Start with Nothing. Build Anything. And Oh Yeah, There’s Zombies!

Our team played Minecraft this summer and it taught me a lot about why playing this video game is great for teaching kids how to code.

Here’s how it all started.

My name’s Alex Sejdinaj and I’m the co-founder of South Bend Code School.

As a team, we’re always looking for fun and effective ways to teach kids how to code. We’ve found that the key to getting kids interested in coding is finding the right motivation. This year, in particular, we started hearing a lot of the kids in our after-school programs talking about Minecraft. In almost every coding session, we had at least one kid adding a Minecraft character to their Scratch games or websites.

After hearing all of the excitement, one of our team members, Kristen, decided to finally explore Minecraft and see what all of the hype was about.

After a few hours, here’s how Kristen described Minecraft in Slack to the rest of the team:

“You start with nothing. And you can build anything!

And there’s zombies!”

After hearing that, my husband (who is also my cofounder) was sold and downloaded Minecraft. Five years ago my husband and I started South Bend Code School with our friend, Chris Frederick. Our goal is to reform tech education by providing equitable learning opportunities for elementary, middle, and high school-aged kids. We’ve worked with over 1,000 students but decided that we weren’t busy enough so we started two additional tech companies, Code Works and GiveGrove. My husband clearly loves the idea of building something out of nothing. That’s probably why he started three tech companies! And who doesn’t love fighting zombies?!

How Minecraft teaches your kid (and my husband) how to code.

My husband has worked as a developer for a while now so Minecraft didn’t teach him how to code. It does teach a lot of the coding concepts that developers use when coding and is important for someone who wants to learn to code.

There are no instructions.

Minecraft has no instructions (there is a tutorial version you can do, but the game is set up in a way that guides players towards just diving in). When you first start the game, your character is dropped in the middle of the world with nothing. Your only goal is to survive. You don’t have any tools, hints, or in-game guides and the only way to find out what you’re supposed to do is by trial and error, searching on Google, or asking a friend who’s played before. You also quickly learn that nightfall comes a lot quicker than you think it will, and when it’s night time in the game, there are zombies that you need to avoid at all costs. Every world in Minecraft comes with a unique starting point and set of challenges. Coding is the same way.

With coding, there are many different approaches that developers can take to building the same project. Each comes with its own set of rewards and challenges. The beauty of Minecraft is that it is extremely open-ended. There isn’t necessarily a specific end goal you are working toward achieving. Instead, you define what you want to, and then you have to figure out how to build it. The crossover between Minecraft and computer science is largely in this concept. You might have to do research or talk with others in order to advance your toolset or build the next cool thing.

Innovation as a survival tool.

Just like the real world, Minecraft rewards its users for building and creating. Minecraft uses a simple 1×1 block structure to build the world, characters, and objects. To advance in the game, you have to build. For example, to survive the zombie attacks that happen when night falls, you have to build a safe place for your character to wait out the zombie attacks. To build a shelter, you have to find and gather building materials. If you want to build bigger and better things, you’ll need better tools that require you to mine for other materials Once you have enough materials and a better set of tools, you can build almost anything that you can dream up. It’s literally your world to create.

Also, the game encourages you to build things to make your character’s life easier and more exciting. For instance, since you have to mine materials in order to build your world, at some point my husband got tired of how long it was taking him to get back above ground after mining so he built a minecart track. At first, he built a manual cart but then learned how to build an automated one. Coding is similar because a student, you quickly learn how to code more efficiently. Coding efficiently can be learning to use fewer lines of code to reach the same goal or learning how to write functions! Minecraft is similar in that optimization and efficiency are key to building big things while surviving the dangers of the Minecraft world.

Minecraft also has modifications or ‘mods’ that are custom coded additions players can use to make improvements to the game like adding monsters or improving a player’s health. There are plenty of options for someone to get started making mods for Minecraft, which is a great way for a young and curious mind to discover coding.

Mods can be made by the player or downloaded through a third-party website.

Collaboration is a skill.

Unfortunately, when many people think of a coder, they imagine a guy living in his mom’s basement or a person hidden away in a cubicle behind a computer screen. This isn’t always true and more often than not, developers collaborate on teams with other creative people. Minecraft gives you the option to safely collaborate with your friends by setting up a private server. On our team, the Minecraft bug quickly spread, and a Minecraft gaming group was quickly assembled.

Not only are they growing a company together but they also built a pretty cool world.

And that’s what coding is.

Minecraft is a great tool for building your learner’s problem-solving and creative thinking skills, two important skills to coding. The game gives kids a safe environment to explore, fail fast in, and build out their imaginations.

And that’s what coding is: You start with nothing. And you can build anything! And there’s zombies (or bugs in coding)!

Thanks for reading! If there’s ever anything that we can do to help you along your coding journey, don’t hesitate to drop us a line at info@southbendcodeschool.com.