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I am developer with over 20 years of experience. I have learned programming from books where computers were generally not available where I grew up. But my son
by lmilcin 5y ago
I am developer with over 20 years of experience. I have learned programming from books where computers were generally not available where I grew up.
But my son is learning programming (started when he was 6, he just turned 8 recently).
He started by goofing off with some robots programmed in visual languages. Then moved to goofing off even more in Scratch. When pandemic started we found a school that teaches programming online and they used Scratch to program Minecraft which got my son hooked up -- he likes Minecraft a lot and having it do stuff that wouldn't otherwise be possible was a huge motivation for him to learn. He is now attending a second semester in that school and they are using Kodu for some more advanced, 3d goofing off.
My son became big fan of Undertale recently and he approached me to learn to make some fan content based on Undertale. We did some research and found Undertale was made in Game Maker -- a game engine for 2d games. So this is what we just recently started learning. He is excited to finally start learning something that can be used to make professionally looking games and says that if it was good enough to make Undertale it is good enough for him:)
He also just got his own Minecraft server (ehm... Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM) and I am hoping that when he is bored with vanilla gameplay with his school friends he will want to start modding the game in some ways.
- bananabat 5y agoGMS2 is a good engine. I also built a Minecraft server for my son. Started with an RP4 but he complained about lag so I finally just let him a Linux laptop.
- lmilcin 5y agoI went with PaperMC after I found vanilla server lags. PaperMC is "built for speed" and it seems to work fine even with couple people playing. Additionally, I can write plugins for PaperMC which is the whole point of having the server in the first place (at least in our case).
- bananabat 5y agoWe use PaperMC too. We've tried to implement GeyserMC so that his non-bedrock friends can join but so far, no love. I haven't had time to dig into why. Very cool that you can write plugins for your kid's server!
- lmilcin 5y agoYeah. When he was little younger he had trouble with navigation when flying Elytra between our distant bases. In particular he made a huge tower on a remote (4k blocks) mountain and we made gunpowder farm in the middle of an ocean (7k blocks away). So I wrote a plugin where you can save your current location with a name and you get a small overlay that tells you where you are pointing -- ie. what is saved destination closest to where you are pointing and whether it is right or left of where you point and how far (1, 2 or 3 angle brackets ). I am also working on couple other plugins.
- bananabat 5y agoHe def thinks you're the coolest dad!
- zby 5y agoWhat do you use for programming in Minecraft? I tried Tinker with my son - but the process is rather tedious, you have to type in a command and an internet address to connect to with each game session, not to mention that Scratch block manipulation on iPad. Also the examples were rather limited. I don't play computer games at all myself - so I did not know what to propose to him.