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TurtleMiner is a mod for Minetest that is similar and inspired by ComputerCraftEDU, a mod for Minecraft. The mod introduces a number of turtles that can be controlled and soon programmed by the player.

General ideas for the mod

The original purpose of this mod was to allow younger players to begin learning to program in a simplistic and fully interactive way. We plan to accomplish this with the following plan:

1. Customize you turtle to have a relationship to your turtle. Change the color and fit it out with some funny accessories.

2. Have a remote control, connect it with your turtle and move the turtle around by clicking on some buttons that stands for the basic actions of the turtle like movement (forward, backward, up, down), turn around (90° right or left), take a block (in front or beneath), put a block (in front or beneath).

3. Have a visual editor with blocks that give the syntax like in scratch. It is fantastic that there is already a blockly-like editor for Lua (http://blockly-lua.appspot.com/static/apps/code/index.html). In this stage the kids should learn the basic possibilities of programming, using if-statements and loops and they can use it to build 3D buildings with their turtle. For more advanced users the possibilities of the turtle should be updated (new texture?) to have sensors and thus more possibilities to use these sensors to build/take blocks depending on the environment.

4. Next step will be a text-editor. At first the kids can program in the visual-editor and see the code that stands behind that. May be a computer-terminal should be connected to the turtle and an other update of the turtle to have this connection. Cool looking turtles will help to spur the children to improve their programming abilities.

For some programs it would be easier to change little things or copy parts of the code in the text-editor and so hopefully they will move to do more text-coding.