Nopecraft - was Re: OT: learner kits

[Douglas Taylor]

On 6/20/2015 8:06 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
>> Right. Get 'em hooked on Minecraft, and then it'll be easier to push them into harder drugs like VHDL later! :)
> There is a good grain of truth to that. In complex Minecraft command
> block systems, a programmer has to think about many, many tasks,
> running in parallel, each triggered by real time events connected with
> the redstone logic network. That starts to sound like Verilog.
>
> In thinking further - I might think that learning to do complex
> Minecraft command block systems is probably *better* for training
> future engineers that giving them a bunch of TTL and a protoboard.
>
> --
> Will
I purchased a Raspberry Pi recently and was surprised to find a version 
of Minecraft installed, I don't know anything about it but my son did.  
It sort of 'hooked' him into the Pi.

Oh, and it also had Mathematica on it, a stripped down version.  I think 
that was to get me 'hooked', I've never been able to afford Mathematica 
and am interested in it.

Doug