Video GameStart Uses Minecraft to Teach Kids Programming (Video 1) 30
Slashdot: Tyler, we're standing in a classroom of sorts.
Tyler Kilgore: Of sorts.
Slashdot: Can you explain a little bit about where we are?
Tyler Kilgore: Sure. So we're at GameStart. GameStart is a school that teaches programming using video games. We also teach video game curriculum design through Unity and other industry standard software.
Slashdot: We're in Ann Arbor, Michiga. Is this the only GameStart?
Tyler Kilgore: Currently, yeah, that’s our brick-and-mortar. We grew – we incubated out of a company called Menlo Innovations and we’ve just recently, in the last year, grown into our own space. We're liking it so far--it's been a lot of fun, but one location as of now.
Slashdot: And so you are a startup in more than one way--it's technical, which is, I guess, the classic startup.
Tyler Kilgore: Yeah.
Slashdot: But it’s also literally only a few people involved in it.
Tyler Kilgore: Yeah. There's about eight of us now. We've got a lot of volunteers that also like what we do and want to participate and we have some part-time instructors that come in and help during busy seasons, kind of like summer camps and such.
Slashdot: Now this, Ann Arbor, Michigan is a town that is pretty serious about education and not just at the university level, of course it is famous for its university.
Tyler Kilgore: Sure.
Slashdot: But local schools you’ve got the STEAM program and you’ve got – just across the hallway in the mini mall where we are there is a Kumon location.
Tyler Kilgore: Yeah.
Slashdot: So talk about what makes what you're doing here different – what exactly – how do you get kids interested in technical fields?
Tyler Kilgore: Sure. So the model that we like to employ is to let kids play. Our co-founder Nate always makes the distinction that humans are the only animals that distinguish or separate play from learning and so we feel that by utilizing this natural instinct to play and this natural passion towards video games like Minecraft and the Blizzard, Unreal Engine, we find that kids are much more engaged, and much more willing to take on more more rigorously engage with topics that they wouldn't have otherwise. And we can leverage that to teach them about programming and to teach them how to make what they do in games better through code.
We do have a relationship with Kumon down the street, down the hall. We've been fortunate enough to be in an area that utilizes a lot of young focused education so there is Kumon and there's an art studio just next to us too. We see that relationship – we see where it's beneficial, but we also can kind of see where we break out from that traditional model that learning happens at a particular point and then play is very distinct from it in different world.
Slashdot: It is a kind of a one-stop shop for educating your kid in different ways.
Tyler Kilgore: Yeah. Yeah, it's a little strip mall where you can sort of pick it all up. Yeah.
Slashdot: Now, the tools that you are actually employing here I mean you've got a chalkboard behind you.
Tyler Kilgore: Sure.
Slashdot: You're also next to a table full of laptops.
Tyler Kilgore: Yeah, yeah.
Slashdot: And a lot of Ethernet here.
Tyler Kilgore: This is the aftermath of one of our summer camps we are running. During the summer camps, we have two different kinds of curriculum: One is more of programming focused and the other is modding focused. Both of them rely on Minecraft and the kids’ passion for Minecraft which is hugely popular. We utilize essentially the same game to do two different things: One teaches fundamentals of programming through Python, teaches what a variable is, how to invoke functions, how to create your own functions, we talk about for-loops, we get into conditional if statements all under this context of being better at Minecraft and playing the game better and not just learning to play but playing to learn.
The modding curriculum though focuses more on Java syntax and understands – since Minecraft was written in Java, Eclipse is the software we use. Eclipse we use it to modify Minecraft and students get a handle on file structures and version control and the more and more advanced concepts of what it means to code and be a programmer.
Slashdot: How big a class is it that you put kids into? And is it more age-based or ability? Or can they choose to take a more serious class versus a more light-hearted one?
Tyler Kilgore: Sure. So we have a few different restrictions or qualifications for what students can go where. We like to keep our class sizes small. We like to have as much one-on-one time as possible. Usually our ratio is about 8:1 for students to instructor that's about what we're comfortable at. And so we have today in our full day camp we had 20 students and so that meant three of us full time checking in, making sure everybody was getting what they needed. And then the classes – the qualifications for who can go where typically the hard cut-off is third grade. So we have curriculum from first, all the way up to the twelfth grade. For the first through third graders, the typing skills are just obviously not there yet. So we have a visual programming interface developed by Google called Blockly that we've modified to allow us to put Minecraft commands essentially, so that you can use Blockly to play better Minecraft.
And then once you get to third grade and your typing skills get better, we just have them in a text editor, we have them type in commands that they would have would have been used to or familiar with--the visual interface. And then there's another cap that fits the fifth through eighth. There is a good group of advanced programming skills that we can start to dig into and more modding focus and that's where we can delve into the syntax. But we do handle students on a case-by-case basis because we’re very familiar. A lot of us remember being the kid that was bored in class and if the kid – if the child isn’t challenged then we want to make sure that that we can remedy that too.
Slashdot: You’re using open source language as your basis of instruction here? Talk about that.
