I'm not a teacher in a school, they come here because they want to learn stuff and do things. There's also other activities like electronics, woodworking, metal, etc. (but I'm just at the computers). It's pretty much like a hackerspace for kids :) So I don't need to test them.
That said, yes he's definitely not just blindly following the steps in the screencasts but really trying to make his own thing and figure shit out. He also does other stuff (had a go at Unity--unfortunately I didn't have enough time to learn it myself first). A lot of the kids here actually have a bit of a resistance against just blindly following set instructions without adding their own ideas to it :) Often I have to hold them back a bit--just do this simple exercise first, yes just exactly like that, it'll give you some insights on the basics and after that you can have a go at trying to work out your grand idea (I word it differently of course, but that's the gist).
And yeah he may not understand all of what's going on when going through the decompile - run script - modify - repackage steps in minecraft, but he does learn a lot. There's no real set goals, if he learns that "whatever a computer is supposed to do, I can alter it and make it do my own wishes" at the very least, just learning about the possibilities (aka more than a microwave oven), it'll plant the seeds of a hacker-spirit :) (though in this particular example I can assure you it goes further than that)
And we'll see where it goes from there. If I notice they just learned one trick and go through the same motions every time I'll try to put them on a more challenging track. Although even in that case, say a kid is making a game (we use GameMaker) and after having struggled through a basic gameplay engine they are comfortable with simply creation zillions of levels, I don't necessarily stop them, as long as they're being creative. It doesn't have to be programming after all, if that is not their talent, maybe they can think up a great storyline, or draw cool graphics. Also it turns out that most modern games do in fact have zillions of levels, and when I see them ordering them into "world 1", "world 2", they must be up to something. That example is about a bunch of 8 year old btw, so I don't expect hardcore hacking/programming yet (but they're clever!), one of these 8 year olds was so super-proud of the game he had been working at for a while, "This game is getting really really AWESOME"--that can't be wrong :)
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I'm not a teacher in a school, they come here because they want to learn stuff and do things. There's also other activities like electronics, woodworking, metal, etc. (but I'm just at the computers). It's pretty much like a hackerspace for kids :) So I don't need to test them.
That said, yes he's definitely not just blindly following the steps in the screencasts but really trying to make his own thing and figure shit out. He also does other stuff (had a go at Unity--unfortunately I didn't have enough time to learn it myself first). A lot of the kids here actually have a bit of a resistance against just blindly following set instructions without adding their own ideas to it :) Often I have to hold them back a bit--just do this simple exercise first, yes just exactly like that, it'll give you some insights on the basics and after that you can have a go at trying to work out your grand idea (I word it differently of course, but that's the gist).
And yeah he may not understand all of what's going on when going through the decompile - run script - modify - repackage steps in minecraft, but he does learn a lot. There's no real set goals, if he learns that "whatever a computer is supposed to do, I can alter it and make it do my own wishes" at the very least, just learning about the possibilities (aka more than a microwave oven), it'll plant the seeds of a hacker-spirit :) (though in this particular example I can assure you it goes further than that)
And we'll see where it goes from there. If I notice they just learned one trick and go through the same motions every time I'll try to put them on a more challenging track. Although even in that case, say a kid is making a game (we use GameMaker) and after having struggled through a basic gameplay engine they are comfortable with simply creation zillions of levels, I don't necessarily stop them, as long as they're being creative. It doesn't have to be programming after all, if that is not their talent, maybe they can think up a great storyline, or draw cool graphics. Also it turns out that most modern games do in fact have zillions of levels, and when I see them ordering them into "world 1", "world 2", they must be up to something. That example is about a bunch of 8 year old btw, so I don't expect hardcore hacking/programming yet (but they're clever!), one of these 8 year olds was so super-proud of the game he had been working at for a while, "This game is getting really really AWESOME"--that can't be wrong :)