Is this project related to the book: "Learn to Program with Minecraft: Transform Your World with the Power of Python" ?
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Program-Minecraft-Transform-Python/dp/1593276702" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Program-Minecraft-Transform-Pyth...</a>
I ask because the concept appears to be substantially similar.<p>re: the approach -- My kids are crazy about Minecraft, and being able to build very simple python programs that modify the world (build block structures, control creatures, etc.) is much more gentle yet engaging than the typical programming 101 tasks.
Neat, I'd also recommend something like opencomputers for learning. The learning curve and asinine amount of time it takes to get started is a bit of a hurdle or thirty, but it helps to have more than one person involved.<p>At the end of my adventure with it, I had some code that would read a png from github from minecraft, then use the 3d printer to create a series of blocks by using the 'pixels' from all server allowed blocks. The personal requirement was to not do any sort of color manipulation and only use what was available. The pixel position from block to block doesn't change, and transparency could be coded outside of the png, so it became pretty damn difficult really quickly.<p>In the process I got to learn about png, cv2, jit (to pull the available blocks' pngs and eventually for an attempt in finding consistent transparency logic. Flowers.....), minecraft's internals, voxels, some lua, more python and some interesting algorithm stuff.<p>Life got in the way and I never actually finished, but the block directly to the left of the cursor was the last block created. Despite its ugliness, I'm actually pretty pleased with it. <a href="https://imgur.com/dqwnnL2" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/dqwnnL2</a> which is part of <a href="https://imgur.com/gallery/giajLha" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/gallery/giajLha</a> (dickbutt baby, nsfw kinda)
There is also ComputerCraft mod with Lua programmable blocks and visual code editor (ComputerCraftEdu) <a href="http://www.computercraft.info/" rel="nofollow">http://www.computercraft.info/</a> and <a href="http://computercraftedu.com/" rel="nofollow">http://computercraftedu.com/</a>
Hey emeth...thanks for making this awesome project. As a father of 2 sons (aged 9 and 11, both Minecraft fanatics) this is a perfect platform to get them interested in coding. Starting with Python is a nice easy on-ramp for them, and they'll even start using GitHub with this project, which is great too. Keep up the cool work :)
Is there a good GPLed substitute for Minecraft ?<p>I am required to use a Free license as an educator and the massive appeal of voxels is undisputable.