The Young Coders Society held its first event at St. Sebastian's School in Needham, MA on July 17th, 2015.  Working with a group of 8 students attending St. Sebastian's Science Summer Workshop, we started by each assembling our own Raspberry Pi.  We took turns guessing what each of the components do and how they all work together to operate as a computer.  Once we had constructed the Pi's, we booted into the home desktop and opened up Minecraft for Pi.

After playing some good old fashioned Minecraft for a few minutes, we started to explore ways to alter the game using programming.  Using Python, a simple but powerful programming language, we connected to our Minecraft game and began experimenting.  Students learned how to post text to chat, spawn blocks, create massive grids of blocks, and destroy huge sections of the map using TNT - all by writing simple commands in Python.

At the end of the event, each student got to keep their Raspberry Pi and was sent home with the tools and resources they needed to keep exploring the world of programming.