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I was preemptively horrified before I clicked your Minecraft link. I taught a summer camp for middle/high school kids that wanted to learn how to make Minecraft

I was preemptively horrified before I clicked your Minecraft link. I taught a summer camp for middle/high school kids that wanted to learn how to make Minecraft mods. It was a disaster. We specifically put that the kids must have programming experience in a Java-like language before beginning, but all the affluent parents saw was, "Get your kids out of the house for 9 hours a day for an entire week!" Don't get me wrong: the kids were stoked. They even had some incredible ideas for mods. One kid's idea was that an entire building would generate based on the location of placed bricks, the type of brick, and how high you stacked the bricks. We liked it so much that we built it and gave it to the students to play with. Problem is that only 2 of 30 had any programming experience at all, and Minecraft development (at least back then) was not exactly beginner friendly. I just wasn't possible to teach Java development and Minecraft's library in a week. I guess my point in all this is to say that I'm glad that they're taking the initiative to make programming more kid-friendly with Minecraft. I hope that they can expand the foundation built by Scratch (loops, conditionals, etc.) to allow kids to see their crazy ideas come to fruition.

cheez 11y ago
Was this at the university camps? I sent my daughter to the gaming sessions and she absolutely loved them. I didn't send her to Minecraft for the reasons you stated :)
- noxToken 11y ago
  Yes it was. After the 2nd day of getting no where, we pretty much just asked for ideas. If they were simple enough, we made and distributed them. There were a couple of enterprising young minds that were doing their damnedest to make their own mods. We helped them as much as we could. Other than that, the kids basically just played Minecraft for a week. At least one kid did come out of the camp wanting to learn to program. I ran into him and his family one evening a month or so later. They sat next to us in a restaurant, and after excitedly bring up the camp, he told me that he's trying to learn programming on his own.

cheez 11y ago

Was this at the university camps? I sent my daughter to the gaming sessions and she absolutely loved them. I didn't send her to Minecraft for the reasons you stated :)

noxToken 11y ago
Yes it was. After the 2nd day of getting no where, we pretty much just asked for ideas. If they were simple enough, we made and distributed them. There were a couple of enterprising young minds that were doing their damnedest to make their own mods. We helped them as much as we could. Other than that, the kids basically just played Minecraft for a week. At least one kid did come out of the camp wanting to learn to program. I ran into him and his family one evening a month or so later. They sat next to us in a restaurant, and after excitedly bring up the camp, he told me that he's trying to learn programming on his own.