Code.org and Microsoft partner for a Minecraft Hour of Code

Microsoft and Code.org have partnered to release a new Hour of Code installment based around the popular Minecraft game.  Code.org is an organization devoted to introducing programming to students of all backgrounds and skill levels. As part of this initiative they routinely release interactive Hour of Code episodes that teach students how to program using popular gaming and movie characters. These tutorials use a visual programming tool called Blockly that allows you to create a chain of command blocks that when attached to each other perform a series of actions.

In this installment of Hour of Code, you learn how to control either Steve or Alex as they perform various tasks in a top-down Minecraft world. Using Blockly, programmers will chain various commands together to make Alex or Steve move around the world and perform various tasks such as shearing sheep or planting crops. When they are ready, they can run their program to see what effect it performs with your character in the Minecraft world.

During the task, visitors can click on the Show Code button to see what their chained blocks look like in Javascript.  Using this visual editor approach and to see how it converts into Javascript is a very intuitive way of teaching programming.  

For anyone, especially kids, who are interested in learning how to program, I strongly suggest the Hour of Code series.  They are very well done and make it interesting for children to learn computer science.