As someone who got into coding at age 11 thanks to ROBLOX and it's use of the lua scripting language: I can recommend!
A lot of beginners get discouraged because their program is A: a boring command-line (don't get me wrong, cli is cool), B: too complicated to do something of relevance.
The Roblox-API allows you to do e.g. spawn a explosion in a one-liner: Instance.new("Explosion",game.Workspace)
It allows you to do almost anything a game would need (GUI, networking, physics, databases, you name it), with a very straight-forward API. Checkout https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/api-reference , they also have AWESOME tutorials which also explain some mathematics https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/articles/CFrame-Math-Oper...
Roblox made learning these various disciplines straight-forward and easy, I still benefit from it today!
Though it also taught me some ... less favorable habits, as they are more common place. Think of: Continuously calling wait() until something loaded, Excessive use of globals, overuse of strings, coding single god-functions that do everything (with a frick ton of redundancy).
Remember who the demographic of Roblox is: kids and early teens. The people who create the scripts for it are also fairly young, think teens to young adults. So bad practices are more common here, especially in some YouTube-videos (seriously, some are terrible learning-resources).
I still believe it is easier to teach good habits to folks who have experience with bad habits, than to teach folks who have no experience at all. It's not too hard to find examples of how those issues (e.g., globals, stringly types, god-functions) can backfire once you get to scale, but it's really hard to motivate them when folks are still trying to wrap their head around function calls and variable assignment.
You can impart the concept on those without experience, but what you get is cargo culting. Often better than nothing when used for good, but causes sub-optimal (at best) solutions in some cases where people refuse to acknowledge or don't even see better ways to do something because it goes against what they were taught.
That's not to say I'm free of this. I doubt any of us are truly free of this. That said, recognizing it's a thing means you can try to put something into your design practice/workflow where you sit back and think if there's a better way that's a "hack", and try to honestly examine the pros and cons and whether it's actually the better solution.
This is quite true. We are building a VBA interpreter and the language is full of problematic practices. Go's much-maligned if err != nil pales in comparison to On Error Resume Next. Good static analysis and linting really helps here.
It will be released as open source over the summer. Currently only the interpreter is working. We are still building out the UI builder and editor. Take a look at our earlier comment regarding motivation/business model:
What's your stance on accessibility? I'm worried this tool could be used by enterprises, considering their reliance on VB, so this is pretty important IMO.
Yeah, it would be fun to imagine a language designed with a video game style unlock progression. I remember programming in TI basic with a small number of global variables and subroutines. No scopes, no local variables, functions _couldn't return variables_, you had to manually keep track of which variables a subroutine was allowed to use, and where it would write out its outputs. After a few months with this functions, scopes, and return values seemed like super powers!
Wow I didn't realize it was released in 2006 and there's already programmers entering/already in the workforce that started there. I though it was much more recent.
I learnt to code through Roblox and now work as an engineer in a FAANG company. Of the particularly niche audience of teenagers I met on that platform many also owe their careers in tech thanks to the accessibility and gamification of coding.
My thought was "damn, I thought 2006 was recent". But I'm very happy to have seen the field grow so much. I hope my kids employ some of it in whatever field they eventually choose.
> Though it also taught me some ... less favorable habits, as they are more common place. Think of: Continuously calling wait() until something loaded, Excessive use of globals, overuse of strings, coding single god-functions that do everything (with a frick ton of redundancy).
I feel like that's probably true of everybody's first adventures in programming. Certainly was for all of us who grew up writing BASIC.
Yep, my first experience with programming was TI-BASIC and all I had to go on was the TI-83 manual. I used a lot of GOTO until I figured out how loops worked.
I wouldn't discount Minecraft either! Roblox is probably better for younger children, but I remember being 10 or so and setting up a Minecraft server so my friends and I could play.
Also, if the kid is ambitious, then Minecraft is a stepping stone to Java programming (which may or may not be a good thing overall).
I've worked professionally with a person who found their love for programming by modifying Minecraft mods. I'd say he was far better than the vast majority of bootcamp devs, even without much real work experience.
Finding out what is fun for you is such an important step in self-actualisation and a continued interest.
Roblox is like the AOL of a generation - I was 13 when I first got into programming thanks to AOL and it wasn't because AOL had created a programmable platform and API. AOL incentivized busting into chat rooms, punting other users, exploring hidden areas, and generally doing all sorts of stuff that could only be done programmatically by manipulating the client with whatever IPC APIs your OS made available. This is basically how Mark Zuckerberg got going too, so very possibly the world's next Zuckerberg is hacking on Roblox today.
