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Creating a Minecraft track #1
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@dhuntley1023 @joedean @marcyDel - check this out! |
My husband, Bob, recently finished writing tutorials on Minecraft Mods and http://www.lopakalogic.com/articles/minecraft-articles/minecraft-mods-forge/ http://www.lopakalogic.com/articles/minecraft-articles/minecraft-bukkit-plugins/ Val |
I think “Tech Mentor Meetup Training” will be really good to get more tech mentors trained and help support these sessions. I would also consider including parent of participants who would like to co-program with their kids, or any adults who would like to understand enough to be potential tech mentors.. yes, we'll convert them sooner or later. The more we educate the better, and eventually growing our network of tech mentors. This will be an awesome educational benefit and a great addition to our diverse portfolio of programs. Let’s do it! |
Thanks Valerie. This is an excellent resource and really well written. I’d love to connect with your husband to get his perspective on the depth of material vs. kid’s skill levels. Would you mind passing on his email? I’ve also added it to a topic I created in our Minecraft repo to pull together best-of-breed existing Minecraft resources and have added links to his work from there. (#2) Thanks again, David. Sent from Windows Mail |
I'm planning to have my first Minecraft programming session with "beginners" on Tuesday 1/28. I'm basically going to use the book "Learn to Program with Minecraft Plugins" by Andy Hunt as my text book for these sessions. I really like the flow of the book. There is a lot being introduced to beginners, which can have major impact on the kids experience. (E.g., Dealing with command line, getting used to a text editor ( I like the simplicity of Sublime for beginners over big IDEs like Eclipse, NetBeans, etc), how to setup a client / server environment, etc) All this before you even get to programming in Java. My Prerequisites for this session are: My first session was just going to have the kids get used to dealing with the command line and connect into a server. And I was basically going to just show them some examples of finite state machines in the game. Teaching them what a finite state machine is and some in game examples. Maybe have them build there own, depending on time. For this first session I also want to set the expectation that it's going to require some work before we get to flying creepers and flaming cows. So, I'm doing this all with my 11 year old son who's a Minecraft guru and loves to code with scratch, tynker, snap, etc. He is new to Java and fairly new to text based programming languages and I'm fairly new to Minecraft so it's a fun match. We have been spending the last couple of days pair programming together and it has been quite an awesome father/son bonding experience! :-) So, I have lots more planning and work to do until the 28th, but time is approaching and any advice that you guys can provide I would really appreciate it! Maybe we should all meet or do a Google hangout or something. That would be fun. |
Hey everyone. I'm really looking forward to seeing how we can develop a Minecraft track! I have also connected with Arun Gupta who is leading the Devoxx for Kids Minecraft session on January 19th and has also done similar work with Silicon Valley Code Camp. He has agreed to do a similar workshop or track for CoderDojo. I will be attending Arun's workshop on January 19th I have a few comments for all to ponder:
Marcy |
Thanks, David. My husband Bob's email is bob.e.freitas@gmail.com. Val On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 10:00 PM, dhuntley1023 notifications@github.comwrote:
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Even for just .jar hacking, you'd still need to load other software, so if Along the lines of free and open source, Minecraft is in a bit of a gray
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Apologies for the formatting, but here is an email exchange about planning the Minecraft track:
Excellent! Please don't take my slow response for a lack of excitement on this - holidays and planning for the immediate CoderDojo events has kept me busy.
I went ahead and created a repo (private for now) in our CoderDojo section: https://github.com/CoderDojoSV/MinecraftMods/. Can you start making the progress there so our other mentors can chime in and help? What we do is just create an issue for an questions you might have. (I added your GitHub username to our mentors group so you have access to our private repos).
Joe Dean is planning on creating a Minecraft mod track for the San Jose dojo. He has posted about it here: https://github.com/CoderDojoSV/mentor-discussion/issues/20. I think it would make the most sense to have the two of you combine to come up with a curriculum.
When developing a curriculum, I want to point out our main learnings from past sessions. A lecture with lead-follow doesn't work very well. Kids move at different speeds and once someone is behind, it is really hard to get caught up (and it becomes frustrating, which is the opposite of fun). How can you structure it so they can more go at their own pace? Think 5-10 minutes of kids off doing their own thing, and 2-3 minutes of the presenter talking, repeated for the whole 1.5 hours. See the https://github.com/CoderDojoSV/beginner-python track for a good example of materials that allow this format.
Session 1 can be exclusively setup. There can be a mentor training day where you go through the whole course. Both of these are a good idea.
I see the age group as kids with some typed programming language experience - mostly 10-13. Classes, object oriented, dot notation, all of this will need to be covered (but I like your idea to keep it as simple as possible at the beginning and add from there). Things like loops, arrays, function inputs should be familiar, but certainly not mastered (so reviewing them would help).
I see this as a potential track for our spring session. So starting the first week of April for 6 straight weeks. We won't have a Java specific class before then, but will have Python which will teach them the fundamentals of variables, loops, arrays, and functions.
What else am I missing? Let's take this discussion over to the issues on the repo so that everyone can view....
-Brian
On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 12:00 PM, David Huntley dhuntley1023@hotmail.com wrote:
Brian Skinner
Founder, Breakout Mentors
Teaching Kids Programming with a Focus on Fun
650-669-8789 | BreakoutMentors.com
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