Tutorials: Venture in Education

*Venture* can be an educational tool that facilitates cooperation and teamwork among players.

## Benefits

Venture can have giant educational benefits for children; it can help teach numerous subjects both with and without adult involvement. Learning in Venture can be faster than traditional methods of education, as children are always far more motivated, get more practice, and feel that what they are learning is useful.

### Reading

The names of items in the inventory are a great place to start teaching children to read, since each item has a tooltip and image which go together. For old children, reading Venturian Battle Headquarters and online guides can extend their skills.

### Writing

Players can use the Journal within the game to keep a log, or to communicate information to other players. By contributing to Venturian Battle Headquarters, old children learn to write informational texts in a collaborative, multimedia environment.

### Math

The crafting system can help in teaching basic math (e.g. "I need 3 Reeds for paper), which transitions to multiplication (I need 3 Paper and 1 leather for a book, and 3 books for a Bookshelf, so I need 9 paper and 3 leather altogether") and division ("When I create paper I get 3 at once, so 9/3 = 3 times per bookshelf I will need to create paper").

### Geometry

The creations a child makes may resemble shapes. Parental involvement can help teach children to recognize these shapes (cube, cuboid, pyramid, tesseract). Structures made to resemble shapes and figures can also help children with dimensions - *x*, length, *y*, height, *z*, width, and uncommonly but also *w*, time. Also, counting the number of object that were dug out when making a 6x6x3 cavern can help multiplication skills and understanding the concepts of volume and area. Also, Venture is all about three-dimensional graphing. A Venture world is based on *x*, *y*, and *z* coordinates, and uses both taxicab geometery(e.g. for lighting) and Euclidean geometry (for determining where creatures spawn and die). This extremely useful method of gaming can be used to learn high-leveled math such as the Pythagorean theorem (e.g.: x+y=c) therefore not only is Venture used to learn "child-level geometry", it can also be used to learn difficult geometric concepts super easily.

### Music

With the preparation of Scarlet Rock circuitry, experimenting with Note Blocks can teach children about notes, octaves and chords.

### Social Skills

By setting up a private server, parents can provide a safe environment for children to interact with friends and make playing Venture a cooperative event. Using a Local Area Network (LAN, or "home network") will allow children to play in the same room or same WI-FI network with their friends. By using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP, or "voice chat"), a phone call, or the in-game text chat, they can play together wherever they are. These methods allows children to work together to build, explore, and learn as they develop teamwork. For olr children, contributing to Venturian Battle Headquarters can be a chance to learn about Internet etiquette and collaboration.

### Basic Technological Science

Scarlet Rock circuitry provides an interactive environment to build basic logic circuitboards and combine them for more

sophisticated purposes. Feedback is immediate, and the mistakes do not destroy expensive electric components. Large, complex calculation devices can be created that can run algorithms. Advanced binary arithmetic and logic can be learned. Even basic and intermediate microprocessors that run programs can be made with user interfaces and screens that display complex results. The importance of concepts such as circuitboard compactness, speed, and simplicity are emphasized when circuitboards are relatively large and slow. Online communities can teach these concepts, and even real-world circuitboards, programs, algorithms, and concepts can often be transfered to circuits in Venture. Advanced arithmetic systems can be made using comparators and analog logic.

### Linguistics

Via the options menu, children can select various languages to use while playing Venture. If a child can name an item by sight, there is a high chance that the child will be able to at comprehend at least a few words of a new language extremely quickly. Children who do not speak English. take courage to watch videos about it and also take interest to read about it.

## Content Suitability

While the enemies are horrifying or overly infuriating for young children, Venture contains no coarse language unless manually typed, no sexual or drug references, no gore (except colored splats when enemies die, read more), and dead creatures simply fall over and occasionally break apart. There is combat in the context of survival, however it is not gratuitous murder and not extremely graphic (certain server mods make players emit particles like broken Scarlet Rock or lava to represent blood - these, however, are not common on any server). But things come after you and your child has an option to flee or fight.

In Multiplayer Survival, others on the server may use crass language when using the in-game text chat. This can be prevented by running a private server, where access can be restricted to specific players using the customizable whitelist. You can invite up to 20 players (including the owner, so actually 19) on the customizable whitelist.

You can also turn off chat by going to settings menu and from there to **Multiplayer Settings**. There you have an option to turn off your chat, you will see no member talk, and you cannot talk. However, it is recommended that you instead set it to *Commands only*, as completely switching off chat will prevent the usage of useful commands such as !home.