Assembler

Inspiration

During the summer we did an internship at a tutoring company that taught children coding and mathematics concepts. What we found extremely interesting, was that instead of using the typical tutoring and teaching practices that are used in the classroom, we encountered a totally new way to engage children into learning material. We used Minecraft to teach the basics of coding and all sorts of math from basic addition to binary and algebra. There were children who came in for our classes that were falling way behind in school, and after a week of tutoring were comfortably performing math problems way ahead of their age group. And not only were they understanding the concepts in a short amount of time, but they were eager and excited to learn more! We want to break the norm of school being a place or boredom, textbooks and memorization. The orthodox concept of the classroom setting should be something of the past when there are so many new, modern, and hands of ways of teaching children things like math and coding. Education and having fun shouldn't be mutually excusive things, and we want to encourage a revolution in the classroom to using things like Minecraft, games and hands on technologies to aid in the exploration of the sciences.

What it does

A basic keyboard where a user can type out simple assembly instructions

How I built it

We built this project using the mechanic known as Redstone in Minecraft. The way Redstone behaves it is very similar to how electricity and circuits behave. Using knowledge of how logical gates work and exploration of the inner workings of a computer we decided to make this assembler. We had to build every circuit by hand and together we worked out our own form of ASCII character representation as well as implementing an assembly language.

Challenges I ran into

We ran into trouble with the implementation of this project in Minecraft because the size of the sheer size of the circuits, often we had to be careful about how far out we built so that it was still in the viewing distance of the player. In addition, having timing elements come together took a lot of trial and error.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are very happy that we were able to create a working assembler, we are happy that we were able to take something we were interested in and place it into an environment that makes it very easy to visualize. It was a great learning experience to try and take something that may be very complicated to, and create it in a way that could be taught and introduced to youth in the classroom.

What I learned

We learned about how computers work internally and how information can travel through circuits. Since the propgation of data was at such a slow and understandable pace. We could understand much better how binary logic worked through the simulation of circuitry.

What's next for Assembler

We hope to keep expanding on the assembler as well as create other projects, making it more viewer friendly and hopefully create a new way teaching complex topics in a way that is more engaging to students.

The Instruction Set

Here

Built With

• minecraft