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Comment by orangethirty | Hacker News Reader

The amazing thing about this game is that I'm using it to teach my girls how to program with it. Its a great tool because it allows them to see the value in writing code by getting real results quickly.

The oldest one wanted to create pink wood to build herself a pink wood house. Why? Well duh, its pink (her words). We quickly dug the source code and had a pink wood block in a short time. She was so happy and learned about Java. A double win in my book.

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Could you explain more about your setup? My own daughters love Minecraft and also want to learn to code...I'd be very interested in how you're accomplishing this.

Thanks!

I'm writing a short e-book on the subject. But the best way to do this is to go to the minecraft wiki and start reading. They have tutorials in there. Reddit also has some very good information and you can ask questions. You can always shoot me an email.

My 8 year old son wants to do the same. Have you found any resources that would be helpful for somebody with intermediate java skills (me) but no modding experience get up to speed with modding minecraft? Modding minecraft could be a great gateway for getting my son excited about programming.

I'm actually writing a short e-book on the subject that I will host on github for all to enjoy. I will announce it here once its out.

oooh, have you seen pi version? Its purpose is for teaching children programming (its scriptable with python). It doesn't look like its quite ready, but here is the link to watch: http://pi.minecraft.net/

There's also Computer Craft, which adds craftable computers and turtles in Lua: http://www.computercraft.info

I'm preparing to try that one out. It looks so interesting and much more fun that writing stuff on Eclipse.

That would make an amazing texture pack!

Have you seen Aureylian and her (very young) daughter playing Minecraft?

(http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAA32A313F61AFBBB)

I especially like the Zoo episode (http://youtu.be/kPMq0V_6KH8)

Would you need to dig into the source code for this? I thought there were just texture images that you could modify.

You would if you wanted to add it as a separate block type, or if you wanted to change non-visual properties of the block.

How did you dig through the source code? Dissasembling or is it somewhere available?

Use MCP http://mcp.ocean-labs.de/index.php/MCP_Releases

The code is all in minecraft.jar

I thought you were going to say you taught your children programming by creating algorithms visually through blocks. Otherwise they are pretending to be having fun.

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