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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."
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.
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.