Minecraft Redstone: The Gateway to Engineering

Abstract

Previous research on Minecraft only generally analyzed an important component of the game called Redstone along with other aspects of the games educational advantages. In the paper, the author focus only on Redstone and tries to find the connection between the mechanism and real-world engineering. The author first categorized content created by advanced Redstone players of the game into Vanilla Redstone and Exploit Redstone and analyzed them, searched for similar mechanisms in engineering as well as asked AI similar questions for reference, and recorded qualities players displayed throughout the video aligning with that of effective engineers. The author then stated the specific fields the build falls into and also the qualities the creator possesses, then put images for each creation to give an idea of the structure. In conclusion, the author summarizes discoveries in the research, shows all the qualities those players seem to have that help one person to prosper in engineering, and lists general fields of engineering having the deepest connection with Redstone. Next, the author suggested that educators could use Minecraft to raise students interest to STEM. The author stated some limitations the research has such as a limited number of videos analyzed or some other technical aspects of the game that can also be connected to STEM and engineering. Finally, some advice for future research has been put in the last part of the paper.