Building Minecraft Mods in Java (grades 6 - 8)
"Learn Java by designing and programming your own items, armor, blocks and creatures for your own Minecraft modification you can play and share. The central concepts of object oriented programming including inheritance, classes, methods and instances will be explored while creating new virtual objects with Java code."
This is one of the Enrichment classes, open to anyone eligible to do the NUMATS talent search (no talent search test score required, just eligibility to test through them).
DD11, who is in 7th grade, gives this class two thumbs up. It is very much "Minecraft plus some cookbook Java," rather than "Java with some Minecraft thrown in," but as DD has gained confidence and experience, she's felt comfortable going beyond what's strictly required for the class.
The first week required downloading and installing all the programs needed (JDK, Eclipse, GIMP), which took many hours plus parental assistance. The instructor was great, though. The very detailed text + video guide was written for Win7; when DD aged for help translating some of it to Windows 8, a Win8 version was available a few hours later. Kids who didn't have parental help got a personal video chat with the instructor. I was really impressed by how much time the instructor spent making sure everyone was able to participate.
The second week also had a relatively heavy workload, due to the need to become familiar with the software. By the third week, it was a fairly consistent 3-4 hour commitment, with about an hour of that devoted to the weekly online class meetings.
Those meetings were DD's favorite part of the course. The teacher would go over the assignment just completed, often suggesting (and providing sample code for) ways to extend that assignment into something more complicated and interesting. In the meantime, the kids (~15 of ~20 enrollees most weeks) would be chatting away in the text bar. There was an online message board also, but very little chatting between the kids took place there.
Most of the kids were 11, with a few 12yos. Many more boys than girls, and the boys tended to be "louder." DD said of one particularly active kid, "I don't think he does anything but Minecraft." DD, who spends ~15-25 hours a week on other activities on top of school and homework, might have liked a little more free time to devote to class. Some weeks she did just the bare minimum and at least one assignment was finished later than she'd have liked it to be. But there was enough flexibility that she made it work.
DD learned more than I had anticipated she would, worked more independently than I'd anticipated (she needed a lot of encouragement at the beginning, but was entirely self-directed by the end), made some friends, and had fun. I don't know that she learned anything at all about object-oriented programming per se, but that was not really her goal.
