Minecraft is a wildly popular game among elementary and middle schoolers. The game allows players to build constructions of textured cubes in a 3D world.
My son has been playing the game for about a year, lets say addicted to it. Last Fall he told me that the game is corrupted because the JAR file snapshot has messed up the configuration. And that right away rang a bell in me as a Java Evangelist at Oracle.
I learned from him that the game is written in Java, has a trial version that runs as an applet in the browser, and downloaded as a JAR file for desktop. The game is modular where the players travel through a world and chunks are loaded and unloaded to keep the memory footprint small. Something unique about the game is the ability to modify the game from what it was originally designed for. In Minecraft language, this is called as a “mod” – short for modifications. For example, a mod can add new characters to the game, change look-and-feel of the play field, or make it easy to build new structures.
continue reading- Introducing Kids to Java Programming Using Minecraft (Arun Gupta, Miles to go …).