Teaching children programming using Minecraft
Learning programming is almost becoming a requirement for our kids, with the future of the workforce moving away from traditional roles and instead towards those that require skills in analytics, computer programming and machine learning.
More and more schools across the world are meeting these future and present needs by introducing children to basic programming at younger ages than ever before. Traditional programming learning often focuses on things like loops and functions, which is probably not the most engaging way to teach a child, so how do we as parents keep our children engaged with this at home?
Block Code: a visual programming language
A visual programming language, or block code, is basically being able to program the desired outcome using blocks or elements that can be dragged and modified visually without much (or any!) typing of actual code.
A good introduction and overview can be found on Wikipedia, where you can easily access a massive list of educational, multimedia, video games, and others that use visual programming in their application to provide some functionality that is better represented visually.
In a previous post I gave an introduction to the educational system called Scratch and its application in teaching children machine learning. This is but one of many tools that can help both children and adults grasp the concepts of programming and machine learning in what can be a very visual and somewhat gamified manner.
In case you missed it, here is a link to my previous article:
Using Minecraft to teach programming
One of the most popular games to come out in recent years was Minecraft, which has provided countless people the joy of taking a world and making it whatever you want. People have built everything from a dirt hole in the ground to massive cities with automated farming.
So what would you say if I told you that you could use this love of Minecraft to help practice programming at home? Well the people over at Code.org thought that would be a great idea so have developed material that does exactly that.
Here you can use block code to program the avatar to move through the Minecraft world and complete the assigned task. While this seems simple at first the challenges become more involved as they progress, and while not explicitly taught, learners are applying the basics of loops and conditional statements that are the foundation of many, if not all, programming languages.
If your kids get bored of programming Minecraft characters, don’t worry! There are lots of other resources available, which can be found here:
Code.org also has a full curriculum for the teachers out there so that you can easily link the coding content with the educational outcomes that you are providing to your students.
But what about Data Science?
If you want a more Data Science focused curriculum take a look at AI for Oceans which focuses on how AI (Artificial Intelligence) can be used to help us solve real world problems. In this case they use convolutional neural networks, a type of machine learning, to help clean up the ocean by being able to learn if something is a fish or not a fish.
This may appear almost pointless since we know if something is a fish or not! However, have you ever tried to explain to someone what a fish is without showing them one? Try explaining it to a computer or robot and you’d find that they get very confused!
These models use a large number of pictures that have a label saying if the thing in the picture is a fish or rubbish, and lets us ‘train’ the model to identify a fish with a high level of accuracy. Systems like these could be vital for cleaning up the oceans using robots in the future.
But I thought we were talking about Minecraft?
Like everything in this field, it is easy to get lost down the rabbit hole and find yourself looking at fish instead of a mob attacking the house you spent 3 weeks getting enough stone for. So, let’s get back to Minecraft with a shout out to one of the lesson plans that focuses on using AI in Minecraft to help teach kids about forest fires and their prevention, while still having fun in the game.
Combatting forest fires with AI not your thing? Then maybe reuniting two groups of villagers in Minecraft, focusing on social inclusion and the impact of bias, while still teaching the kids coding in either block code or Python, is more your style?
Well enough of that…. for now!
Gaming platforms, such as Minecraft, can be such great tools when teaching kids programming, as it makes it more fun and relatable for them.
Writing about this has given me many hours of joy exploring such great resources and playing around while also being impressed at the level of support out there for teaching kids to code. Thanks for coming along for the ride! I hope that you found this helpful, and if not, at least entertaining!
I look forward to writing more on this and other topics soon and hope that you will get something out of it too.
