This article's focus seems very different than the experience that my 9-year-old has had playing both games for the past few years. At least for now, she's not

This article's focus seems very different than the experience that my 9-year-old has had playing both games for the past few years. At least for now, she's not really shown interest yet in programming either game: she plays them. (She has the option of using them on a full computer and occasionally does, but she's usually on a tablet.) So most of what this article focuses on is orthogonal to her experience. I'd summarize more like this: Minecraft is a game focused on building things in a virtual world. Roblox is a game platform for playing games other people have created. Playing in the same world as your friends is easy and built-in on Roblox; it's a good bit more complicated on Minecraft (at least if they aren't on the same local network). On that level, my sense has been that Roblox is much more of a "content consumption" platform (quite often involving social elements and/or storytelling) while Minecraft inevitably includes creative designing and building (sometimes including social play, if you can figure out how to get it set up). I suspect that creating your own Roblox content is easier than writing a Minecraft mod, but Minecraft has a whole lot more "building" in the base game than most Roblox games do.