New Minecraft Mod Teaches You Code as You Play

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/learntomod/

by coderfish • 12 years ago

123 49 12 years ago

dups2• 12 years ago

Nice!

Also of note is a mod called Computer Craft, that adds Lua programmable computers and devices into the game (touchscreens, turtles!) as well as a set of APIs for interacting with various aspects of the game.

http://www.computercraft.info/

asgard10242• 12 years ago

Yes, that's what most people tend to use for programming these days.

Although I personally have never enjoyed it as much as the famous Redpower 2 mod, which had computers as well, with 6502 assembler and Forth. It was less forgiving than Lua, but somehow more fitting the genre (of construction set, that is); programming in Lua feels almost like you could program the thing in Java and put it in a new block.

I also liked the logic gates and other stuff that came with RP2, I think that's good for kids to play with as well. Too bad Eloraam stopped developing RP2, it was the best mod for Minecraft ever.

(Also, CC computers seem to reset on world reload, while RP2 computers were persistent. They are also dirt cheap compared to RP2, and their runtime behavior is not well specified. I just kinda feel that CC computers break the fourth wall of the virtual world, in several different ways..)

tene• 12 years ago

I have similar preferences to you, and RedPower is one of the mods I enjoyed the most. Fortunately, Eloraam has recently started working on RedPower again.

http://www.patreon.com/Eloraam https://twitter.com/therealeloraam

dups2• 12 years ago

Ah yes I miss Redpower. Was a _very_ polished mod which felt less magic (in a good way) when playing.

About that fourth wall. I know some who take this as a very strange kind of opportunity. For instance:

- SQL databases hooked up to sorting contraptions to manage inventory.

- Arduino/rpi to receive input/output from the game over the HTTP API. Think - controling doors with physical buttons, routing in game player detectors to LEDs. Lots of opportunities here.

Houshalter• 12 years ago

The main advantage of computer craft is turtles, programmable robots. You can automate all sorts of things in the game and it's fun. Automating things with redpower is possible, but takes massive complicated contraptions and great feats of engineering.

linksbro5• 12 years ago

Hey, lead dev of learntomod here. I have spent many, many hours using Computer Craft, it was one of our inspirations for building our product. I'm glad to see it's still in wide use.

erbo5• 12 years ago

ComputerCraft isn't working with the newest versions of the core Minecraft game (1.7.2/1.7.10). There's another mod, OpenComputers, that does similar things: http://oc.cil.li

(I've assembled a custom modpack for Minecraft, and had to learn a lot about mods in the process. One of these days I need to look more at how mods are written. They're written in Java, of course, like Minecraft itself; some use Scala as well. I have a bunch of starred repositories on GitHub to look at...)

thret• 12 years ago

Very cool. Get 'em while they're young. I can't imagine kids these days would copy out games in basic by hand the way I had to on my first computer :)

DarkTree• 12 years ago

As a 22-year-old, I can't believe you ever did that.

sp332• 12 years ago

I'm 28 now. I totally did that! I copied a bunch of programs by hand, from a single-player pong clone to a 3d plotting engine with hidden-line elimination on an Apple ][e.

DougWebb2• 12 years ago

I'm 44, and started programming when I was 12 on a ZX81 and then a Commodore64. Back then we had magazines instead of the internet, and any serious program was written in assembly rather than BASIC. One of the more advanced things the magazines did was print out hex dumps of the machine code, with a checksum on each line, and there was a program (which you had to enter manually) that would let you type in those hex dumps. It would checksum each line as you went along and warn you if the checksum you entered didn't match the checksum of the bytes you entered. That was a huge improvement over just typing in the programs, because you knew you didn't have any typos.

Many, many hours were spent typing those programs in. I'm still really good at typing with one hand while the other is used to point at what I'm typing in.

bdamm• 12 years ago

I'm 35, and I did that on my commodore 64. The program was in the book, you typed it out. Although in truth I think I only did this once.

Usually I just loaded games from the tape cassette loader.

Rusky• 12 years ago

21 and did that on an old TRS-80 in my basement.

JonLim• 12 years ago

I'm 26, I remember borrowing a few books from the library that walked through creating a game in QBASIC.

Those were the days. :')

ndrake3• 12 years ago

I'm confused. What does the $30 pre-order get you? Is it a subscription service? Their FAQ [1] mentions a subscription for a private server after the beta.

1 - http://www.learntomod.com/faq

Osiris• 12 years ago

The page about the pre-order just says "$30" but then in the FAQ it mentions a $10 / month fee. They should really be more explicit about the pricing right up front.

jobu2• 12 years ago

It looks like the $30 is a 3-month subscription. Seems a bit pricey considering the target demographic.

linksbro5• 12 years ago

Sorry that our pricing model isn't the clearest - we're still bouncing around ideas for after the beta. The $30 pre-order gets you access to the entire beta period until we release.

The subscription fee after the beta period is for use of a private server for you and your friends to use learntomod. Alternatively you can opt for a lower fee to play on a public learntomod server.

ndrake3• 12 years ago

Will people be able to run their own learntomod servers? What happens after the beta? Would I have to pay more to continue using the software?

stratospark• 12 years ago

I've taken a look at the product site and I love it! I think it's perfect. Our son is obsessed with Minecraft and has recently been expressing interest about learning how to program. One question about the pricing, is would I be able to go through the lessons as well as my son? Or would we need to pay for separate accounts? The FAQ mentions something about up to 4 players per server.

