Anything to get kids interested in programming is a good thing, right? My son already tells people he can "program in JSON" because of Minecraft's little command-block DSL that's comprised of instructions structured as JSON. It's really adorable and has piqued his interest in broader programming, and "stunts" like Minecraft BASIC interpreters can only help.
My 11 year old son has been programming in Scratch for a few years, and kind of hit a dead end. So we recently bought him Sams Teach Yourself Mod Development for Minecraft in 24 Hours. It goes straight into some pretty heavy Java, but with a lot of hand-holding. He's really loving it so far, and seems to be learning a lot and making good progress.
There's this Greenfoot (http://www.greenfoot.org/) environment I've been hearing about. It has a visual interface that allows you to put sprites and assemble a game, but it also has Java foundations. It might be another option for that transition between a visual tool and a programming language.
We all know real programmers use butterflies. I've been letting my son focus on the code rather than the editor, so he's using Eclipse per the aforementioned book's recommendation.
I got my start from Starcraft Broodwars map editor. It was comprised of if then conditions and actions. Very simple system and i'll bet there are a good amount of people that were inspired by a system like it.
Totally, the Starcraft editor got a lot of things right:
- It looked like text but you were actually working with a statically typed AST -> Syntax errors were impossible.
- Commands were sentences with the parameters where you would except them, e.g. "PLAYER brings AMOUNT UNIT to region REGION.". Also, the commands were translated so you didn't need to learn English to learn programming.
- Since you were programming on top of an existing game you had very high level commands at your disposal which allowed you to get impressive results with little effort.
Next time some gray-beard like me starts bragging about having learned to program on an 0.001 Ghz Apple ][ with 0.000016 GB of ram, you can tell them you learned on an 0.00000002 Ghz Redstone processor.
Turtles have been a thing in modded minecraft for quite a while, with two mods that add the functionality, Computercraft and OpenComputers.
ComputerCraft being the earlier mod is quite easy to get started with. Some iron and redstone makes you a basic computer capable of scripting via Lua, another layer of iron and some more redstone turns it into a turtle which you can equip with tools to automate certain tasks. Swords to kill monsters, pickaxes to dig through stone, axes to chop down trees.
OpenComputers adds some more very fun features. Computers are built from parts (CPU, RAM, HDD, GraphicsCard, Disk Drive), and you have to flash a BIOS before getting started, as well as adding a screen and keyboard. After getting a computer up and running, you're faced with a unix like command line environment a bit more advanced than computercraft. There's also a lot more cool blocks to play around with, from the 3D printer to hologram projectors, again all controllable using Lua scripting.
There's a ton of potentially educational mods that aren't programming based as well, like Rotarycraft and Reactorcraft, the former being based on realistic machinery (from Fermenters to multi-step mineral extraction), the latter on a simple nuclear reactor model (going from isotope centrifuges to toroidal fusion reactors).
If you do want to play around with it, try downloading one of the launchers like FTBLauncher or ATLauncher, and just loading up a modpack. If you're intrested in Rotary/Reactorcraft or OpenComputers, I can recommend the Revolution modpack on the ATLauncher, though I haven't played it these last 3 months.
ComputerCraft also has an "education" version, which includes a visual programmer for turtles similar to scratch (which also allows you to switch to the generated lua code as well)
That's really cool. Haven't played since late September, so I might not be on top of all the changes going on with modded Minecraft. I heard of the Teachergaming thing on another thread on here in a thread on MinecraftEdu.