Tyler Kilgore: Yeah. So Python is a great framework to start your understanding of programming--it's clean, it's all human readable, it's easy to sort of pick up what's happening. Whereas something like Java or any of the C languages, there's a lot of syntax, those curly braces--it's hard to explain to a student why the curly brace is there. Anytime we find ourselves just saying ‘Just trust us on this’ or ‘You just have to do this’, we start to – that throwsup red flags in our mind. We feel like it should intuitively make sense when you're learning the fundamentals and learning the concepts of procedural thinking versus our object based thinking. But yeah, so we like Python. We like it that it's open source, we like to keep our mod open source, the mod that we have developed for Minecraft. We want to keep that as available as possible.
Suck it, "editors." (Score:3)
>> intrested, but yoi
Please tell me someone at Dice knows how to use spellcheck.
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They take the failure train to work.
They snack on failure chips and failure dip.
At lunch they eat failure sandwiches on whole-grain failure bread with special failure sauce.
They shit out failure and wipe their asses with failure paper.
They take the failure train back home where they eat microwaved leftover failure.
They lay in bed at night in quiet failure with a tear running down their cheek
They get up and, after fumbling for
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Working sick, didn't insert the finished draft on time. All corrected now.
Thanks for noticing,
- R
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Spellcheck?
Tag! You're it...
And watch out, misspellings can be intentional. Got your attention, didn't it? That's all they need. Do make sure to click on the ad...
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Agreed. That shirt is hideous.
Stop teaching shitty code (Score:3)
If you want to teach good programming Mine Craft is the LAST place to go!
Old Quake engines are open source.
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There's a Visual Studio plugin to create Minecraft mods now.
Microsoft is out with a 'beta' version of Minecraft for Windows 10. I suspect it isn't written in java.
Minecraft hasn't hit 2.0 yet, but I predict there will be many surprises for part of the fanbase. Particularly for mod developers.
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Nah he's not tripping balls. He's just part of the standard slashdot peanut gallery who collectively pop into everyb thread and smugly announce how the person in the story is such a massive idiot for doing it wrong and how OBVIOUSLY there's a better way to do it. Naturally the peanut gallery inhabitants never actually leave the gallery and do anything useful.
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I got my first introduction to programming-like topics through playing garrysmod running the wire addon. I remember starting out with simple circuits with a few logic gates to open and close doors or aim turrets, then moving on to expression gate as that feature was developed. By the time I started programming classes in college I was pret
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Re: Stop teaching shitty code (Score:2)
I never miss a chance to rip on Minecraft.
My first experiences with the game had to do with children who wanted to run the game but couldn't because the code was so buggy it needed more horsepower than the systems in front of them could provide. They could play UT2004 on the system smooth as glass and it looked great, but Minecraft looked like hammered shit even when it was running smoothly. The kids insisted on that game and that game only, even though it caused them massive amounts of frustration
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They could play a game from 2004 but not Minecraft. Go figure.
Please do make a better game. Nobody wants to stand in your way.
The installer for Minecraft for the PC now is an .msi file and it bundles in an embedded JVM. When I noticed, I uninstalled the stand-alone JVM on my machine immediately. I'm pretty sure that has fixed a lot of issues for many people. But I doubt if the long term plans now that Microsoft owns Mojang involve java forever. There's a Visual Studio plugin for Minecraft mods now, an
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here's a Visual Studio plugin for Minecraft mods now, and I'm pretty sure the port for XBox isn't java. It's at rev 1.8 and 2.0 probably isn't far off.
It's not. But apparently the Windows 10 version is based of the current Minecraft PE version, which is written in C++. The Xbox version would be a bad base since it can't do infinite worlds and probably has huge swaths of it written specifically for controllers, etc.
They haven't been too specific about any of it, but I would imagine that this Windows 10 edition is going to be the only edition before too long. Maybe they'll have a Mac version. Linux is probably fucked.
The fanboys don't want to admit it,
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My point is the game from 2004 still looks great today. Minecraft from any era looks like shit.
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They are talking about writing java mods to the game which change the way it behaves.
For example- "timber" is a mod that causes all of a tree to fall when lower blocks are chopped.
"Toughboats" is a mod that makes boats not take damage.
Some mods get pretty sophisticated and past a certain point, you are going to be rooting thru the deobfuscated actual minecraft source code.
Cool stuff.
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You can do a lot of logic in Minecraft. Beginner programmers would have no chance with the Quake source code.
Subjecting kids to Eclipse... (Score:1)
is child abuse.
Why do that? (Score:1)
Why teach "programming" to kid? To delude another generation into thinking it can be an actual career when it's soulless and draining boring job bashing out code and ruining your health by sitting in front of a monitor all day? Meanwhile the smart people go into management and make big bucks while you keyboard monkeys slave away waiting for your jobs to be outsourced or given to some H1B Paki. Computers are for chumps.
ComputerCraft (Score:2)
I grew up with the old LOGO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%29) in the eighties to teach elementary school kids some programming. (I was about 10-11 at the time).
Nowadays you can do the same with the ComputerCraft mod for Minecraft. I've now been using it for 3 years to teach 13-14 year old girls programming and it works really well. I teach about 80 in a few events throughout the year as an outreach program for my work. They start writing working programs within 30 minutes and w