Redstone and Netherite

Transcript:

The question is, "my students are interested in learning about redstone, is that in Minecraft only or is there some sort of real-life equivalent?" and I would say the answer to that is up until Minecraft actually got copper, redstone was kind of like the closest thing in Minecraft that we had for copper. It's a material that we could make wiring out of, but it is fictional. So I'll share my screen again, actually, so you can see where it comes from. So if I come back here so we can get the redstone dust, but we find it down in the ground in the form of redstone ore, which looks like that, and when I'm mining, it actually glows a little bit if I'm standing on it, because you can see the little like particle effects that are coming up when I walk on it, because you can actually squish it all together in a block, and when you put it together in a block, it becomes a power source itself. So that's powering that piston and making it go instead of the wire that carries a signal. So it's kind of used as the equivalent of copper wiring, but also a power source in and of itself, and, I don't know, Kim, if you want to talk about, are there any rocks that we can find that would be a power source on their own?

[Kim:] What do you... what are you thinking, Sarah, I'm trying to think of what you're leading at.

[Sarah:] I don't know, I guess the closest thing I could think of would be, like, things that you might use in nuclear power.

[Kim:] Okay, yeah, so, for sure, so we could use uranium, for example, in fuel rods. yeah that could be a good fuel source, for sure. What is the nether? I don't even -- netherite?

[Sarah] Netherite is another coming soon, it is a fictional thing they have created, so I'm actually going to run back over to our material reducer, because this is kind of a really good way to illustrate it. So when I put a rock that actually exists, like diorite, I get the real elements that it's made, of silicon, is a real element oxygen, is a real element but if I go and I grab something that comes from the nether, like, we don't have netherite in Education Edition yet, netherite is something you get from ancient debris, so it implies that there used to be a civilization that is no longer there, but you can sometimes find debris and refine it into netherite, which is this fictional thing. But if I stick this netherrack in the material reducer, I get silicon--

[Kim]: Are you sharing your screen, Sarah, I can't see it, and I want to see this ficional rock.

[Sarah]: Oh, sorry, there we go. So if I put the netherrack in there, I get silicon, oxygen, mercury, and question mark. And question mark is the fictional material in Minecraft that we don't know what this is, it comes from another dimension, so it hasn't been defined yet. So it's not in education edition yet, but I am betting that when we get netherite, and we put it in the material reducer, that we will get the question mark as well, because there will be something in it that doesn't exist on Earth.

Hey everybody! So it's future Sarah here, and I just wanted to add a little bit on. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to do this while I was actually talking to Kim, but I thought, why not come back and actually check out redstone in the material reducer and see what Minecraft thinks it is. And it's actually pretty awesome. So if I put the redstone in the material reducer, we do have that mystery nether element, so I was right about that, and then we have some carbon, and then we have uranium. So we were actually right. Redstone is functioning a little bit like a radioactive material, producing its own energy source, which is pretty awesome.