I meant workspace within the minecraft world, ideally they would all work on one or two big projects in the game and use the python scripts to either help them build or to provide some interesting interactivity. The only issue with that is they're more likely to use it to grief each other, there may be the possibility of having each player put onto their own map but that would increase the memory requirements quite heavily. The setup I have in mind would be students working in teams of two or three, coding python locally on one machine and playing minecraft on another, both of which connected to one central server. At the moment I'm running it all on my course provided laptop and it is just about capable of handling one user and a python script, my hope is that when I actually have a classroom available there will be some resources available to me. Otherwise I could replace the server component here with a Raspberry pi running the minecraft pi server, though I do not know if multiple computers are able to connect to it or not.
Ah, yeah, I don't know how to really help there. If you figure out how to stop griefing you'll be able to retire rich. Best I can figure is to make it one large, module thing, witch each team working on one part, that way they're not competing, hopefully reducing some of the grief.
The best hope is that by having them build parts of the same system in that multiplayer environment, that they'd feel enough ownership of the system not to wreck it all. I'll definitely have to put in a world backup system but the real limiting factor of any solution would be that python script access. I wonder if I could set up some form of authentication and logging so all scripts could be traced back to whoever runs them, I have little experience with Python but I guess the libraries are all accessible so it may be possible to just add it in. Actually: thinking on it, I could have a gatekeeper so they authenticate with my server which will then pass the connection on to the actual Spigot+RaspberryJuice server perhaps? Otherwise I'd have to modify the RaspberryJuice mod as well, which I suppose is just Java so I'm fairly confident I could do that... blargh.
Yeah, the joint ownership was what I was trying to get across. And setting up a simple proxy that logs who does what shouldn't be too hard, that way you don't have to add hooks to what's already there and can have it all in a central place. And nightly backups of the server shouldn't be too much of a pain and that way even if a troll does muck things up your students only lost a few hours of work.
There's plugins to auto-backup and do all sorts of world management; ultimately I want them to have fun making something, if I can teach them logic gates and programming then all the better. If I can teach them other things such as some basics of architecture or geography, then that's even better!