Microsoft uses Minecraft to teach your kid coding basicsMumbai, Nov 18(AZINS) Minecraft is dangerous. It's addictive gameplay, vast landscape, and soothing ambient music can be such a time-sink that, before you know it, you've spent the last two hours building a virtual rollercoaster, and then a further hour riding it in-game. The creativity and sheer size of structures you can accomplish in the game are mind-bending; a simple Google Image search will toss up block for block recreations of famous real-life monuments, and even fictional ones. So it's absolutely brilliant that Microsoft has decided to leverage that power for good.

Code.org is a non-profit organisation, launched in 2013, that focuses on expanding people's awareness and access to computer science and programming, particularly aiming to improve the participation of women in the (very underrepresented) field. In order to do achieve that, the organisation has been hosting "Hour of Code" events in various US schools for the last two years, hoping to instill a love for programming in children. This time around, they've managed to partner with Microsoft, in order to use Minecraft assets for the course. And while the event will be US-based, you can find a great online tutorial for your kids here.

The system Code.org is using is called Blockly. It's a web-based visual programming editor designed by Google that, instead of using lines of text to code, has the programmer drag and drop instructions from a command bin into the workspace. This is perfect for novice programmers as it lets them play with different capabilities within the code, while not burdening them with syntax rules (they can graduate to that later.) So, for this event, Microsoft had it's Minecraft developers create a programming tutorial built around Blockly. Instead of programming an entire app, the instructions you're dragging and dropping control just your character's movements and actions. It's a step-by-step lesson and, once you've progressed about halfway in, you can compare your block-driven code you've created to what it actually looks like in text with proper syntax.

For instance, the screenshot below is from just Stage 6 of the 14-stage lesson.