This will get way more young kids interested in programming than all the subsidized school programs combined, by the way
From another comment: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-10-02-minecraft-...
I'm 21. I first learned programming through Roblox when I was like 15. I don't play anymore, and haven't for years, but I have a giant friend group that also got introduced to programming through Roblox. A lot of them have gone on to work there now, and they've been making it better and better over the years.
Minecraft is giant, and there are tons of mods for it, but also the barrier to entry for making those mods is extremely high. You have to open a command line, decompile a jar and deobfuscate the bytecode and then use Java, which historically isn't the best first language to pick up for a kid. More kids have probably been introduced to coding through ComputerCraft than have gotten a mod building correctly.
But I was already on Linux then.
I find it funny people think Roblox is a new thing when I played it a few years prior to Minecraft coming out.
What you can do is expose your kid to a lot of things and help them find something they're passionate about. Ideally something they can use to pay their bills too when their business fails. I don't see why some programming/tech exposure can't be one of those things.
I work fewer hours and have more lateral mobility than pretty much all my friends that make as much money as I do. Software engineering is a good field. Nobody is saying you have to force it down anyone's throat, and that's not what a Minecraft scripting API is doing.
What a great creative opportunity though for kids out there to dabble in programming due to a game they love. That doesn't preclude them from being financially savvy in the future. They're kids.
The issue is that the parents are doing this in order to set the kids up to a career in programming, which IMO is going to be the blue collar work of their future. There is no glory in being a code monkey 10 years from now... just a decently paid blue collar worker making someone else rich.
Teach them the business skills that will enable them to properly hire and evaluate 20 programmers for their business venture, not simply be one of those 20 programmers.
This isn't a rare path - just look on sites like SpigotMC and you'll see literally thousands of developers turning to the business side of things. The business skills that your kids would gain from this would be 1000x more valuable than whatever you can teach.
As it turns out he was wrong, my son's enjoying a great career as a programmer, his son has left psychology and is doing some kind of creative arts) music/digital career.
I think ultimately no one really knows what the future will hold, but it seems that it can't be a bad thing having a strong familiarity with the modern day building blocks of business, i.e software.
But i totally agree about arming them with business skills as well, so they can step up to whatever the next step is.
- I want them to be confident in interacting with technology. To understand that none of this is magic, and that it can be bent to one's will given enough (usually not much) knowledge.
- I want them to learn that they can, and should, automate their tasks on the fly - whatever those tasks are. I want them to know it doesn't require (though can involve) buying ready-made single-purpose solutions, but a little bit of thinking and (sometimes) skills. This conceptual block is what I see in most of non-computer people around me.
- I want them to acquire the ultimate tool in learning and communication: trying to make a machine to do something. There's no better way to realize what you don't know than trying to model it as a computer program.[0][1]
I don't necessarily want them to be a programmer in the future[2]. I want them to find their own career, but I also want them to go through life confident in their ability to truly understand whatever they're curious about, and to shape the increasingly digital world around them.
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[0] - I used to use this approach as a teenager to verify my understanding of physics. The act of trying to write a simulation quickly revealed which parts of the topic I only thought I knew.
[1] - Incidentally, that's the primary source of frustration in job - a lot (often most) of time is spent debugging and fixing lack of understanding of stakeholders. Most people aren't aware how imprecise (and in a way, wishful) their thinking is.
[2] - Honestly, I doubt that in 20 years, this will be a well-paid job, due to sheer scale of mass-manufacturing of "programmers" that universities are now engaged in. I expect the supply to exceed demand in 5-10 years.
Didn't understand why they imply that being a code monkey means you know nothing about anything else... Must not be a code monkey themselves. Working with programmers you see people of all backgrounds who have a wealth of knowledge in all sorts of topics, some even have financial backgrounds, others business and military, and so on.