I remember punting. At one point AOL suspended my account for a month for running a punter. I also remember searching various chat rooms and sites trying to find crackz and warez for expensive software like Adobe Flash, so I could make animated videos. Good times!
There won't be a "world's next Zuckerberg", the virgin soil has been claimed and the moats they built to ensure their ownership can only be taken down by concerted government action.
Really? Gen Z barely even participates in Facebook & IG. I don't think the moat is as impenetrable as they would have you believe. At any rate, the next Zucks are being made on blockchain today, not Roblox.
That's exactly what happened with me as well: I originally started with Lua (knowing only pascal so far) for computer craft and then branched out from there. Now it's my favourite language for everything.
Hands down the best early game automation in kitchen sink packs. Just get a mining turtle, fuel it up and collect resources while you build your base.
And if you have an add-on mod or the cc:tweaked fork that adds better inventory methods, it's possible to build an autocrafter in a sort of DOS style refined storage way :)
If they're "bad practice" but generally lead to favorable results (or almost every result is the result of bad practice), then it might be reasonable to not call it bad practice anymore. While I really love reading concise and beautiful code, I love seeing something work far more.
Is there any particular version of the game you need to be able to code for it? I know for instance - in a vague way - that Minecraft is different in terms of the version that runs on my son's iPad and the Windows version, written in Java.
There are now (historically it was more complicated) two types of Minecraft. The Java type runs on a wide variety of general purpose systems including your Windows PC. On every other platform where Minecraft is still updated it's "Bedrock Edition" which is not Java.
If you buy Minecraft from Microsoft on their Windows store thing I believe you can buy "both" together in some sense, which is a good deal, but obviously programs from the Windows store do not run on an iPad.
Although Microsoft has dipped their toes in the water and sometimes did some PR about it, you can't today mod Bedrock Edition and if you could it would always be a far more limited experience because of how Bedrock Edition works.
For Java Microsoft is doing the most essential work to make modifying it possible, as well as maintaining it, but a huge community actually takes that and runs with it. If you tried to just use what Microsoft makes available then anyone except a Java expert would probably be stuck with toy changes that barely scratch the surface of the game.
For example as a modded player it's hard for me to think about, but there's no electrical power analogue in Minecraft. The modders (not Microsoft, after all their game doesn't have electricity!) added a framework for a single unifying type of electrical power so one mod's steam turbines can power a different mod's plate pressing machine without either of them needing to spend a year designing an electrical energy system they don't really care about.
It's always fascinating what happens when a well organized community starts to develop around easily-modded games. Kerbal Space Program for instance, has people building frameworks, APIs, and resources to make the job of making mods easier.
Part of why it works in KSP's case is that any mod or plugin published to the official forums needs to be distributed with a license.
> Though it also taught me some ... less favorable habits, as they are more common place. Think of: Continuously calling wait() until something loaded, Excessive use of globals, overuse of strings, coding single god-functions that do everything (with a frick ton of redundancy).
For the target audience of roblox, I'd say that all seems absolutely fine. Anybody who wants to continue programming will sooner or later find out about things like local variables, refactoring code into functions, etc.
It probably easier to learn the good habits once the bad ones have bitten you in the ass. It's hard to learn good habits if you don't understand why the bad ones are bad.
I can't speak for OP, but I have a very similar experience:
I was introduced to ROBLOX in late 2008 -- my account was created September 26. I spent the first several months just exploring the platform. It was only a few years old at that point, and had just started the curve upwards on its hockystick graph.
The games were way simpler at the time, and they were genuinely made mostly by kids and young adults, and it showed.
One cool thing I discovered is that not only could you choose to open-source a world, you could publish individual models for anyone to make use of. I saw my first lines of code by grabbing a public model and looking through it to see how it worked.
My first forays into coding was pure "script kiddy": I'd take an existing script, stick it in a new model, and tweak it until I was happy with it. This was often things like taking a model of a sliding door, re-sizing it, and adjusting the script's `for` loop so it would slide the door the full amount I wanted.
I slowly figured out stuff like loops, variables, scope, and flow from that, without ever learning the term or reading a book. I was so engrossed that I asked for and received the Lua Reference Manual for my birthday.
I grew out of the platform's intended audience age early in High School, but I had already transitioned to writing python and making Java mods for Minecraft at that point.
I'm now almost 3 years out of college and doing embedded software engineering full-time. And it does really retain a part of that initial joy; I get the same rush when I write an ISO 8601 parser and see it spit out JSON to AWS, really!
