Minecraft: Pi – Free - Offers an Interactive Way to Learn about Programming

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Promo, Minecraft: Pi Edition by Mojang is finally available. (via http://pi.minecraft.net/)

Since its full release on November of 2011, the Minecraft craze has yet to subside. The algorithmically generated game world full of movable and breakable textured cubes has offered millions of fans worldwide-unlimited entertainment on several devices ranging from PC, Android, iOS, and even Xbox 360 ports. To date, Minecraft has sold over 20 million copies of the game overall and has received several awards - most recently, a Golden Joystick Award for Best Downloadable game. Even my Nephew stopped playing first-person shooters and switched to Minecraft, which is quite an accomplishment. Even after all of its recent success, Minecraft continues to expand to new platforms with their latest release of the Minecraft: Pi Edition. Now, programming hobbyists get a shot at tinkering with the most recent video game craze - for free.

So what does this mean for Minecraft fans? Well, if you love programming and happen to own a Raspberry Pi, it means a whole lot more fun. First, let us take a look at the significance behind the Raspberry Pi platform.

The Raspberry Pi is a simple, single-board computer developed in the UK with the intent of changing the way kids interact with computers and programming. Due to high-prices of computing devices and insufficiently funded school curriculums, students began to lack knowledge of computer science. So, the Raspberry Pi team set out to design a device that would eliminate this issue aided by using more affordable mobile processors. The result was a credit-card sized computer that runs on Linux and comes equipped with a 700MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and a VideoCore GPU that rivals most Smartphones. Reception to the Pi has been outstanding, receiving incredible interest from the educational community, various worldwide agencies, and individuals all looking for cheap, accessible, and programmable computing.

The newly released Minecraft: Pi Edition is a cube-for-cube remake of the Pocket Edition platform for mobile gaming, but with a little twist - it is programmable. That’s right, now you can enjoy the same block-ubiquitous world that is Minecraft with the ability to manipulate its environment through programming in any language!

The folks over at Raspberry Pi are excited about this release hoping to evoke the interest of more children into programming. Of course, this too is an exciting prospect for those already interested in coding. Now users will be able to have a command-prompt side-by-side with the Minecraft window and observe the immediate results of loop-writing on the block-building process. Yet again, another example of the benefits of learning through playing. The Pi Edition is playable without programming. Did I mention it’s free?

Install Instructions by Daniel Frisk:

Download it here (for Raspbian "wheezy" with XWindows only): http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

Boot up your Raspberry Pi with Raspbian. If you haven’t set XWindows to start automatically upon boot, type in “startx”.

Next click the icon for LXTerminal to open a new terminal window. Use the following commands (in bold) to download and launch:

To download it: visit https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.minecraft.net/pi/minecraft-pi-0.1.1.tar.gz

To decompress it: tar -zxvf minecraft-pi-0.1.1.tar.gz

To run it: cd mcpi

Followed by minecraft-pi

Cabe

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