![]() Then I replaced that with a variable to show how she could make that change in just one place by giving values a name. Once it was working, I got her to make changes to the code to change the height of the lamp, to show her how she was changing the same values in multiple places each time. Every time we made a change, we ran lamp() and I got her to tell me what was wrong with what it built so far (lots of off-by one errors!). She was building lamps out of fence posts and glowstone, so I got her to write down the step-by-step instructions for building a lamp and started writing a new lamp() function following her instructions, showing how each of them turned into a piece of code. Just the other week, I used it to teach her about algorithms, JavaScript functions and debugging. They love doing everything manually, but the eldest is twigging on to the fact that if you're doing the same thing over and over again, you can do it much faster by telling the computer how to do it with JavaScript. Just watching them build stuff, play out stories and invent new things together is amazing, and the eldest quickly learnt how to enter commands in the console to do things like change the time, weather and game mode. My 8 year old and 5 year old play together on a ScriptCraft server I run on my laptop. Kudos to MS for the hard work, and putting it out so early. Giving an open universe to kids with the blocks to effect their world is just an insane tool. This is the sort of thing that makes computing and abstract thinking easier for everyone. Imagine the result of having your for loop create millions of blocks accidentally in your universe, and seeing that mistake happen in a non-threatening way. I've had said 12 year old try multiple times to "learn programming", only to give up when things aren't as great as they'd imagined in their head, after having spent hours just trying to figure out the right version of Python, and how to get a shell set up, and how to get something on the screen. "Teaching programming" feels serious and adult, and doesn't leave room for fun. ![]() It's really unfortunate that there is so much time being devoted to "teaching programming" to kids, instead of "teaching playing on computers". It's the ultimate fantasy universe, and the way you combine elements to make something new is very analogous to programming in the vanilla game.Īdding a way to customize this universe will just explode the interest in programming among young people. If you haven't watched a 12 year old play Minecraft, you need to do so. ![]() Getting Minecraft modding working in Visual Studio is how you are going to get the next generation of kids interested in programming. ![]()
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