okay i thought that minecraft earth was going to be like, a kinda fun novelty, i didn't realize it's running the honest-to-god bedrock engine. it's actually minecraft
long, excited about the future
okay hear me out
we know minecraft is used in educational settings (there's the whole raspberry pi thing where you can interface with the world via python, there's something i don't know much about but it's called Minecraft: Education Edition)
and minecraft came out at right about the right time in my life that i know how useful it can be for education. like, so much digital logic stuff came intuitively to me because i had played with redstone
imagine like, a few years down the line when the tech is a little better (but not even that much better, tbh), a class of students learning about things like logic gates, etc, by going out to the field outside the school and like, building out of NORs and ORs in an accessible way
imagine a kid who doesn't get it walking over to where their friend is and seeing how they built their thing, out of big chunky 1mx1m blocks
it's not fundamentally different from playing with breadboards or whatever except that when i first started putting together stuff on breadboards, most of my time was spent trying to get the wires where i wanted them
i dunno this just seems very cool to me
long, excited about the future
@monorail honestly big agree
when my niblings are a little more grown, tbh, i expect the like... first upgrade for the switch to time perfectly with this... but i'm really excited to do nintendo labo stuff with them too
and even if every kid playing with redstone doesn't go on to learn circuitboard design, there's some really important lessons that you learn that i consider the like... y'know how there's pre-algebra or pre-calc? that
long, excited about the future
@monorail (by pre-programming i mean lessons like...
1. the computer will do exactly what you tell it to do, no more, no less
2. how to build mental models of imagining the computer (or redstone, whatever) following the orders you write, and what that means
3. attention to detail, because the computer won't know you meant to put a comma there. a redstone line in minecraft won't either. you have to train yourself to look beyond your own pattern-completion.)
long, excited about the future
@monorail i'm not explaining myself very well lol, but i think that i got my "pre-programming class" doing hexxing for petz. and as it becomes harder on multiple fronts to pop the hood of a program and tinker around in it like *i* learned, i'm really glad to see the same learning experience there baked into the games themselves.
i feel like "pre-programming" is a really important set of principles to pick up these days in general, it's rather multidisciplinary.