My 8 year old and 5 year old play together on a ScriptCraft [1] server I run on my laptop. 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.
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. She'll learn to be properly lazy yet.
Just the other week, I used it to teach her about algorithms, JavaScript functions and debugging. 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. 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!). 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. Then I replaced that with a variable to show how she could make that change in just one place by giving values a name. Then I made the variable an argument and showed her how it's similar to passing the time or gamemode to other game commands. When I came back to have a look at their world later, there were lamps reaching up into the clouds.
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. 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?"
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. She'll learn to be properly lazy yet.
Just the other week, I used it to teach her about algorithms, JavaScript functions and debugging. 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. 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!). 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. Then I replaced that with a variable to show how she could make that change in just one place by giving values a name. Then I made the variable an argument and showed her how it's similar to passing the time or gamemode to other game commands. When I came back to have a look at their world later, there were lamps reaching up into the clouds.
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. 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?"
Minecraft has become an amazing tool :)
[1] http://scriptcraftjs.org/