DanBC2• 12 years ago

If the learn to mod people ever find their way here: that fucking huge fixed banner makes reading your page unpleasant.

http://imgur.com/NwpRBC3

jobu2• 12 years ago

That style seems to have become fairly common, and it really does suck on small screens. What's worse is when you try to zoom in to make the text readable and suddenly the top banner takes over the entire screen.

Ntrails2• 12 years ago

Or when it moves at the wrong moment as you go to scroll/pinch and then counts it as a click and opens the new page. At the very least let me close the damned thing, I've seen and read it enough to interact. Now let me read the site.

linksbro5• 12 years ago

Sorry about that! We'll get that fixed right away.

swayvil• 12 years ago

Now that's coding with entities!

(if u haven't seen the new Terry Gilliam : Zero Theorem : then u should)

ausjke4• 12 years ago

Minecraft is very popular among kids, however I tried hard to deny my kids to play that. Instead I redirect them to program in python and processing and javascript, that might be more boring but they can play whatever games they built themselves using the 'real' programming language. So far it worked well. I always wondered how beneficial Minecraft(and the new code Mod) could be to kids? I dared not to let them play as I was told it's too addictive for kids...

Ntrails2• 12 years ago

If the child is at an age where you should be worried about their ability to handle the game, you should be monitoring their usage as well. Unless you can keep them away from all of the different ways they can find addictive games to play (hello flash player) then it seems to me better to be involved and encouraging responsible use?

I don't know that minecraft needs to be beneficial. I certainly doubt super mario or sonic the hedgehog were when I was young. It's a game. It allows lots of creativity, it has lots of variety. No mod will change the fact that it's still a computer game. Treat it as such and I don't see a problem?

DanBC2• 12 years ago

always wondered how beneficial Minecraft

It's fun and relaxing, and there's some evidence that children need relaxation.

It's also potentially sociable, if you can find a suitable server.

While I wouldn't want to overstate the benefits of Minecraft I do think it's a pretty awesome game that changes to fit the playstyle of whoever's using it.

I've seen amazing things made in creative. Not just stuff turned into a model and imported, but built block by block.

I dared not to let them play as I was told it's too addictive for kids...

Set firm boundaries and stick to them. Set conditions on play - "You must have finished homework before play". This also means that you have a privilege that you can withdraw if needed.

linksbro5• 12 years ago

I would agree with you if you were talking about Call Of Duty, but I think Minecraft is a different game.

The amount of potential creativeness and ingenuity that exists just in vanilla-minecraft makes the game more appealing developmentally to kids. Building structures develops spacial reasoning and 3d thinking. Collecting resources disciplines management skills. Collaborating with others and respecting their buildings both teach important social behaviors that are otherwise non-existent in most other popular games. These are just a few reasons why minecraft is both a really fun game, and a really exciting game to push further.

It's the modern sandbox game, and it's just a canvas. So we are trying to bring programming to the above skill set with learntomod.

erbo5• 12 years ago

How about playing with your kids? I have a private Minecraft server set up where I, my fiancee, our godsons, and their mother all collaborate. We use a custom-assembled modpack with a lot of different options; my fiancee has been learning to breed trees and bees (Forestry mod), while I've got a nuclear reactor going (IndustrialCraft 2 mod) and am starting to design a rail system (RailCraft mod), and one of our godsons has been building fancy houses, furnished with add-ons from BiblioCraft and MrCrayfish's Furniture Mod.

ausjke4• 12 years ago

Honestly I don't know I can host Minecraft for free, maybe I can set up a server to try it out and see how it goes. What's minecraft's business model if the server is free?

kawera2• 12 years ago

Would love to setup a server to play with my daughters too. Could you point me to some resources on how to do it?

larrybolt2• 12 years ago

I'd love to hear where you are hosting that server. I currently have a tekkify [1] private server running with some additional mods such as Forestry and currently the world folder is about 700MB. For a while I've used an openvz vps but the load was too high and I pulled it to our local network on an old machine I had laying around. (For those wondering, openvz is a no go for modpacks unless you have a very expensive plan.) The load went from 2 to 5 which is terrible. I've been thinking about getting a dedicated machine at kimsufi [2] as hosting locally in our home network isn't so great really with low upstream speeds. For a vanilla world however (no mods except bukkit) you could run it on a openvz host though. To even lower the load more you could tweak the view-distance or even add a bukkit-plugin which limits the amount of entities that spawn.

[1] http://tekkify.com/mods [2]: http://www.kimsufi.co.uk

ausjke4• 12 years ago

I'm always curious on why I got a downvote here? The silent downvote for no explanation at HN sometimes drove me from curious to furious.

tombh• 12 years ago

Relevant (shameless plug) for my and @kdurrani's implementation of LOGO's famous Turtles language but in Minecraft and in 3D https://github.com/tombh/mc-turtles

We taught Code Club in primary school and Minecraft is the one thing that is guaranteed to grab and sustain kid's attentions. We actually used it at first through a Raspberry Pi and unplugged the keyboard and mouse, so the only way kids could interact with Minecraft was through Python ;)

New Minecraft Mod Teaches You Code as You Play

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