Occasionally I'll log on and check things out. Games are a lot more polished, thanks mainly to the developer program that enables revenue sharing, so people can actually have an income from their creations. The studio and platform have also matured a lot as well. I remember when custom GUIs and dynamic lighting were mind-blowing features we sort of hacked together using tricks like a bunch of semi-transparent spheres anchored at a user's origin to simulate fog.
No, they should learn Minetest¹, which is more limitless than Minecraft and more accessibly scriptable than Roblox, with an infinite world in all dimensions and basic modeling² and coding³ tools that work within a running game, but more importantly is Free software. Free as freedom from micro-transaction pushing companies, and free as in freedom to learn and tinker in the depths of the engine core and transform the entire world⁴.
I personally disagree about the (subjective) looks at least with texture packs (https://content.minetest.net/packages/?type=txp&sort=score&o...), but I’d say the feel was part of the charm when I played Roblox as a kid. There were and now probably are more of polished games like Phantom Forces, but my favorites always included unpolished ones like the old disaster survival games with shops of dozens if not hundreds of copypasta items from little half-broken handheld video game players and RC toys to the essential [anti-]gravity coil to hot sauce that made you run faster to freeze guns that let you entrap innocent bystanders in blocks of ice. And every few waves of disaster some slightly retextured blocky noob character would be spawned in the sky and fall down only for rapid unscheduled disassembly because its physics engine joints were broken, and if you were unlucky its spherical head would fly into and one-hit kill you on contact. The games felt like something a kid could make, and I tried to, but I couldn’t see the source for any I enjoyed and I never learned nearly as much as I did when given root on an (airgapped) old spare computer revived with Puppy Linux and loaded with Pygame, including example games which I learned to code by modifying. Later my favorite Roblox games became Armored Patrol and Urban Patrol, which had no micro transactions and used the physics engines to great effect — as long as you learned to enjoy being flung into the sky far enough to see the world unload, or finding the similarities between its mapgen and modern art. As I did:
This. Freedom to setup your own server and tinkering with the LUA scripts is very accessible. Removing some creatures to allow small children to play without getting scared? Ten minutes tops, really useful. The mountain generator, how does it work and what happens if we alter the recursive functions? Just play and learn with Minetest :)
As a parent who's kid is into both, if there's a choice, I'm pretty sure I'd recommend Minecraft; In Minecraft, the default vanilla gameplay itself is quite intelligent and creative. No such guarantee with Roblox, where, depending on the game, there's a decent chance the kid will get sucked into endless mindlessness.
That being said, I'll be taking a look into Roblox for scripting/programming, I haven't done so yet and I'm all about teaching her how to "cheat" -- and actually, this is a place where Minecraft feels like it has faltered a bit, or I'm looking in the wrong places -- I had a great deal of success teaching other kids (I run a nonprofit) Python with the "MCPI" api, and I can't seem to see if that's been updated or if there is a modern equivalent?
I have prepared for my kids smooth gradual "helpers" in Minecraft - I did place command blocks for them first, later I created server mod with custom commands and teach them to write commands. They learnt to try and combine stuff in "command line" and they loved it. It worked great for them, I believe they acquire basic procedural knowledge sofar but they don't reach "java" level yet. I'll see.
me, a 28 year old, just started playing Minecraft and I feel so bad for sleeping on it for so long. It's surprisngly such an incredible deep and complicated game (in a good way) - I was so wrong for thinking for so long that it's "just a kids game"
100%. I first looked into it only for the mcpi thing because it intuitively reminded me of when I was a kid doing plot graphics in BASIC. The rest looked like silly laboriousness, like no thanks, I don't want to punch trees.
Fast forward to massive sprawling cities and worlds me and the kids have created, and also me insisting that sometimes we avoid "creative" because working for what you build and having there be danger and difficulty getting it built is more fun.
Minecraft mods are made in Java. I saw something about work on a full modding system for the Windows/mobile version, beyond the limited cosmetic stuff available now, but I don't know how that's progressed.
Some years ago I wanted to buy one for my nieces and nephews. The only one I could find had on it, in bold letters, "No glass! No flames! No hazardous chemicals!"
When I was a kid, we'd dig a large hole in the garden, then pop some chlorine and milk in a plastic coke bottle, quick shake, then dump it in the hole and all my mates would very quickly push the soil back onto it.
Boom, and "die aarde maak rooibek oop", like that old Afrikaans poem said...
Translation: The earth opens its red mouth (due to the red coloured soil)
I never got a chemistry set primarily because my parents thought of them as a bit dangerous. I would have loved a set that was "guaranteed" safe just to get anything at all.
