3 ms·
A common topic on HN is "teaching kids to code". I can think of no better environment for this than Minecraft + ComputerCraft. One of the most difficult challen
by bradleyland 13y ago
A common topic on HN is "teaching kids to code". I can think of no better environment for this than Minecraft + ComputerCraft. One of the most difficult challenges is getting kids interested in coding. Kids have a short attention span, so if you can't do something interesting in a relatively short time frame, they lose interest. ComputerCraft is great because A) I have yet to meet an 8-14 year old who isn't content to play Minecraft for hours, and B) ComputerCraft allows you to do a lot of very cool stuff that this demographic finds immensely rewarding. When you combine the willingness to spend long periods of time focused on a single task with creative inspiration of Minecraft, you have a winning combination.
- pfhorge 13y agoWhen I was a kid, I got to take some Logo programming classes at Purdue. I can't imagine how much more intuitive and visceral it would have been if we'd had Minecraft instead of blank white screens. I happen to play Minecraft now, and I just finished writing a 3D Perlin noise generator in Lua so that my turtles can build structures with some randomization. I'll be adding code to pixellate my smooth, mathematical paths into minecraft blocks using Bresenham's line algorithm. I've also written programs to do highly efficient mining with minimal effort on my part. I've seen programs written by other people that control a fleet of turtles from a central computer, and programs that run complex farming operations. There's so much breadth of possibility with something like Minecraft and ComputerCraft. If Minecraft is like playing with Legos online with your friends, ComputerCraft is like Mindstorms. I envy the kids who start out on this stuff.