[codyjones]

One of my kids learned Scratch at home. He tried some local classes, hoping they would teach more advanced material, but they were introductory and he spent his time tutoring the other kids (not a bad lesson in itself!)

We briefly tried GameMaker Studio 2, however we had no prior experience and finding out what functions were needed or called made it a high friction experience.

He has been playing Minecraft since a young age, and creates elaborate redstone mechanisms. I like how this mixes creativity, spatial planning, and boolean logic, and doesn't require learning a new UI or language.

Most recently we tried creating a Minecraft mod in Java using Forge. I cannot state strongly enough: do not do this. The Forge architecture is fundamentally broken, whereby it adds some functionality but otherwise forces you to code directly against decompiled Java classes.

Most tutorials only work with a specific version of Forge/Minecraft. There are no release notes or documentation, because there is no API. (To be fair, the Forge aspect is documented, though I only found it useful once I already knew what it was trying to explain.)

So what started out as an exciting father-son project became something I dreaded.