I probably wouldn't have become a Nobel prize winning chemist with my n00b/safe set but it might have set something off.
That is so sad. That was one of the things I was really looking forward to. I mean, I guess we can always play with 'safe' stuff ( ferrofluids, oobleck ), but it just won't be the same without going boom.
I mean you're probably right in the sense that the peak of the Gauß-Distribution is probably shifting to the left.
The absolute numbers are probably a different story. When more people get introduced to coding, more people are getting good and very good at it.
Think about sports. Are there more people that are bad at skiing in Austria compared to the Netherland? Yes (if you don't count the ones who never stood on skies).
Are there more good skiiers in the Netherland compared to Austria? Absolutely not.
I think the fact that you can do coding everywhere makes the comparison a bit skewed. How many awesome skiiers are there in the Netherlands that will never develop that skill?
On the contrary, code quality sucks now because there's not enough talented programmers to go around. So many smart, quick witted kids are getting diverted into other professions. What if the total number of capable programmers doubled with the same amount of work? There's plenty of developers today who would be considered flat out incompetent if you held them to standards for any other industry. At the very least there's not enough qualified individuals on the job market to force those people out yet.
This article's focus seems very different than the experience that my 9-year-old has had playing both games for the past few years. At least for now, she's not really shown interest yet in programming either game: she plays them. (She has the option of using them on a full computer and occasionally does, but she's usually on a tablet.) So most of what this article focuses on is orthogonal to her experience.
I'd summarize more like this: Minecraft is a game focused on building things in a virtual world. Roblox is a game platform for playing games other people have created. Playing in the same world as your friends is easy and built-in on Roblox; it's a good bit more complicated on Minecraft (at least if they aren't on the same local network).
On that level, my sense has been that Roblox is much more of a "content consumption" platform (quite often involving social elements and/or storytelling) while Minecraft inevitably includes creative designing and building (sometimes including social play, if you can figure out how to get it set up).
I suspect that creating your own Roblox content is easier than writing a Minecraft mod, but Minecraft has a whole lot more "building" in the base game than most Roblox games do.
On one hand an actual professionally designed course on programming in either of those games would be amazing if that's what you want to do.
On the other hand, this just feels gross... If my parents just picked a video game for me and decided I was going to take a course on it I don't think I could be convinced to give a shit about it.
I was watching my 11 year old nephew play some game on Roblox, and he kept alt tabbing between the game and a black window full of text
I got closer, and sure enough, he had a window full of python code!
It turns out that Roblox had (has?) basically no anti-cheat measures built in, so you can download a hacking toolkit that gives you direct python control of all the game's memory
I told him that cheating is wrong and you're only cheating yourself of the satisfaction of a game well-played, and then walked him through using the toolkit to make a new cheat.
His popularity skyrocketed among his buddies after that, haha
I cheat all the time on roguelike games to avoid permadeath. Permadeath games are designed to be as massive of a time sink as possible.
"Oh, you invested 3 hours getting to level 8? Well, you died - start all the way from the beginning again and sink another 3 hours to have a few minutes of practicing level 8 before you die again..."
Screw that, I have a job and family, I don't have time to sink 100 hours to reach the end "legitimately" so I cheat and take away permadeath so that I can practice the endgame without the grind.
For example, I saved a backup copy of the temporary save file in Teleglitch[0] to allow me to start at the beginning of level if I die instead of the very beginning of the game, and as a result I could practice the later levels without having to grind through first levels over and over.
Imagine if you could only learn a piano piece by starting over from the beginning every time you mess up. It's absurd. The fastest way to master a piano piece is to practice the measure you are bad at until you have it down. I have no qualms cheating at video games that don't respect my time.
It's absolutely fair if cheating makes your gaming experience more enjoyable - feel free to! But rogue-likes/perma-death games are definitely not trying to waste your time. Many games focus on replay to enjoy the game in a different way, try a different strategy, discover a different aspect - you name it! See, for example, Faster Than Light: There are so many hidden aspects and pathways and possibilities to play the game; if you mastered it on the first try you probably would never think it's that great. Or see Dwarf Fortress: It's simply fun to find out how the castle is going to go down this time. Sure, it's sad when your homie-dwarves get slaughtered by a gold dragon, but it let's you move on. Making your castle invincible destroys the fun and removes the feeling of success when you master a large castle or fend of a dragon.
That's not to say your style is not okay - it's a single player game, do whatever you like! But I think "wasting time" or "absurd" is a blatant miss-characterization.
