Monday, April 7, 2014

AppleTV, Reflector App & Minecraft

The other day my daughters were both playing Minecraft.  They are obsessed!  (Did I mention that my girls are 9 and 5 years old?!)  Anyway, they like to play on their iPods or my iPad and then project their worlds on our family television using the AppleTV, but you can only project one device onto the AppleTV.  Then the wheels in my brain started turning!  I can have them both mirror their devices at the same time.  Even better, I can have them be in the same world, project both to the AppleTV to see each other's perspective.  Here is what I did:

  1. I mirrored my Macbook Pro onto the AppleTV.
  2. I used the Reflector app so that my girls could then mirror to my computer.
  3. Both screens then pop up on my computer screen which is mirrored through the AppleTV onto our TV.
Here's a picture of what it looked like:  (Sorry that it isn't a great picture.)


So cool!  Except, it was a bit glitchy and it crashed.  We will try again soon.

I should also mention that I have used this same set up in my class of 16 students with iPads.  I was looking for a way to get all of my student's screens onto my computer screen.  Reflector seemed like the perfect app.  It worked for a few minutes but once again, it crashed.  Maybe too many iPads logged on at once?

Well no matter what, this is an interesting concept to explore.