First of all, I have to admit, Programming in Minecraft is a hobby of mine and I’ve been ‘into’ various aspects of Minecraft for probably about 4 years now, so I’m probably a bit biased when it comes to this topic.
But I really do think Minecraft has a lot to offer to kids who find it a nice change from the carefully produced and heavily scripted games from the big studios. Here are some ways kids can learn from Minecraft:
1. Working with numbers.
The game works by gathering resources which can then be used to make items and then sometimes those items can be crafted into other items. The calculations to work out how much of each resource will be needed to craft, for example, a bookshelf can get pretty complex.
Also Minecraft can be used as a way of factoring integers! If you have a certain number of blocks and you figure out a way of placing them to make a solid rectangular prism, you have just found three factors of the number of blocks! (hint-it’s the length of the sides)
(I’m working on a custom map where factoring numbers is built into the game. It’s still a long way from being completed, but hopefully one day…)
2. Creativity and role-play.
Solo gameplay in Minecraft gets boring quickly unless you play with a bit of imagination and use some creativity. If you are a parent, it’s a good idea to check what your child is up to in Minecraft. Are they creating? Are they persisting with developing a single world? The problem with a Mojang account is that they can end up spending there whole time on server mini-games and not appreciating the game as it was meant to be played.
A big part of Minecraft now is custom maps. Players can easily make their own maps. These are custom made worlds which usually have some kind of end goal. Minecraft provides a wide range of extra features for map makers, so maps can be made as simple or advanced as the designer wishes. Creating custom maps is one of the most creative activities I can think of, encompassing programming, storyline development, voice acting, computer art, and any number of media skills.
3. Programming
Mojang are offering a web based graphical programming tutorial via code.org, but I don’t think it has a lot to offer kidsonce they reach senior primary school.
However Minecraft, as of version 1.12 in the Java version, now comes with a rudimentary programming language via something called functions. Also command blocks, which execute a single command at a time, have been around since version 1.4 and have gradually been improved and made increasingly more capable.
It is actually quite a lot harder to program in Minecraft than using a standard programming language, because many capabilities of structured programming are missing in Minecraft. Capabilities such as looping, branching and even passing parameters must be created by various tricks, often using in-game entities. On the other hand, Minecraft programs can execute many command simultaneously and be programmed with timing at the level of single clock ticks at 20 times per second. It reminds me somewhat of the FPGA programming I used to do when I was in the aerospace industry.
4. Engineering and Science
This needs to be put in context. Minecraft presents the player with a virtual world with consistent rules that are only superficially similar to the real world. The player can use those rules to create an unlimited number of contraptions and inventions. However the rules are not always well documented and can vary between versions. Players often create experiments to check exactly how the rules work. Hence science!
It should be noted that Minecraft makes a poor substitute for the real world in many ways. The rules of Minecraft are too simplistic to present many of the real world challenges of our complex analog universe such as making precise measurements or dealing with subtle interactions between physical laws. Nevertheless, the ease of which a player can slip into science mode without even realise it in a Minecraft world makes it a valuable educational resource.
I’m fairly biased when it comes to Minecraft, but, with a bit of parental encouragement and supervision, I don’t think it needs to be a complete time-waster. We just need to make sure kids get plenty of real-world play as well.