Sure. But I think we've all played games where you keep having to replay the part you've mastered over and over just to get to the part you haven't mastered.
It's like a multi-phase boss where you can do the first 2 phases with your eyes closed, but you die really fast on the 3rd phase because you haven't mastered it yet. The problem is when the first 2 phases take 10 minutes collectively. So basically you pay a time tax of 10 minutes, have a few precious seconds of practicing phase 3 before you die and have to pay another time tax. A lot of games (not just roguelikes) fall into this trap of having unavoidable time taxes.
Games that are conscious of time taxes like Guitar Hero, Celeste, Crypt of the Necrodancer, etc., usually give you some sort of "practice mode" where you can practice the part you are stuck on without paying the time tax. It's games that uncompromisingly force you to pay time taxes that I cheat at.
Similar for me and the wife in minecraft - /gamerule keepInventory true every time.
It’s not the kind of game I play for the challenge of staying alive, rather for the progression and development of base/gear/tech. Plus past mid game, there’s tools available to avoid death consequences anyway (totems etc).
Always gotta be careful in the use of cheats, mods, and game modifiers that the underlying challenges and enjoyment in the game aren't sucked out. But careful use can take away pointless grind and turn an impractical time sink into something that fits enjoyment into a smaller amount of free time.
This is also why I don’t let me son play roblox. The lack of oversight also means that their are lots of predators on there. I’ve seen kids basically being lured into virtual brothels and other nasty stuff.
And from what I can tell this flexibility isn’t going to change, since it’s what is making roblox so popular.
I can’t watch what my son is encountering in such a game every moment, so any online games for kids really need to have much better safety mechanisms.
Some more info, and you can also google roblox sex if you want to be disturbed.
As a former child of the internet, I can assure you that he will still do what he wants. When I was younger, my parents spontaneously decided to install a web filter which I bypassed in 5 minutes once it stopped being convenient to comply with it. I violated my screen time restrictions pretty much whenever I wasn't home. I became a better liar.
Kids are far craftier than you give them credit for, and even if you watched over your son's shoulder all day every day, I can assure you he would find a way to break your rules.
I'm personally of the persuasion that we're approaching this "internet safety" stuff from the wrong perspective. Why not teach your kids how to be responsible, set reasonable limitations (more expectations than limits), and discuss how they're using the internet in an open and honest way?
I got an impactful parenting tip from the Digimon movie, of all places. There was a moment in the story where a child had to go meet his friends to help save the world. His mother could tell that something was up, that the boy was being evasive, and she was pressuring him to tell him where he was going.
The grandfather stepped in, and said something to the effect of "stop pressuring the boy; you're obviously going to force him to lie to you, and that doesn't help either of you."
I'm not a parent so I'm not nearly invested enough to have put much into the problem, but having been a kid playing online games I have to wonder if you believe you can actually shield your kid from adult material anymore and if you can't then wouldn't it make more sense to just have some hard conversations and let the kid handle things as they come up?
Again, no judgement, I don't see optimal solutions here, just choosing the least worst option maybe.
I just can't imagine being a parent myself and feeling equipped to protect a child from adult material these days so it feels like the only viable alternative is to have adult conversations and enable the child to make decisions rather than the alternative of the child inevitably encountering adult situations and feeling the guilt/anxiety of having to hide that from their parents.
My nearly 7yo loves Minecraft too - both Java and Bedrock! He keeps asking me about Roblox but I've also heard of the whole monetizing thing and I keep telling him to stick to Minecraft as well.
My daughter is starting to use her Chromebook more and more independently. I'm very happy she's developing the skills, but also nervous about who and what she might encounter. I am convinced the danger is overblown by far, but seeing how trusting kids are I know I have to be safe rather than sorry. They think the world is a safe and good place and while it's much better in western countries than, say, India or Iraq, truth is that the world is a dangerous world for little girls everywhere. The internet takes away some of the physical aspects (direct bodily harm) but there's enough things that can happen to ruin your mind, psyche, life, and some abusers are skillful to even get victims to expose or harm themselves, setting up further harm for a lifetime (think of all the teenage girls who's photos are shared online for decades, with many of their friends having seen them, and with facial recognition this can all only get worse).
I'm less worried for the boys. I'm also less worried about the 'sex stuff' they might see (say, stumble upon erotica, porn, fetish porn, etc) as all those will come with time. I'm more worried about violence and /r/watchpeopledie kind of things. Imagine a seven or ten year old that can't sleep after watching Caspar or Moana, encountering a video of an innocent person being pushed in front of a train, or lynched, or ... It's absurd to me how that's legal on the US platforms that prudely censor every nipple...
