With over 100,000,000 registered users, and over 34,000,000 paid computer users and another 30,000,000 paid mobile users, Minecraft has become one of the worlds top games, and certainly the top creative game. There are almost 1,000,000 people playing Minecraft at any moment! You probably know lots of people who spend time creating houses, roads, towns, mines, as well as gather experience points by battling monsters (mobs).
But what if you could start learning how to change what you are doing, not just playing with what the game comes with? In the Programming in Minecraft Camp we will be using software to start learning how to modify the gaming environment. Camp leaders also introduce other programming languages and campers have time to code outside of the Minecraft environment as well.
Will there be time to "just play the game?", yes, but the focus will be on learning new skills that relate to programming in the environment. Our camp staff run private Minecraft servers just for the campers so they have a safe place to experience the game with fellow campers and to work on programming challenges.
Ages: 10-14
Do you need to have a Minecraft account? No, but you should bring your login information with you if you have an account so you can play as yourself.
The curriculum for our Minecraft camp is designed to be an introduction to programming concepts - learning how programming works and the concepts that it is built on. We generally do not dive too far deep into coding a particular language until later in the week. That being said, it is a very scalable camp, and can accommodate different experience levels, campers will be able to use what they know and apply that in the Minecraft coding environment. As for specific languages that we use in the camp, we use Lua and JavaScript primarily. As it is an introductory class, we spend a bit of time "block coding" - a stripped down version of coding to teach the concepts behind it. However, at any time, the students can switch to the script version and code that way. Primarily we use a different version of MineCraft called MineCraft Edu. It is currently on 1.12.60, but it does not exactly mirror the original game in terms of updates.
NOTE: The University of Southern Maine, the University of Maine System, and Maine Robotics are not affiliated with MineCraft, MineCraftEDU or Tynker.