Computer Coding

I have held off buying minecraft but decided it was time to allow the twins to start to investigate the wonderful world of minecraft and coding.

I know very little about minecraft, other than what I hear people say about the educational value minecraft has, and what strikes me is not just the actual game itself but the amount of educational tools out there that use minecraft as a base for learning.

I purchased the twins the Playstation 3 and a copy of minecraft for Xmas and spent some time with the twins getting to know what it was all about. I found it dull and not very exciting but the kids seemed to enjoy it.

They have both already experienced coding for themselves using scratch the free coding program which you can take a look at here,  and they have experiencing some real life programming of Daleks at the Birmingham Science fair last year, which Oliver particularly enjoyed, you can see his great attempt here..

so they have experienced coding before, so our focus on coding will take the form of minecraft focused things to begin with.

I have gathered a list of coding sites for kids, so there will surely be plenty there for the twins to get their teeth into and keep their attention, here is a list of the websites for coding that I found. 

The Hour of Code, on the code.org website which has coding with Minecraft, they also have Anna and Elsa and Starwars, so whichever the kids are into more they can choose which is great for keeping their focus

Tynker works with interlocking blocks of code, making coding language accessible to beginners and as these blocks are familiar to the twins they may enjoy this.

codeacademy needs no introduction really as this appears to be one that everyone knows.

Techrocket has some minecraft focused learning so one to investigate for sure.

Hackety Hack is a free downloadable program for beginners to investigate

Khan Academy is familiar to the twins as they do maths on the website so fantastically they do coding too, and as the twins love videos to watch and learn from this will be a go to site for them I am sure.

I think I will find that the twins will just be away with this one and just get on with it, but this will be incorporated on a regular basis for the rest of this year, as I feel they are now ready to do more focused work now they are reading proficiently enough to get by and understand what they are looking at.

They both love using reading eggs and maths seeds but I feel they are outgrowing it, playing how to train your dragon is one of Olivers favourites and various other on-line games so I feel this will be to them just another on-line game to play, especially as they incorporate their favourite characters and imaginary worlds.

Both of them have become very creative over the past year and this will be a great way for them to express themselves even more and see the results of what they conjure up.... so into the world of coding we gooooooooo...... see you on the other side....

Update....

Oliver devised a Star Wars Game on code.org... What fun he had, see if you can evade the Storm Troopers and Puffer Pigs whilst collecting the Droids and Mynocks.... click on the picture to get started.