Microsoft recently invited children and their parents to its UK headquarters to learn more about coding and designing using its products.
The boys and girls used Surface devices and a free Minecraft tutorial called A Hero’s Journey to write code and build structures in the popular block-building game.
A Hero’s Journey features a new character called the Agent, and gives players 12 challenges that teach core coding concepts such as loops – a sequence of instructions that is continually repeated until a certain condition is reached – debugging – removing errors from the program – and functions – reusable code that performs a function. It also contains popular objects such as Redstone and pistons.
The youngsters then designed a modern-looking sleigh for Father Christmas using Paint 3D, the Windows tool that lets users create objects that look three-dimensional.
Click the circles below to see what happened.