We’ve been playing for about a month, just an hour or so before bed. He’s starting to get interested in crafting. He loves to smelt, so I built him a dedicated space to grab ore and store the bars.

We play whatever he wants, so sometimes we’re playing Mario Kart or the like. But more often than not, he comes back to Minecraft.

At 5 or 6 they'll likely need a fair bit of support, but that's a lot of fun too.

Lego is awesome for teaching kids to think in so many different, wonderful ways.

If you want to teach your kid how to cope with failure, disappointment, and minor lacerations, get him an Erector set.

I’ll have to get some for my son for him to experience the same trauma I did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construx

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meccano

If you don't like the new changes, they have pretty much every version ever released available to download and play in the launcher.

Not to mention her keyboard and mouse skills are great now.

Until then, social media, instagram, Snapchat, discord, etc. are a net negative.

I don't understand how building a piece of software that Apple is willing to publish on the App Store makes your daughter emotionally prepared for social media.

I don't have any problem with gatekeeping minors' access to social media (although I would be much more liberal in this area than you) but this metric seems absolutely bonkers to me. My heuristic from my own personal development would be that the earlier I was able to make some commercially viable software the later you should push my access to social media... my coding ability was never an indicator of my defenses against the common ills of social media for kids as I understand them!

Probably depends on the kid, but I would have hated it and it would have likely made me not want to engage at all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology)

You have so little autonomy or trust and respect as a kid, that period of life sucks.

My personal experience is that they pick it up very quickly - a couple of months - and then quickly go on to blow your mind.

Minecraft is so much better than the digicrack that passes for actual “educational” games. The Prodigy products are an abomination, those people should be ashamed of themselves.

And of course, everyone's favorite: The Oregon Trail and subsequent sequels from MECC and later The Learning Company.

It's a shame that market simply isn't viable anymore. Those games played a big role in nurturing my love for computers.

And I also feel like in general the educational value of games like Minecraft, BotW, etc is often undersold - partly out of stigma surrounding the medium as a whole, partly because they’re often teaching skills that are difficult to directly measure.

I have no doubt that when he’s a bit older, things like Cities: Skylines, Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Kerbal, Outer Wilds, Rimworld, etc will continue to entertain and educate.

You’re probably more than good to let them play Minecraft in some form, just remember that while what they’re doing will probably look quite foreign to you, it doesn’t mean it’s not intellectually stimulating & beneficial to somebody that young.

I've honestly never taken to most of the things my parents suggested (or god forbid, forced), it just wasn't fun unless I was the one holding the initiative.

To explain and demonstrate: My love for computers ultimately stems from my mom and dad's computer just sitting on the desk, ripe for piquing my curiosity. I probably would have gone down another path in life if they instead shoved it in my face.