Youth Digital Mod Design 1 - Online Course for MAC/PC

Bought this for our sons 9th birthday and it was his favorite gift ever - he was so sad when the course was over! Excellent method of editing Minecraft java code that is very engaging, productive and educational. Codecademy et al. didnt connect with the simple coding results, this integration with making a mod kept him incredibly engaged. The videos are very well done and had him laughing out loud. EXCELLENT support response - very fast, very personal and very well tailored for kids. Hardest part now is waiting for Mod Design 2 !

My sons been looking at this for a while now. Okay, its worth paying for making education fun but I find this too high. Many online courses for free. Nice this is offered on Amazon to give as a gift but you can buy this download many places online for $150. I was hoping to find a bigger discount for Christmas. For $50 Ill wrap a printout of the purchase in a box to put under the tree if I do decide to purchase it. I was hoping to find this boxed nice for a gift but the price is way too high on Amazon.

I will re-review after my son has had a couple of months experience with this. First impression, though, is not overly positive. This course is for an old (1.6.4) version of Minecraft, and a very old (JRE 1.6) version of Java. This caused hours of confusion and problems on my sons first attempt to start the course. You need to download Eclipse (a heavyweight Java development environment), which is slow, and when he started Eclipse per the video instructions (provided by a happy/chatty guy that my son seems to like but I find insufferable) was greeted with a blizzard of errors.

This is just awesome.

Mod Design 1 is a fantastic program for mine craft enthusiasts! I recommend this to kids 8-14. My 11 year old was a bit skeptical at first because his Christmas gift was a online class, however, once he got started, he couldnt get enough! I am excited to give this review as STEM teacher-this is a must have for your brainiac! This took mine craft to a whole other level. The program is excellent and easy to follow. The instructors are only an e-mail away and are always great about personalizing their responses. Thank you Youth Digital!;)

I was a bit hesitant at first given how much this costs, but our 8 and 10 year olds love it. One thing that it does is not to focus too much on programming or Java itself but in how to get a mod built. At several points, it also goes through a trouble-shooting exercise to teach how to figure out why something isnt working correctly. This isnt really a general how-to-program course, but it is a fun way to introduce kids to programming by letting them get to the interesting parts while not having to focus on the annoying parts of programming.

I have a 10 year old son who loves Minecraft and recording Minecraft videos for Youtube. He does not have a server yet. I liked the idea to have him learn Java and improve his gaming. He would not be into coding if it wasnt for this avesome product. I would advise parents to spend 1 hour setting up an account with Youth Digital (provider) and downloading the files. Make sure that firewalls allow for installation and so on. And the let your kid loose once everything is working. Dont get your kid totally excited about uploading their own sword and they you spend an hour rebooting and creating folders. It was the best thing I got my son all year. The guy who teaches the kids in the videos is on the kids level, respectful, has a nice language and is a good role model. Somebody commented on his voice being weird, buts its sounds good to me. Which I had a science teacher like that in school :)

Great presentation and organization of learning modules, and the kids laughed all the way through.

My 10 year old daughter loves the creative mode of minecraft & loved the idea of being able to customize particular aspects of the game that arent available in the standard version. I was initially hesitant to pay almost $200 for her to take the online class, as shed tried scratch programming as was bored with it. However, she kept insisting shed pay attention and would really put effort into it if I were to let her learn Java for minecraft. I took the risk and bought the course online and I have to say Ive been SUPER impressed! Ive been with her through the online lessons and the lessons are indeed fun & easy to follow along with.

My 10 year old son LOVED this!! He devoted every free minute to this class (even waking up early). He finished it in six weeks, and hes asking to start one of Youth Digitals other courses. He really learned a lot. Working with Java has taught him to pay more attention to detail in other areas (punctuation, spelling). It was definitely money well spent. I highly recommend it. Right now, you can save a little bit of money by just downloading it from Youth Digitals website, but you wont have a nice box to wrap.