Copper (and redstone)

Transcript: Part 1

[Sarah:] and this is another one that is coming soon to Minecraft. So, copper, and with copper, you can see in the picture in the middle, if you leave it over time in Minecraft, it will actually turn from this, kind of, shiny orangey brown to green. So what do we want to say about that?

[Kim]: That's very true. So you can see a picture right below it of Queen's Park, and they used copper sheeting for the roof, and instead of being sort of that coppery color that we expect from a penny, if people remember what pennies look like, or you can look at the images there from the gallery, sort of that coppery metallic look, it turns green over time as it's weathered, so that is very true.

[Sarah]: So the other thing that I wanted to mention here, if we jump back into Minecraft, is again, in Education Edition, we don't have copper yet, it's coming eventually, you'll be able to do things like make lightning rods out of it, so if you put one on your house, lightning will strike the lightning rod and not set your wooden roof on fire. But what we do have in Minecraft is this stuff called redstone, which doesn't really exist in the real world, but I have a lever here, and this lever is a power source, so you can see it's kind of lighting up a little bit.

[Kim]: Okay.

[Sarah]: If I use this redstone to connect this power source to a machine, like a piston or a door, it will actually carry that current and turn them on.

[Kim]: Is that a cow?

[Sarah]: Yeah, I have a cow wandering around our testing site, sorry.

[Kim]: Okay, just checking. It was a little distracting, I just wanted to make sure the cow was okay. Yeah, so that is very, very true. So, copper is used for wiring a lot, because it has a wonderful ability to transmit electricity through it, so that's what copper wires, how you turn on your light switch, and your light goes on, is that electric current that is traveling through copper. So that is very true.

[Sarah:] Why does copper turn green over time?

[Kim:] Yeah, it's just, oh it's a complicated process, but the copper mixes with oxygen and makes a different mineral, so that's that's what's happening.