But beyond this, there's a categorical difference to seeing something and being urged/pushed/forced into seeing it and the other person taking some perverse pleasure from it, as described by the previous poster. Goatse is disgusting but funny to some degree, but being lured into someone's virtual torture or rape den...?
It's like upskirt porn - totally uninteresting from the sexual perspective, its all about power, abuse, invading in the private sphere and mind of the victim. I don't want to expose my kids to that risk. The most previous thing I have in my world are my kids and especially their minds.
I want them to explore the digital, but the powers of abuse unleashed online - it's just incredible. From the random middle aged man paying for child rape in the Philippines or pretending to be a 12 year old boy and tricking kids into revealing their lives up to the abuse among classmates, friends and strangers - the internet is a damgerous place for kids. And I can manage and anticipate some risks for my kids. I dread what my daughters' friends will encounter when their only protection is a barely digitally literate single mom.
I've raised a boy and several girls in the internet age. I had your attitude from the get go. I wish I had been better educated and had done it different.
What I've learned raising children in the internet age is that boys are vulnerable during the formative years to porn addiction and the dopamine spiral that causes humans to seek harder stuff more often.
The girls are more susceptible to depression from social comparison through social media. There is a correlation, perhaps even a causation, with a drastic increase in suicide and self harm attempts of preteen and teen girls and the prevalence of social media consumption.
It shouldn't be too surprising that the formative years, when kids' brains are still developing and most vulnerable to impulse decisions, are formative for actual brain development through experience as well. It doesn't work to treat kids exactly like adults because they aren't as well equiped ad adults to handle adult situations.
Giving up on restrictions to experience and material during these formative years is, imo, like trying to teach children how to responsibly consume meth.
In my case, the answer is to tell them that there are some decisions that should absolutely wait until their prefrontal cortex is fully developed because of the developmental impact it has on them. Until then, there will be restrictions on certain things in this house under my roof.
I try to build a trust relationship that encourages them to be open and honest about what they've been exposed to do what I can help them navigate. And when we've calibrated wrongly, there's also therapy that had proven to be helpful for three of my six kids. It's also not cheap so I feel lucky that I'm able to afford the extra help when needed.
> I told him that cheating is wrong and you're only cheating yourself of the satisfaction of a game well-played
As a kid, cheating was often the only way I could actually play a game and enjoy it. It was cheating or not play at all. I used to play all kinds of games with printed walkthroughs.
Later when I got more proficient I needed cheats less and less and berated myself of using them.
Now as an adult I sometimes still "cheat", because it's not worth it cursing at the screen over and over for not finding that one solution to a puzzle. Or my kids get bored watching when I get stuck in a place for too long.
So no, for me cheating is not wrong. Cheating in online competitive games, thats a different story though.
Be careful - this was me back in the Diablo II days when I was in middle school. It's great because it got me into technology but the downside is it's extremely easy for kids to stumble upon a virus this way. Hopefully you have some safety measures in place.
Getting a virus on your (adult) personal computer can be a really big pain due to potentially forcing you into losing valuable data (tax records) or needing to sink a lot of time into recovery or reconfiguration; back up your data! For a kid I'd generally run with the assumption that they're going to software brick their computer at some point and just hope they don't overheat the computer in the process. Be prepared to reformat and reinstall operating systems, and, if you can, grab a cheapo computer dedicated to your young ones and keep them away from the "important things" computer.
There is alot of content to be potentially loss that could be important through out someone's life that aren't financial.
As an example there are basically no hard copies of photos and videos now so a kid could potentially lose any memory of their child hood they didn't share on a social network or that their parents didn't document for them.
Facebook encouraged uploading of full albums when it was popular but all of current tools heavily encourage curation to project an image or that for fun images are ephemeral.
There are tools that help mitigate this like dropbox and iCloud, but as far as I know they only save images taken on the device and not images sent to you.
I have been playing with lua game development with my kids (not getting too much interest right now - if dad likes the idea there must be something wrong) but the ability to see the code running sounds good - can you point me at any links?
"Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and ... Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do." -- Mark Twain
This is consistent across most human activities. There's no better way of making an otherwise enjoyable book deadly dull than to turn it into a class assignment.
I started out as a teen over 40 years ago now. I begged and finally got my parents to buy the cheapest Radio Shack 4K home computer for me for xmas ($299). I learned to type by typing in simple game code listings from magazines written in the ROM BASIC. I couldn't afford games at the pizza place (@ .25c for three lives) and the game ROM cartridges Radio Shack sold were $20.
