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Summer approaches!

As always, we are planning big things for our camps at Hockaday. Camps run every week June 4 through July 20, with our Product Development camp the final week.

Click here to register. Choose Minecraft under "Session Type" on the left, or for Product Development, filter by date for July 16th.

(Lack of) server updates.

There have been two bugfix releases of Minecraft (1.12.1 and 1.12.2) since we last updated the creative server, but we've decided to wait to update our server version until the next point release (apparently they're skipping 1.13 and going straight to 1.14). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Similarly, since ComputerCraft has gone open source there have been some updates to it, but we're going to wait until we have adequate time to test them before we attempt to upgrade our ComputerCraft server.

The Minecraft U modpack on Technic was temporarily broken until today, however (I let a domain name expire...oops), so if you've had issues with it, try again.

All that to say, the current server instructions are still up to date!

One of our instructors and best builders has been working hard on a castle on the creative server.

If you're not whitelisted or haven't been on a Minecraft U server recently, hit reply and let me know your username and when you plan on joining...I love giving tours and handing out free items.

We spoke at Product Camp Dallas

Minecraft U co-founder Daniel Miller gave a talk at Product Camp Dallas about our Product Development camp process. Slides of the talk can be found here (or in PDF format here).

Links of interest

The Kids Should See This. "Smart videos for curious minds of all ages."

Free programming and web development books from O'Reilly. Also, their only Minecraft book is on sale on Amazon.

If you have a more advanced programmer in your family, they might enjoy Screeps, "The world's first MMO sandbox game for programmers."

We've been having a lot of fun with Sonic Pi, "The live coding music synth for everyone." You write music compositions in Ruby code. It's surprisingly easy to learn.

You might have heard of Really Bad Chess ("chess with totally random pieces") already...here's another voice saying, "It's fun." Now available on iOS and Android.

We're feeling nostalgic over at archive.org's computer magazine archives. Start with Enter, produced from October 1983 to May 1985 by Children's Television Workshop.

So you don't have to scroll back up to find that summer camp link 😀

Summer Camp Registration