Fourth-Grade Coders Get Inside Look At Minecraft

SMITHTOWN, NY - From Smithtown Central School District: Fourth-graders at St. James Elementary School in the Smithtown Central School District went on a virtual field trip to the headquarters of Minecraft in Stockholm, Sweden, on April 9. Lydia Waters, one of the brand directors, gave students a virtual tour of the facilities.

During the visit, the fourth-graders Skyped with Agnes, one of the developers who is creating a new release into the Minecraft game. She explained her job function and showed the students the lines of code used to create the “turtle.”

Following the virtual tour, students learned some basic coding functions. The Microsoft team members guided each student through the coding lesson on how to code through command lines. They were taught that code is a set of instructions that tells a computer to do something and Make Code uses event-driven, block coding to start an action in Minecraft. Each student was then able to change the number of times to spawn animals, change the spawn of animal types and change the location of the spawning of the animal.

Photo courtesy of Smithtown Central School District