>Therefore, to approximate the value of √2, we can simply measure the time it takes for a player to travel at a constant rate along one of the legs and the time it takes for that player to travel along the hypotenuse.
In many games, moving diagonally (e.g. by pressing Left and Forward at the same time) gives the player a higher speed than moving orthogonally. The sideways and forward movements are added, rather than normalized, and so you could traverse the hypotenuse in the same amount of time as traversing a leg. I know this was the case at one time in Minecraft, but not sure if it still is. Presumably they did their measurement by just facing along the hypotenuse and walking forward, but it's the sort of weird game mechanic you have to be on guard for when doing this sort of thing.
As they are using blocks (that cover a square area), I don‘t understand why use MC when you can actually compute the ratios directly based on the area covered by blocks that are less or equal some distance from a defined center - other than it being more fun to use slime ofc.
"This article is a proof of concept that Minecraft can be used in higher education. We should note that the goal of this article is not to have the most accurate approximations possible, the goal is to inspire people to have fun while learning about various mathematical topics."
Wonder if the authors are familiar with https://www.luanti.org/. Just as "fun" surely, and less nudging kids into the jaws of the proprietary toll-extracting behemoths of our world.
Luanti (formerly minetest) is open source, written in Lua, has an API with mediawiki docs, and has a vscode extension: https://github.com/minetest/minetest
SensorCraft is open source, written in Python, and is built on the Pyglet OpenGL library (which might compile to WASM someday) https://github.com/AFRL-RY/SensorCraft
mcpi supports "Minecraft: Pi edition" and "RaspberryJuice" (~ Minecraft API on Bukkit server)
minecraft-pi-reborn is an open source rewrite of "Minecraft: Pi edition" that's written in C++. It looks like there's a glfw.h header in libreborn. Emscripten-glfw is a port of glfw which can be compiled to WASM. Glfw wraps OpenGL. Browsers have WebGL.
> While we chose to use Minecraft to approximate irrational numbers, we believe there are many settings where this type of experimentation is possible. We would love to hear from anyone who finds inspiration from this paper and does some exploring of their own!
I'm sure they would be happy with you testing Luanti to see if there are equivalents.
Like, how do you generate random dots in Luanti? How do you record deaths? Or do you use other methods entirely? Is velocity isotropic or is traveling on the diagonal faster/slower than horizontal/vertical?
You're missing the point - I think people involved in education should put the extra effort in to not use things like Minecraft, and should explicitly search for more "community-friendly" projects, based on Free Software.
If none existed, it'd be possible to understand.
If one did exist, and it was really well-documented, with a thriving community, and loads of care put in to modding as a primary facet of the game rather than a sort of add-on, well then... it gets harder to understand.
Whether I can play around with these ideas on luanti myself is completely beside the point.
While my point is that they can't know and do everything.
Is luanti able to even do these tasks? Depending on how it implements mobs and the physics, it might not be possible, so your "If none exists" might actually be true - you don't know!
Help them. Don't be yet another annoying FOSS fan who insists others aren't pure enough.
> While my point is that they can't know and do everything.
Indeed. If you'll relook at my initial comment, I was literally just saying, I wonder if they're aware of Luanti.
> Is luanti able to even do these tasks? Depending on how it implements mobs and the physics, it might not be possible, so your "If none exists" might actually be true - you don't know!
Again, yes, I do not know, I was really just saying, I wonder if they know about and have considered Luanti. I have been playing with Luanti now for a total of about one hour, but it seems great, and I was wondering if they knew it's there.
> Help them. Don't be yet another annoying FOSS fan who insists others aren't pure enough.
Noted. I didn't mean to be, and will be careful not to get up too high on the horse in future. Thanks for the honesty.
The friendliest way is to do one of experiments in luanti, then write them to say you liked the paper, but because you don't like proprietary software, you did it in luanti, and let them know of your success/failure.
I already acquiesced to your basic point, that I should be careful about appearing too "high-horse" about the whole thing. I told you that I really did not mean to, and thanked you for sharing your perception.
And yet you're continuing, and pushing it a little step further, and implying that this is about me not liking proprietary software personally.
How weird. I don't know how I could have been more explicit. I do not think educators should use proprietary software with children if they have the choice to do otherwise. I'm making an ethical point, in the sense that I believe it should be a general rule.
Sometimes making an exception makes sense, sometimes not mentioning the whole thing at all makes sense, the world isn't black and white, sure. But I am not making a point about my personal preferences when it comes to software.
I saw that one possibility to resolve 'wondering if they knew it's there' was to email them directly and ask.
I was trying to caution you that it would be more friendly to include why you were curious, and to include some detail that tells them it you like their work enough to try it out yourself.
> I do not think educators should use proprietary software with children if they have the choice to do otherwise
The target audience is college students, not children.
Unfortunately, in my experience, mesecon (the Luanti equivalalent of redstone) mechanisms seem to be unreliable for scientific experimentation because their behavior is framerate-dependent.
