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

My 8 year old loves it and would like to do more lessons. It is a easy to follow and makes it fun for kids. I would highly recommend this as a starting point for kids interested in coding. My 8 year old started with Scratch.

8 year old loves it!

This course is AWESOME!! I am extremely impressed with everything about Youth Digital and Mod Design 1. I have had nothing to do with the set up or the course work, my 9yo has done it all himself from the word go - unprecedented! Within three days hes almost finished, and the excitement for learning to code has been a delight to see. Thanks for a top notch experience Youth Digital!

I only have good things to say about this company, they are creating fun interactive training courses for kids to learn by doing what they love, playing! I got my 11 year old son the Mod Design 1 course, and he is literally programming in Java to make his ideas come to life in Minecraft. I have watched a couple of the videos with him, and the trainer is a total goofball, but my son is laughing and learning, so dont let that turn you off; the goofy + serious training totally works... You might think it is expensive, but it is a true training class, and I think it is a good value for what you get out of it. Having been a programmer for almost 20 years, I can say that it is really good stuff, and critical concepts that kids are going to be required to know at some point. They have other courses too, such as fashion design, 3D Game Design, 3D Animation, App Design (you actually build and install an app on an iPhone or iPad!), and others. It would make a great Christmas present! ... ok, done with my product advertising... no I dont get paid for this, I just want them to make more of these!

So far, awesome. The course gets you going and adding things to Minecraft very quickly. We just finished module 3. Easy to follow, even if you know nothing about software development. They repeat everything, often and slowly explain the code, but after you have already built something. My 10 year old son has a form of autism and problems focusing, but he is doing fine. The course presenter is great, cracks my son up. We had a question about running out of memory (counter-intuitively, you might need to decrease the heap memory allocation in Eclipse->Run->Edit Configurations from 1024 to 512 to avoid out-of-memory errors while running Minecraft). and Youth Digital responded back within the hour. I did not expect to be using Gimp to make our own graphics. its a lot more detailed that I had figured on. Love it so far. Cant imagine the 1500 dollar summer camps are that much better, if they are at all.

I rarely bother to review anything, but we bought this for our 9 year old son for Christmas and he immediately became obsessed. I cant comment on the quality of the content, because my son really did all of the components independently (and my Minecraft and coding knowledge is limited). But I will say thank you to Youth Digital for putting together a program that was easy enough for him to move through independently and engaging enough to keep him involved to the end. He emailed questions to Youth Digital along the way, and always got quick and helpful responses. After submitting his final project he got a thoughtful and thorough review of his mod. A staff member had clearly taken the time to play through his design and note what worked and what didnt. That meant a lot to him.

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!;)

The best thing ever! I have created more than 100 items! This deserves 5 stars!!!!

I bought this for my 11 year old son based on a facebook post when it went on sale for $49.99. We homeschool, and this was an addition to regular curriculum. Im so glad I purchased it! You should know that there is no software in the box, you simply receive a web address and a code to download the software. We have a Macbook and our son was able to follow the online directions and install everything himself. Hes a bright boy, but not necessarily a computer nerd, so a child who can listen and follow directions will be successful with this. He has had a little bit of programming instruction through the free online Khan Academy, so the first few lessons were a wonderful review for him. That was yesterday. Today, he started to make a sword. He ran into a few little problems with his code, so he sent a message through the help feature and received timely answers that helped him sort out his mistakes on his own. I was copied on all of those messages, too! (Great feature, there!) After a bit of trial and error, he was able to import the sword (sorry, light saber) and use it in his Minecraft kingdom. My husband and I didnt have to do a thing to help. What a relief to find a product like this that doesnt require hours of tech support and troubleshooting just to make it work for your kid!

The program itself is worth 5 stars- the support ranges from 0 stars to 4 stars. My 10 year old loved this thing- got it for Christmas and within 3 days was on level 11. Problem is there was a hang-up in his code that he was trying to get straightened out. When the support questions are easy, you get a timely response, when they are more difficult, different people are assigned to them and the response takes a lot longer. When they want to buy time, you get a message like this after a couple days: