Some breif notes from a lazy Sunday morning spent exploring the minecraft coding environment that I set up using Raspberry Jam earlier. I'm taking my notes in Jupyter while I explore the Minecraft API and poke around with one of the sample programs. Since my blogging engine Nikola also supports Jupyter Notebooks as one of it's import formats, I found that I could do Litterate Programming for Minecraft quite nicely!
A summary of the steps to install Minecraft with Forge, the two Forge mods "Raspberry Jam Mod" and "PythonTool Mod" and configure the coding environment to my preferred arrangement. I am using this on my own computers (work's Mac, and my openSUSE PCs) as well as my son's Windows 10 PC.
A bit over two years ago I wrote a post about hacking minecraft with Python. During my holiday break this year I decided to revisit this, and have a bit more of a go with it. Some things have changed, including the Minecraft Bukkit Server that I used then (CanaryMod) being abandoned, and some new enhanced modules that let you run Minecraft PI Python code on a non-PI machine, with Python 3! So let's dig in.
I've been coming to my sons class when I get a chance and showing the kids about computer codes. I actually started a CodeClub last year and we were pretty successful, though very limited by my availability -- I was able to run the club for one hour most weeks, so it took us two terms to cover Scratch 1.
This year I've had even less time away from work, but I've had great support from the grade 6 teacher. We plan for him to facilitate the projects in class while I assist via emails and blogs. So: here's my first post.
I'm having a play with Minecraft and Python, using the mcpipy library, a Minecraft server called CannaryMod, and a plugin-in for that called RaspberryJuice.
You can do all this out-of-the-box with Raspbian on a RaspberryPi, but I wanted to set up my home computers also. Here's a quick run-down of the steps I followed.