If my kids (late elementary, early middle school) and their friends are any guide, it's doing extremely well.
The thing my kids most consistently spend their allowance on is hypixel (a minecraft curated multiplayer server with some scenario-based games is the best way I can describe it).
I found my 8 year old playing hypixel. I know jack about Minecraft, so I couldn't understand how come he was having some kind of chat dialog with someone. The only thing I've ever shown him on his Fedora laptop was how to log in, open a terminal and and start Minecraft from the command line.
It seems that he taught himself to find the web browser, then find google, then search for Minecraft resources, then enter urls for Hypixel and Mineplex into Minecraft.
I was torn between pride and trepidation of what's to come.
As someone who’s 17 - this is exactly how I learned about computers, but when I was 7 (so 10 years ago yeah). I will say that my parents turned on a chat filter pretty quickly, as incredible amounts of obscene stuff was posted on lots of the random servers I played on.
Hypixel is pretty great (I actually still play sometimes!), and they have a good curse filter and it’s definitely family friendly.
To be honest, I spent a ridiculous amount of time on MineCraft over the past 10 years (definitely over 5k+ hours), and it’s taught me an incredible amount. It’s where I picked up my first O Reilly book, on Minecraft mods, where I learned for the first time how to self host a server, and also where I made some really great friends.
I’d be more worried about your kid finding something like social media FROM Minecraft - for example, I spent a ridiculous amount of time on Reddit, which I found through MC. As a kid whose parents don’t really care about what I do on the internet, unlimited access to viewing whatever I wanted wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
If you have any minecraft modding resources to recommend, I'd love to find some to do some simple, relatable things with the kids. (We're way past scratch, onto javascript [still plenty to do here to get the basics completed], but I like to bring in "more interesting" things like react-native or minecraft mods.)
Hi. I'm 16 and got into programming in a similar way but I can't in good conscience say that making Minecraft mods is a good way of learning programming. It's a pain in the ass. There's practically no documentation and you usually find yourself scrolling through deobfuscated game code trying to make sense of the thing and figure how the game works. I don't think it's a good way of learning. Don't get me wrong, getting started programming by making things that you want to make is an excellent way to make it enjoyable rather than a chore but trying to write Minecraft mods and figure out what to do is frustrating and grueling.
I got into programming with 12 with very little actual motivation to program anything. I read a book, did the exercises and understood pretty much everything on first try. It took me around a month to get through the book. After that I never used my programming skills until I was 16 and wanted to make Minecraft mods.
Joining IRC a modding channel and talking to Mojang devs every now and then was a pretty interesting experience.
I doubt that this is possible nowadays, especially after Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang.
My memory is failing me but I also saw Drew DeVault on IRC using his former online nick and since I pretty much used IRC exclusively for minecraft related things he must have done something related to minecraft back then as well.
I mostly agree but it can be nice to see your code doing something actionable and visual rather than the alternative more traditional approach to learning programming, printing to the terminal.
I have never actually played minecraft but have watched hundreds of hours of minecraft videos. It could just be my personal filter bubble, but it seems to be going through a huge boom among streamers right now.
The appeal is that it is some sort of a Second Life or Metaverse for these streamer personalities who otherwise have no "physical" opportunities to interact outside of voice chat. In these worlds, they have towns, homes, pranks, disputes, wars, and lots of opportunities for highly entertaining roleplaying in general.
I mostly watch virtual youtubers (pekora from hololive in particular) but if you're not into virtual youtubers, the mod'd OfflineTV server is also great. Michael Reeves will probably appeal to the people on HN. Right now there's a nuclear war going on and Reeves thinks he can win by programming an army of self-replicating turtles using Lua: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/805937812 The guy with nukes is the dictator of the server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrtKTFZvK5Y
The thing my kids most consistently spend their allowance on is hypixel (a minecraft curated multiplayer server with some scenario-based games is the best way I can describe it).