Lately, I am blown away by all the amazing opportunities kids have now days. So much information and technology right at their fingertips. My daughter is nine, and there isn’t anything she can’t easily learn. At her age, I would have had to head to the library and hope they had a book on what I wanted to learn. It was difficult, and I missed a lot of opportunities because of this. I am so grateful, though that it can be different for my daughter. She can do anything she wants and, with practice and focus, learn new abilities and skills.
Both my kids have a huge interest in computers and games, especially Minecraft. I think this is like a lot of kids right now. As a parent, I wanted to take this opportunity and show my kids how they could turn their love of Minecraft into something cool. I wanted to show them how their game works; I wanted them to be able to code their own game.
First, I needed to find out if this was even possible, and I needed something that a nine-year-old could do. I did some research and found Code Kingdoms.
Code Kingdoms seemed perfect! It was for ages 8-14 and even boasted kids having their own servers to code on. Kids can make their own mods by watching step-by-step video tutorials, writing the code, and then playing their game with the code they just made! Kids can also play with up to 25 friends on their server. Code Kingdoms requires no previous coding experience; this is really for any ability and great to get kids interested in coding. Kids can go at their own pace, and the videos encourage kids to pause and try the coding they just watched on their own.
It’s fantastic to have your kids doing something they love and learning at the same time! Even better is the look on their faces when they see their code working inside their game. My daughter’s face lit up when she saw she had created something all by herself, and she could play her Minecraft game with her new mods.
As with any new learning opportunity, kids will make some mistakes and that’s okay. With Code Kingdoms, kids can see errors easily with the automated error highlighting. If kids are having difficulty getting past a certain point, they can talk to chat support any day of the week, and they will assist as soon as possible. The coding is drag and drop, which makes it easier for them to get a hang of real coding, without having to type everything. Kids that really get the hang of it can move onto text code anytime they want. In Code Kingdoms, kids are learning to code with Java, one of the most useful programming languages.
My daughter loves that she can add her code and go back to her game without restarting it. She can then go back, code more and return to her game again. Kids can also change worlds without restarting (this is apparently HUGE, according to my daughter). No restart is ever needed. There are also no restrictions on how long or when kids can be on their server. They can jump on anytime; this goes for friends they invite as well. As a parent, I love that Code Kingdoms is safe, and I can get notifications of friends that join my kids’ server.
I feel that Code Kingdoms is a fantastic resource for kids to learn coding and decide for themselves if it’s a skill they would like to use in the future. Code Kingdoms is an amazing building block (no pun intended) to expand kids’ minds and imaginations and possibly a building block that will give them a head start in a future career. To this mom, that is priceless. Do your kids love Minecraft? Is coding a skill you would like them to have? Head over here to check out Code Kingdoms!
A big thank you to Code Kingdoms for providing us with copies of Code Kingdoms in order to facilitate this review, all opinions are my own.