After several months of re-typing in each game listing every time the computer got shut off, I was getting pretty damn fast. My parents finally got me the $30 audio cassette tape recorder for my birthday. That was a glorious day! Once I could save the code, I started changing little things in the games like the colors and number of lives. That expanded into adding new obstacles and new levels.
Ultimately, all the BASIC games were pretty primitive. All the unobtainable ROM cartridge games were coded in some magical incantations rumored to be called "Assembly Language". I knew a guy at school with the same computer who had a couple of game cartridges and I'd sometimes manage to talk him into loaning me one for a couple days. Giving the cartridges back sucked. Eventually I learned how to copy the ROM space memory by writing a BASIC program of PEEKs and POKEs. Many hours of experimentation later I was able to copy the 2k of ROM data into user memory (the BASIC code had to be short or the ROM would start overwriting it). Now I could run that game without the damn cartridge! Unfortunately, that was the only game game cartridge at Radio Shack that worked. All the other ROMS I tried had protection measures which I eventually figured out were trying to write to their own memory.
Then I found a listing for a BASIC program called an Assembly Language Monitor that would turn bytes back onto mnemonics. With that, a bunch of luck and several days of effort I was able to find the code in the game ROM that tried to overwrite its own memory and replaced it with NOPs. I felt like king of the world. I wasn't very productive as a software pirate because I spent many times longer figuring out how to copy the game than I ever spent actually playing the game. :-)
However, as I bumbled my way through each new obstacle I encountered as a game pirate I was writing more and more of my own tooling code. Eventually that slowly evolved into a career as a self-taught programmer, software architect and then tech startup entrepreneur. So, yeah. There's at least one case of a frustrated teenage game-player being an on-ramp into a successful tech career.
I think we're getting to the point where it's quite common that the parent(s) are also gamers. In that case, if it's going to be the kid's first exposure to either game, I don't see why it would be any more gross than picking a sport for the kid to try.
Some kids will respond better than others to this approach, but this seems like a perfectly normal thing for parents to do as part of their kids' education.
Not to dismiss your position but I think you might have some sample bias - most 'gamers' are just used to mobile and console and really have no noteworthy IT skills or understanding of what happens behind the scenes.
I wasn't assuming that they were particularly savvy at anything. I was just pointing out that the parent(s) being gamers likely means there's a decent change the parent(s) know what they're throwing at the child by handing them Minecraft or Roblox.
I know at least one parent who used Minecraft as an opportunity for both the parent and the child to learn to code.
I taught a semester of this company's Minecraft course in college. My students all had a pre-existing interest in the game and seemed interested in learning how to code their own experiences into it, for what it's worth.
When you are playing Minecraft you sooner or later want to have your own Server.
There are of course "as a Service" offerings but i personally know 3 or 4 people who got into Linux / Admin stuff because they were running minecraft servers for there friends.
I started learning about networking after having to deal with shady VPNs and configuring NATs - just so that I could be the kid in my class with his own minecraft server
Minecraft was what got me into Java. I still run a small server with a few regular players, and I experiment with making server plugins when I have a neat idea I want to try.
And before that, I learned Lua when trying to mod the game Company of Heroes.
It seems like video games we know are a great starting point when it comes to learning how to program at first.
Same here, I learned Java when I wanted to make Bukkit plugins and minigames for my server. I don’t play Minecraft much anymore, but I’m glad to see that it still seems popular and thriving when I do play on servers or watch it on YouTube.
I play Destiny 2, which has pretty extensive public API for reading data from the game and interacting with player inventories, and we see a lot of people pop into the discord learning to program for the first time because they want to make something for the game they play.
I can't advocate for Roblox because of their lack of moderation on excessive pornography posters hidden in many of the maps. This was a couple of years ago, so maybe things have changed. Roblox wins in freedom to build anything you can imagine versus Minecraft's limited blocky, lego-like (retro) builds. There's a trade off.
Personally, Minecraft's command blocks and server commands helped my child feel at home with java programming. I never forced or talked about programming until he started asking me questions about programming mods to extend his game plays after he outgrew the command blocks and / commands.
Command blocks and mods aside, Minecraft is more or less large-scale pixel (voxel) art with added elements of (optionally) having to survive while collecting your voxels and being able to program your environment with DIY mechanical/electrical constructions (which could range from assisting own survival to showing off). I personally find these limitations both useful equalizing forces (in multiplayer) and engaging creativity-boosting constraints.
