#Minecraft forge building examples how to
#Minecraft forge building examples manuals
#Minecraft forge building examples code

I had 4 buttons that were directional arrows. I used an array of picture boxes as tiles. Not only that, it used the same language as gorillas, more or less, and I could drag and drop elements on to the canvas.īy 9 or 10 I made my first 'RPG' in visual basic. But the Visual Basic came with books, and help.

#Minecraft forge building examples manuals

I didn't have books really, because while you got QB with your operating system, you didn't get manuals for it or anything.

#Minecraft forge building examples code

That along with Gorillas on qbasic was really my first entry into programming.īack then I was about 9 years old, I really wanted to make computer games, I was pretty smart, but in 1991, a kid with no resources has a hard time breaking into programming.īut QBasic had gorillas, which was a GAME! And it was in basic, and so the source code was right there for me. The other day, she took me to her room in the new house they'd just built and said 'can you type to make this room fabulous?'Īs a kid, my programming career started with Visual Basic, a little bit of that and qbasic.īut my dad had a copy of Visual Basic with our old computer back in the early 90s.

#Minecraft forge building examples how to

The younger kid is still learning how to read, write and type, but she's also noticed that you can do cool stuff by writing on the computer. When I came back to have a look at their world later, there were lamps reaching up into the clouds. Then I made the variable an argument and showed her how it's similar to passing the time or gamemode to other game commands. Then I replaced that with a variable to show how she could make that change in just one place by giving values a name. Once it was working, I got her to make changes to the code to change the height of the lamp, to show her how she was changing the same values in multiple places each time.

Every time we made a change, we ran lamp() and I got her to tell me what was wrong with what it built so far (lots of off-by one errors!). She was building lamps out of fence posts and glowstone, so I got her to write down the step-by-step instructions for building a lamp and started writing a new lamp() function following her instructions, showing how each of them turned into a piece of code. Just the other week, I used it to teach her about algorithms, JavaScript functions and debugging. They love doing everything manually, but the eldest is twigging on to the fact that if you're doing the same thing over and over again, you can do it much faster by telling the computer how to do it with JavaScript. Just watching them build stuff, play out stories and invent new things together is amazing, and the eldest quickly learnt how to enter commands in the console to do things like change the time, weather and game mode. My 8 year old and 5 year old play together on a ScriptCraft server I run on my laptop. Kudos to MS for the hard work, and putting it out so early. Giving an open universe to kids with the blocks to effect their world is just an insane tool. This is the sort of thing that makes computing and abstract thinking easier for everyone. Imagine the result of having your for loop create millions of blocks accidentally in your universe, and seeing that mistake happen in a non-threatening way. I've had said 12 year old try multiple times to 'learn programming', only to give up when things aren't as great as they'd imagined in their head, after having spent hours just trying to figure out the right version of Python, and how to get a shell set up, and how to get something on the screen. 'Teaching programming' feels serious and adult, and doesn't leave room for fun. It's really unfortunate that there is so much time being devoted to 'teaching programming' to kids, instead of 'teaching playing on computers'. It's the ultimate fantasy universe, and the way you combine elements to make something new is very analogous to programming in the vanilla game.Īdding a way to customize this universe will just explode the interest in programming among young people. If you haven't watched a 12 year old play Minecraft, you need to do so.

Getting Minecraft modding working in Visual Studio is how you are going to get the next generation of kids interested in programming.