Aha, ok, I didn't know that. I'm only playing around with Luanti very recently. I've made a note of this, and when I get around to experimenting with mesecon (which was on my todo list, as it looks great), I'll look into this, thanks!
Yeah exactly, and they'll only know things that people tell them about. So tell them about Luanti.
I have given lots of classes to kids and young people, and if I followed your logic there I would have only told them about stuff I thought they already knew about. Luckily, I didn't.
You've broken the site guidelines badly here. Can you please not do that? Comments like this are not what this site is for, and destroy what it is for.
"A good critical comment teaches us something." That's what I thought I was doing.
I did not intend to break the rules badly (nor do I believe I did; I didn't fulminate nor called names). Instead I was called names by others replying to me. I will not participate in HN anymore.
People learn better when it is fun, playful, and seems to relate to or be useful for things they care about. Doing so is part of teaching it “head on” and teaching it well.
I’ve actually been teaching my 2nd grade son Math recently though Minecraft- things like using euclidean coordinates, triangulating positions, etc. we’re both having fun and he’s learning valuable ideas.
You seem to have a dry, joyless, and uninspired view of math and how it should be taught. Traditional math education has done an impressive job of turning something incredibly fun and useful into something that seems stodgy, dry, and pointless.
I’ve always had a fun playful view of math that I learned from my own parents and mentors, and I think that is what has led me to continue studying and using math to solve real world scientific problems as an adult.
The "quit having fun" meme immediately springs to mind[1]. I, personally, know damn well that if this was around when I was at this level of mathematics I'd probably enjoy the field a bit more instead of growing a life-long hate and fear of math
Re: "I’ve actually been teaching my 2nd grade son Math" - it seems to me you proved the parent poster's point: this type of scientific communication is better suited for middle-school audience than university audience. A blog post seems more appropriate than posting it on arxiv.com with full academic credentials...
Math education techniques are a legitimate field of research worthy of publication. Science education is an academic field that publishes just like any other. Arxiv is a preprint server and not a journal - they don’t discriminate based on “impact” or interest to a certain audience. If you want that, read a journal that meets your desired criteria. It is perfectly reasonable to publish methods for educating children, or even results intended for an audience of children in Arxiv. A key purpose of a preprint server is to circumvent gatekeeping.
Absolutely- there is no reason children can’t and shouldn’t learn science by participating as it is done by real scientists- reading and even writing and publishing their own papers. I am an academic PI and am involved within teaching science by directly involving undergrads and even school aged children in real research, and having them write and publish their own papers as primary author. The idea of gatekeeping science as not for children is awful in my opinion.
Moreover, just because Minecraft is a video game doesn’t mean it has no place in real scientific research- it is a virtual world with a modular plugin system that can allow a researcher to create and interact with simulations of almost any type of system imaginable. People have executed realistic physics experiments, designed working cpus, etc in it. I think there is a lot of potential for really significant research within it.
Are you simply trolling or just so cynical that you can't read about some people having fun with mathematics on computers on a site called Hacker News without feeling the need to insult a whole discipline and building strawmen?
I don't know what you think the "math education problem" is, but I guarantee that being nasty to people is not the way to solve it.
I agree with the parent poster. A blog post seems more appropriate for these types of fun (math-related) activities. The Try Things on Your Own sections seems more appropriate for middle-schoolers / high-schoolers than University students/professors.
At least this was not supported by an NSF grant (There are problems more deserving of NSF grants than approximating pi with square blocks.)
I don’t think the arXiv makes any claim to require a minimum level of originality or contribution to the state of the art, beyond “write it up as a paper in full academic prose and it can’t just be a proposal”, especially in a history and overview subsection dedicated to exposition. The authors have a pretty good claim for getting published in an expository journal like, say, the MAA Monthly.
(Also, I don’t think this is any surprise to you, but an NSF proposal requires engagement with the literature, and a statement of contributions.)
Oh no, how dare educators do outreach to the next generation of people who might be interested in their field...
> "just teach it head on, and teach it well."
Seriously, as someone who was an assistant-teacher at university for a year, few things annoy me more than people with very strong opinions on education, whose confidence is very clearly based on not knowing the slightest thing about how education works.
Good luck trying to brute-force information into unwilling brains. Especially in a form where there is no connection back to the lived experience of the people being taught, meaning they have no point of entry.
Or perhaps your point is that we shouldn't do outreach, and only the people who already found maths on their own are allowed into this exclusive club of people who consider themselves oh so intelligent? Like being in favor the mathematicians equivalent of a "gatekeeping hipster" attitude?
Honestly, I don't know which interpretation looks worse.
I don't think either of those was GP's intent. I think it's more of a lament about anti-intellectual and anti-engineering culture in the U.S.
I interpret it that you shouldn't need these gimmicks to get people interested in math, but rather change the system so people would be more interested in those jobs or fields, by making engineers, academics and teachers into more respected members of the society.