Having seen screenshots of Roblox, I generally find the visuals pretty horrible. Considering its “free to play” model constructed to extract money from players, as opposed to Minecraft’s buy-once-own-forever, the choice seems straightforward.
Addendum: for a glance of things achievable mostly in vanilla with enough creativity, check out a montage around the beginning of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816mQFkks1Y.
Minetest may be a better comparison to Roblox here. Modding has first-class support and is a basic part of the game, everything can be serverside unlike Minecraft where mods have to match up, Minetest's mods also use LUA like Roblox (and Garry's Mod).
Bonus points, Minetest is free as in freedom software, so out of all these, I'd be most comfortable recommending it to someone.
>earn the virtual currency ‘Robux’ to purchase items
not sure about this one. my kids have been playing Roblox and Minecraft for almost two years and AFAIK the only way to get 'Robux' and 'Minecoins' is by buying them with real-world money
creative and social advantages aside, they are both ultimately microtransaction based moneymakers and both offer monthly subscriptions. that said, you don't need to spend money to enjoy or progress, unlike some other games where you perpetually pay through the nose to be second best
> Roblox has a single version which works seamlessly across all platforms. In Minecraft, kids can only play together if they have the same edition, and modding can only be done via the Java Edition.
This still saddens me everytime Minecraft comes up. I bought Minecraft when it was in Alpha and it was immediately apparent how social the game was as we all sat in the dorm rooms sharing servers over the LAN. Then Microsoft came along and trashed the whole interoperability aspect and now I have to explain to others why anything other than the Java version of Minecraft is a lesser version.
If by interoperability you mean 'PCs Macs and Linux boxes can all play Java edition', then that's still there.
Mojang made the original version (now called Java edition).
Mojang then made Pocket Edition for iOS, and made it as a separate thing with no cross-play.
Mojang then got someone else to make the Xbox edition, again it didn't cross play with anything else.
Then Mojang sold to Microsoft.
Microsoft then made the iOS, Android, XBox, Nintendo Switch and Windows 10 editions all work together and have the same features and upgrade path.
So its not really fair to say that MS trashed the interoperability aspect - it was Mojang that started down the path of different versions for mobile/consoles. MS actually did a huge amount of work to make all those platforms work together again.
But yes there are now two seperate Minecrafts - Java edition, and all the others (previously known as Bedrock).
Its better than it was though, in interoperability terms.
I'm incredibly greatful for Bedrock on Windows - I have friends that play it on PS4 and I play on PC on Bedrock and we all play together with cross play.
Okay so I was a bit eager to blame Microsoft, thanks for the correction. The early proliferation of non compatible clients was still a bad blunder that I can now attribute to Mojang.
Partly it was because back in 2011 no-one imagined that a phone could run full minecraft so they conceived of it as a simpler, cut down version. Then hardware improved etc.
Almost any serious mod packs won't fit on games consoles or cheap tablets. MC Eternal even struggles in 16GB of RAM.
Do you get something for that? Sure. The first six months I played MC Eternal I was still finding random drops from mods I'd never seen before, I fought monsters yesterday I didn't know existed last week. And beyond suspecting that the moon is actually literally made of cheese (thus explaining where the rat civilisation went) I haven't even started on space travel yet.
On a PC you can run a large pack slowly on a medium sized PC, or reach inside and (for solo play) rip out the biggest pieces you care least about. Neither of those sound practical for a Switch.
I'm sure a PS5 could run most packs if somehow they were functional, but I'm also sure most Minecraft players don't have a PS5.
I have two children interested in programming, and they equally love Roblox and Minecraft. I chose Roblox since Minecraft requires the Java edition (€26,-) for both children: they each have to have their own account. Strange decision from Microsoft.
The Roblox-API allows you to do e.g. spawn a explosion in a one-liner: Instance.new("Explosion",game.Workspace) It allows you to do almost anything a game would need (GUI, networking, physics, databases, you name it), with a very straight-forward API. Checkout https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/api-reference , they also have AWESOME tutorials which also explain some mathematics https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/articles/CFrame-Math-Oper... Roblox made learning these various disciplines straight-forward and easy, I still benefit from it today!
Though it also taught me some ... less favorable habits, as they are more common place. Think of: Continuously calling wait() until something loaded, Excessive use of globals, overuse of strings, coding single god-functions that do everything (with a frick ton of redundancy). Remember who the demographic of Roblox is: kids and early teens. The people who create the scripts for it are also fairly young, think teens to young adults. So bad practices are more common here, especially in some YouTube-videos (seriously, some are terrible learning-resources).
If your kid is curious, give Roblox a try :D