The Mojang team is set to release a special version of its behemoth hit indie title Minecraft for the Raspberry Pi computer, in a bid to encourage more young people to get into coding.
The Raspberry Pi launched earlier this year, and is a credit card-sized, single-board computer designed to teach programming to students in the UK. The team behind it saw huge demand back when it was released.
Minecraft: Pi Edition will be completely free to download, and will feature a version of the Pocket Edition with support for multiple programming languages.
"You can start by building structures in the traditional Minecraft way," explained Mojang's Owen Hill, "but once you've got to grips with the in-game features, there's opportunity to break open the code and use programming language to manipulate things in the game world. You'll be learning new skills through Minecraft."
The Pi Edition is due for release sometime soon, Hill added, and he urged interested individuals to grab one of the $25/$35 Pi devices.
Raspberry Pi trustee David Braben told Gamasutra earlier this year, "My real ambition is that I want us to be able to give them away for free to every child in the [UK] in one year group, and then keep doing it each year, so that gradually everyone has one."
Minecraft is one of the most educational and positive games made. It is international in flavor and influence. it really does bring down barriers and make the world a little smaller while making it seem a whole lot bigger.
It's nice to see some people and organizations are actively interested in motivating young people to learn about computers; with the advent of opaque computing as found on mobile operating systems (and heavily encouraged on Windows 8), I often worry that tangential learning and motivation to learn about computers and IT are being marginalized. Minecraft, with its relative openness to modding and in-game circuit design, is a great example of the sort of game that encourages an important kind of computer-oriented curiosity (all without demanding it).
