridors too narrow at just one block wide!
For my build, a scale of 1.5 blocks to 1 metre seemed to work better — the corridors were a couple of blocks wide and the building didn’t seem too large. This might be different for your build — so play around and see what works for you. Here's the result:
Finally, I exported the schematic file from Spritecraft and copied it into the correct server directory (for MinecraftEdu that’s server/schematics but it may be different for your server). Then in a flat Minecraft world, I used the WorldEdit //schematic load <filename> and //paste commands to make the plan appear on the ground.
For our school there was an extra complication — the whole school is built on a slope, with steps and ramps along the corridors. To ensure the floor level ended up in the right place, I asked the students to start building at the lowest point of the school and then create the corridors (with their slopes and steps) before creating the classrooms.
This has been a really successful project so far. The students have made some really detailed rooms, complete with furniture, automated lighting systems(!) and non-player characters acting as teachers.
Here’s some pictures of their build so far — I hope to make another video before the end of term of the students giving a guided tour…
If this has helped you and you’ve created something from the real world in Minecraft (especially another school), please comment below — I’d love to hear from you!
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