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I'm in exactly the same boat, and doing very similar to you. My son is 11 and daughter 8. Both do Code.org and/or Scratch fairly regularly. Son wants to get

I'm in exactly the same boat, and doing very similar to you. My son is 11 and daughter 8. Both do Code.org and/or Scratch fairly regularly. Son wants to get into modding Minecraft, but honestly I'm a little annoyed with how shady and complicated that process is. Or maybe I'm just too old to "get it". I don't discourage him from it, but haven't been able to teach him that as much. Son also recently bought with his own money a Arduino starter kid off amazon. You can get an arduino, LCD, servo, LEDs, etc. for 30-40$. We've taken it a step at a time and go through various concepts, etc. For example, I talked to him about 'rubber duck debugging' (ie explain the program to a rubber duck or plus toy line by line), semicolons, code blocks, etc. This has been great for learning real C and tinkering with electronics. I plan to start them on basic web stuff on glitch.me sometime. That should let them build simple websites etc. for free.

geomark 6y ago
Have you seen the book "Adventures in Minecraft [1]? Modding Minecraft with Python. I'm working through it with my 10 year old at the moment. Pretty good so far. Nothing "shady" (not sure what you meant by that) and not complicated. [1] https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Adventures+in+Minecraft%2C+2nd+Edition-p-9781119439585 https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Adventures+in+Minecraft%2C+2nd+E...
- shireboy 6y ago
  Thanks will check it out. By shady I meant the sites filled with ads that you go to to download mods, and the mod installers that I worry about what else they might be installing on my machine. Am I doing it wrong?
  - geomark 6y ago
    Oh yeah, that. This is a book so you don't have a lot of that shady stuff. But you do need to download and install their server code so you can run a Minecraft 1.12 server on localhost. Seems safe and no malware.
lancefisher 6y ago
We've found MCreator to be a great way to get into modding Minecraft. It has block programming like Scratch. https://mcreator.net/ https://mcreator.net/

geomark 6y ago

Have you seen the book "Adventures in Minecraft [1]? Modding Minecraft with Python. I'm working through it with my 10 year old at the moment. Pretty good so far. Nothing "shady" (not sure what you meant by that) and not complicated. [1] https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Adventures+in+Minecraft%2C+2nd+Edition-p-9781119439585 https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Adventures+in+Minecraft%2C+2nd+E...

shireboy 6y ago
Thanks will check it out. By shady I meant the sites filled with ads that you go to to download mods, and the mod installers that I worry about what else they might be installing on my machine. Am I doing it wrong?
- geomark 6y ago
  Oh yeah, that. This is a book so you don't have a lot of that shady stuff. But you do need to download and install their server code so you can run a Minecraft 1.12 server on localhost. Seems safe and no malware.

lancefisher 6y ago

We've found MCreator to be a great way to get into modding Minecraft. It has block programming like Scratch. https://mcreator.net/ https://mcreator.net/