I am from Czechia and I see this as a feature of neoliberal capitalism. The socialist movement, both in the Western and Eastern bloc, had a lot of emphasis on educating people. China now does something similar. But under neoliberalism, the respect of people is tied to money-making or entrepreneurship. This view, critical of low priority of education under neoliberalism, seems to be shared by many people outside the U.S. today.
I do have a soft spot in my heart for Soviet popular science and mathematics books, especially those that do recreational explorations - anyone of any age can enjoy them, but to someone young enough I’m sure they would’ve been totally engrossing.
I think showing students well formatted papers about approachable subjects is a great idea that more teachers should adopt! What's wrong with modeling the actual domain? "Serious mathematicians" communicate by publishing papers, but for some reason my only exposure to papers was on my own time outside of school, where they were largely intractable. This includes college math and physics courses.
> Is this a stunt to attract US students to mathematics research?
Like how the bowling ball pendulum lab is a stunt to attract students to physics, and the Briggs-Rauscher reaction a stunt to attract students to chemistry?
Sure, why not. Define "stunt" broadly enough and it can include anything which piques the interest.
> Why does it seem that everyone bends over backwards in the US instead of confronting the math education problem head on?
Why does it seem you have no joy?
> don't approximate it with video games, just teach it head on
This is head-on teaching how to approximate the values of four different mathematical constants.
You don't even get to the Minecraft way to approximate Apéry's constant until you've read that it's a special case of the Riemann zeta , and seen two ways to define it (as an infinite sum and as an infinite product), in order to explain why the Minecraft method works.
First, a ton of arXiv articles are fairly low quality so nothing new there. Published math research though is of a fairly high quality but mostly irrelevant and too specialized. I doubt it is a stunt. Rather, it's probably a sign of late-stage research boredom where all the useful stuff has been done and now there's not much else to do but invent arcane puzzles for amusement.
Monte Carlo integration to compute pi is not an arcane puzzle, given how often it's taught. We did it in my undergrad numerical methods course. In Fortran.
I don't think any of these are arcane puzzles for someone who wants a mathematical career, which is the target audience (see, 'likely one of the first irrational numbers you encountered in your mathematical career').
This is for undergraduate education. A 20 year old now was 6 years old when Minecraft came out. A 20 year old now studying math has very likely played a lot of Minecraft.
Also, the authors' respective institutions don't have a graduate level math program. Lynch's personal research is in combinatorics ("particularly connections between combinatorics and representation theory, topological combinatorics") and Weselcouch's is in "enumerative and algebraic combinatorics".
Rather than attribute it to "late-stage research boredom", why not interpret it as two young math professors (they are both in their 30s, I think) coming up with interesting ideas for their undergrad, math-interested students?
> Rather than attribute it to "late-stage research boredom", why not interpret it as two young math professors (they are both in their 30s, I think) coming up with interesting ideas for their undergrad, math-interested students?
Because I believe that is what the ultimate aim of research is these days: to attract more young minds to eventually contribute to meaningless pursuits.
America is a democracy and demonstrably most people's priority is not good education when it comes to schooling.
A significant portion of the people who reject the school system do so entirely based on fundamentalist religious reason, specifically things like "evolution is a thing" and "here's how you have safe sex".
The primary driver of American school boards in some states literally seems to be getting the bible into American schools for some reason.
Don't make things up, people don't reject "here's how you have safe sex". Maybe some individuals do, but majority of parents support calm and thorough explanation that sex exists and that's how adults do that safely so you 16yo's won't regret it later.
The problem is that thanks to 1% of overly active idiots it quicky degraded to "gender affirming closets" at our libraries and transgender lessons for 4th graders.
>The problem is that thanks to 1% of overly active idiots it quicky degraded to "gender affirming closets" at our libraries and transgender lessons for 4th graders.
they don't want people to have command over powerful symbols because it makes men smarter, that would be bad for universities
they deliberately make people lost, even your thought of "upfront" teaching which might but maybe not include the current status of throwing 50 formula questions at students for years,
when it has to do with maths oriented people should be given the primordial understanding that every historical mathematician was working with, knowing some basic enough greek, beginning with symbols and deriving just simple things and binary and incompleteness, etc.. instead we've made a few generations of absolute fakes with ZERO taste for symbolic beauty, because some symbols are not permitted by the party.. does the number 2001 or 1984 scare you?
In many games, moving diagonally (e.g. by pressing Left and Forward at the same time) gives the player a higher speed than moving orthogonally. The sideways and forward movements are added, rather than normalized, and so you could traverse the hypotenuse in the same amount of time as traversing a leg. I know this was the case at one time in Minecraft, but not sure if it still is. Presumably they did their measurement by just facing along the hypotenuse and walking forward, but it's the sort of weird game mechanic you have to be on guard for when doing this sort of thing.