Kids Coding Adventures 2018

Today was the final day of Kids Coding Adventures 2018, a coding camp that I've directed for the past three years at Harding University.  23 kids attended, who ranged from 2nd thru 4th grade (a few 5th graders snuck in). I had two fantastic helpers from Harding Academy (Mason and Anna) as well as my oldest son.

In previous years we used Tynker, but this year we used Microsoft's MakeCode to program Minecraft mods using blocks or JavaScript. This required us to use Minecraft Education Edition, which is a special version of Minecraft that interacts with programming environments like MakeCode.

A few of my observations, in no particular order:

• Kids absolutely love Minecraft, so they were really excited about camp. But loving Minecraft is a double-edged sword: It's challenging to keep kids on task when they can easily start "playing" Minecraft.
• Minecraft Education Edition is only $5, which is really inexpensive. And it's easy to install. However, each user must have a special Office 365 account, which is a headache for our IT guys to setup.
• Using MakeCode was challenging, especially for the 2nd graders. You must flip back and forth between the MakeCode window and Minecraft, and flip back and forth between chat and regular mode in Minecraft.
• Two major usability problems with MakeCode:
  1. The responsiveness is pretty bad. I saw frustrated kids clicking multiple times on a button that should have immediately responded, but it would take seconds to process the first click.
  2. When you mistype a chat command, there's no feedback that the command was mistyped. This happens more often than you might imagine.
• I discovered three problems in MakeCode the first day: a tutorial had erroneous logic, and MakeCode had 2 bugs, one of which would completely erase all your code. (I've reported all the issues to Microsoft.)
• Most kids struggled more than I thought they would with creating objects using the "fill with" command. We focused on using only the x and y axis, but it was still tough for them to convert a simple picture into code. Next time I'll spend more time doing simple exercises to get these ideas across.