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Microsoft Brings Its Embrace-Extend-Extinguish Game To K-12 Schools?
theodp writes: A year after it paid $2.5 billion to buy Minecraft, Microsoft has announced a partnership with Code.org that makes a Minecraft-themed introduction to programming a signature tutorial of this year's Hour of Code, which hopes to reach 200 million schoolchildren next month in what the Microsoft-funded nonprofit is billing as the largest learning event in history. "A core part of our mission to empower every person on the planet is equipping youth with computational thinking and problem-solving skills to succeed in an increasingly digital world," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a press release, which also notes that "Microsoft is gifting Windows Store credit to every educator who organizes an Hour of Code event worldwide." Of the Minecraft tutorial, Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi gushed, "Compared to what you would otherwise be doing for school, this is, like, the best thing ever."
Developers. If you can flood the market with people who know how to code, then you can pay them at fast-food worker wages.
More headline trolling details: Amazon & iTunes credits are given to teachers too as the link above states in the freaking post timothy made. But sure, go ahead and bash microsoft for putting money into a program that is trying to teach using a tool that is extremely popular among the very population that you are targeting.
Slashdot editors, can we please drop the flamebait summaries. Every discussion about education turns into a shitfest anyway, without TFS having to amp it up.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Who cares? If that happens then the school program moves onto a different platform. They're not locked into 'programming for minecraft' in any way shape or form. Not that I see this happening anyways, Microsoft is definitely on the python bandwagon with their education environment development.
I'm sick and tired of the Microsoft is evil crap.
Me too. I wish they'd just give up the evil already.
Yes, 20 years ago they tried to embrace, extend and extinguish their standards over open standards to the entire internet
Are you claiming they'e stopped?
You might want to look at ooxml and the subbverting of the ISO standards body and the SDXC card debacle.
In case your wondering for the latter they've managed t oget their patent encumbered, yet not novel or very good exFAT filesystem embedded into the SDXC standard. That's pure rent-seeking, plain and simple.
Oh and then there's the Linux patent shakedown on Android. Nice phone you have there, shame something should happen to it. Tell you what, pay us a bunch and we'll go away. But we won't even tell you what the patents. If you want to even find out what we might be suing you for, we're going to make you engage in a very costly lawsuit.
Yeah, nice, big fluffy, happy microsoft. Tell you what, you *should* be sick and tired of the evil microsoft crap because it's sickening.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Microsoft now owns Minecraft and they can do whatever they want with it. They may be using Python now, but that can change in a heartbeat.
Then the school is free to dump Minecraft and move to something else. They didn't use Python because of Minecraft. They had already decided to teach Python, and then picked Minecraft because it used Python. The students also write Python plug-ins for FreeCAD and print their projects on a 3D printer. There are plenty of other options.
Btw, you can write Minecraft plug-ins in languages other than Python, including C++ and Java. You may be able to use C# or VB as well.