https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyMcS9n-0jU

Shaykh giving fatwa on Minecraft 😂 Says it is not permissible. It blackens the heart. Some tasawwuf vibes going on here?

(Chen, NeurIPS, 2021) Che1, Lu, Rajeswaran, Lee, Grover, Laskin, Abbeel, Srinivas, and Mordatch. "Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling". Arxiv preprint rXiv:2106.01345v2, June, 2021.

Quickly a very influential paper with a new idea of how to learn generative models of action prediction using SARSA training from demonstration trajectories. No optimization of actions or rewards, but target reward is an input.

Wu, Prabhumoye, Yeon Min, Bisk, Salakhutdinov, Azaria, Mitchell and Li. "SPRING: GPT-4 Out-performs RL Algorithms byStudying Papers and Reasoning". Arxiv preprint arXiv:2305.15486v2, May, 2023.

Bowen Baker et. al. (Open AI) "Video PreTraining (VPT): Learning to Act by Watching Unlabeled Online Videos" Arkiv, June 2022.

Introduction of VPT : New semi-supervied pre-trained model for sequential decision making on Minecraft. Data are from human video playthroughs but are unlabelled.

Bowen Baker et. al. (Open AI) "Video PreTraining (VPT): Learning to Act by Watching Unlabeled Online Videos" Arkiv, June 2022.

New supervised pre-trained model for sequential decision making on Minecraft. Data are from human video playthroughs but are unlabelled.

reinforcement-learning foundation-models pretrained-models proj-minerl minecraft

They demonstrate the model on a "minecraft-like" domain (introduced earlier by someone else) where there are resources in the world and the agent has tasks.

What are the assumptions at the heart of Minecraft's virtual world?

learning code = computer science? I guess, but I also wonder if my need to learn code has come more from a desire to communicate on social media more effectively.

There's also something about teachers who went to school then too. I'm one of them, and I love to tinker with the curriculum.

Yup! That's the secret.

It's the different kinds of experiences in one place that makes Minecraft different.

And it's worth teasing out the differences.

That's an interesting verb. What skills does Jordan have that allow him to do this?

Notice how many options there are here: "some," not all the animals, kill and eat or tame and make pets.

This is what my students describe: loosing track of time while they are on Minecraft.

We can never underestimate the pleasures of moving around in what seems to be a virtual space.

He invites peers to play his game with him.

After reading a book, this 11-year-old sees ways to create his own version of an imagined world.

In the second paragraph, I'm delighting in how many different modes of thought are evident. First there's the making.

Key word here, I imagine, is "can." It probably all depends on how the time on Minecraft is structured, and I worry that I haven't done this well enough for my students.

Parents need to give children "structured" play time and more "free time." Granted, but what do the structures look like and don't we need to do the same in school for youth of all ages? We need play AND we need to think about how to structure this play.

When I watch Gabriel, Faith, Mia, and others playing Minecraft, I worry that the game is inspiring more "work, work, work..." or mindless obsession than it is creative making and expression.

I've been in the first two categories: timid and uninformed, and I've watched my students be adventurous players!

This is off-putting to some of us, but I guess a lot of young people like the freedom of being able to get lost in such a world without "instruction."

So there's more to it than building things and surviving? A student who plays minecraft told me today that he thinks you actually do learn what you are simulating in the game. "Like when you build a garden, you learn how to farm," he told me. Hmmmm.

18 million downloads. This is a popular game. Parents, teachers, and students are using the game for educational purposes. This surprises me because I never though a game would help kids.