Hour of Code has become a global phenomenon, but with excellent resources and celebrity support, it comes as no surprise. Several websites are now running their own Hour of Code projects, but I want to look at the ones on the official site as I’m really impressed with their offerings this year.
Earlier in the year I talked about the Frozen resources and mentioned that while it is an excellent resource, it gets quite tricky near the end. I’ve noticed that in the meantime, they have addressed the issue of calculating angles being too tricky, by adding in information about the necessary angles in the description for each level. However, some of the children in my school completed both of the new resources and then tried the Frozen one and all agreed that Frozen was still the hardest of the lot.
So, Minecraft is exceptionally popular amoungst the children in my school and, with the approaching launch of the new Star Wars movie, this too proven to be a popular choice.
In the Minecraft puzzle, the children are given the choice of playing as Steve or, his female counterpart, Alex. This is a nice start as it acknowledges that children of both genders will be giving this activity a go.
As with the previous activities, you are shown a video, this time it’s from one of developers of Minecraft, who explains the activity ahead.
The code is based on blockly and introduces it’s concepts in a slow and simple manner. Once you’ve figured out of the system works, you are introduced to concepts such as shearing sheep, cutting down trees and mining resources by using ‘destroy’ blocks in the code.
I really love that when you get to level six, you can chose a difficulty level for building the foundations of your house.
We’ve just been introduced to the repeat block and the activity begins by giving us some basic code, which we are expected to modify to complete the design. The code we are given at the start won’t build our house, but with the addition of some further loops, we can complete our house.
In the Frozen code, we are usually given a limit on the number of blocks we can use for each activity, which is to encourage us to use loops effectively, but so far we haven’t been given a limit for the Minecraft code, but this changes in level 7:
The limit is not enforced, and if you exceed it, you are politely reminded that you could do it more efficiently.
If you don’t finish the activity in the required number of blocks, your status bar shows a slightly lighter green colour, which means that, as a teacher, I can clearly see who has carefully completed the activity and suggest that children look again at certain bits to try and make their code more elegant.
The activities involve a number of blocks unique to this activity such as ‘place cobblestone’ or ‘shear sheep’ and I think this is useful for children to see as they can recognise that code can be altered to suit the situation.
Slightly different to the other Hours of Code, if you complete the Minecraft activity, you get a special Minecraft themed certificate, which the children really love!
So, what are you waiting for? Give the Minecraft hour of code a go!
Cat Lamin 